A few days ago, one of my favourite bands, Massive Attack, performed in Berlin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend. What I did come across, though, was some of the coverage in local press, and I have to admit it left me with an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.
It’s not about criticism, as it’s literally their job.
It was the tone that felt familiar. The kind where criticism stops being an examination of facts or arguments and starts sounding suspiciously close to the repetition of a dominant narrative, with a few sarcastic remarks thrown in to signal what readers are supposed to find ridiculous.
I’ve seen that pattern before.
Take one example.
The review opens with a quote from an attendee complaining they paid 80 euros for what felt like “a pure pro-Palestine demo.” The “Free Palestine” chants, the “Resist” announcements, the Palestinian support act – all described in a way that mirrors something familiar from demonstrations.
Well, perhaps that’s exactly what it was, for some people.
Perhaps it was a space to express solidarity. Perhaps it was one of the few places where people didn’t feel completely alone in their grief or anger. And perhaps before reaching for a complaint about how this clashed with someone’s evening out, it’s worth remembering that some people have paid a considerably higher price for showing up at protests in Berlin than having their concert mildly disturbed.
The review’s sharper complaint is aimed at the screens: an overwhelming stream of images – war, Gaza, Trump, Putin, bombs falling on Iran, children mining cobalt, climate change, Big Tech – paired with blunt political slogans, some translated, in the reviewer’s words, only middlingly. At one point the review asks how naive, ignorant, or misguided Massive Attack must think their audience is, to need this kind of “frontal instruction.” Later it lands on a memorable phrase: a “humourless missionary fetish.”
That’s a real aesthetic judgment, not just political fatigue, and it deserves to be taken seriously as one.
But here’s where it gets interesting. The review also flags, specifically, that the death tolls and homelessness statistics shown on screen came without sources – delivered with the familiar shrug that, well, this is art, not journalism.
Fair enough. But if we’re going to raise that question, let’s actually raise it.
Maybe let’s play a game and ask Massive Attack for their sources.
If the figures are wrong, videos misleading, and statistics don’t hold up, then by all means expose it. That’s exactly what journalism is for.
But if the sources do hold up – and reporting on casualty figures and displacement in Gaza has been remarkably consistent across organisations – then the problem isn’t the information itself. The problem is the discomfort of being confronted with it, dressed up as a complaint about taste.
Which brings me to the part of the review I think is actually sincere, and worth sitting with: the band sounded great. The reviewer clearly loves this music – the drums, the guest vocalists, “Unfinished Sympathy” and “Teardrop” at the end – and is genuinely disappointed that, in their view, all of it gets crushed under the weight of the messaging. “Jammerschade,” a real shame, they call it.
I don’t doubt that disappointment is genuine. But the premise underneath it doesn’t hold up. The music isn’t being crushed by the politics. What’s happening is that some listeners would prefer their Massive Attack experience to stay safely in the register of “timeless trip-hop classics” – and would rather not follow the band all the way to where the band has, for decades, openly said it wants to go.
Art becoming political in times like these is hardly surprising. If anything, it’s inevitable. When public discourse narrows, when human suffering becomes background noise, and when reality gets filtered through competing propaganda machines, artists tend to react. Some people wish they wouldn’t. History suggests otherwise – and this is not exactly a new direction for this band.
Ultimately, this isn’t just about Palestine. The same principle applies whether we’re talking about Somalia, Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, or anywhere else where human beings are paying the price for political violence.
Most of us can remember losing someone close. Now imagine that loss multiplied across an entire society, until it becomes routine news, until destruction becomes ordinary.
Looking away doesn’t make any of it disappear.
If anything, the habit of looking away is what allows these tragedies to continue. The less attention we pay, the easier it becomes for those responsible to carry on, and for everyone else to convince themselves there’s nothing to be done.
That’s why I find artists willing to force these conversations far more valuable than commentators who, however eloquently, would rather they hadn’t.
Gene Sophia
Berlin, 14.06.2026
Postscriptum:
A Reddit user who attended the show raised a different point worth adding here. They loved the concert, but noticed something troubling: among all the global crises on those screens, Ukraine was conspicuously absent. Prigozhin showed up as a kind of villain cameo, but nothing about the war itself, nothing about what Russia has done to Ukrainian cities and civilians. The user wondered, not unreasonably, whether some wars get “hyped” more than others – and whether bands worry about losing audiences in Russia by naming the war too directly.
I think this is a fair observation, and it doesn’t undercut the argument above – if anything, it sharpens it. The point was never that Massive Attack’s curatorial choices are beyond criticism. They clearly aren’t: a band that puts unsourced statistics on a screen, or leaves out one of the largest wars currently being fought on the European continent, is making editorial decisions, and editorial decisions can and should be questioned.
But notice the difference in register. The Reddit user’s criticism comes from someone who shares the band’s basic project – more attention to suffering, not less – and is asking why the spotlight didn’t land somewhere it arguably should have. That’s the kind of criticism that takes the work seriously enough to hold it to its own standard.
The mentioned review, by contrast, criticised the spotlight for existing at all. Those are not the same conversation, even if both start with “I have a problem with the visuals.”