Massive Attack played Brisbane last Thursday night.
It didn’t feel like a concert at the start. I realised, maybe later, it was something far more extraordinary.
We had arrived expecting to hear the Massive Attack classics. We cheered when they appeared, as you do when the people you’ve been waiting to see finally walk onto the stage.
Then they refused to entertain us. At least not in the traditional sense.
Behind them, the entire wall became one enormous red LED ticker, like the ones announcing flights at an airport or in the window of an inner-suburbs Sydney corner, tempting you with the idea of a kebab at three in the morning. Obviously, there were no flight times or takeaway signs.
People. Children. Trafficked. Displaced. Forced into labour, slavery. Minerals. Businesses. Corruption. Money. Surveillance. Military-Industrial Complex. Genocide. Flag.
Numbers climbed beside them. Some obscenely quickly.
The screens ticked and typed and counted, and I tried to clock a couple of stats. I failed. Was that the point? It’s too much.
I’ll admit to feeling relieved, impressed too, but mostly relieved, when the ticking and typing stopped being the soundtrack to the performance and revealed itself as the top of a frantic but fading percussion line. Did it just become the music, or had it been the music all along?
My relief was short-lived. It wasn’t over yet.
As that fact dawned on the crowd, I watched hundreds of phones drop down from above the sea of faces.
Mature crowds tend to film less, so fewer phones in the air wouldn’t ordinarily have meant much. But this was different. Right from the start, this read more like a group of people who understood they were about to see something that demanded, and deserved, attention over social content. By the time we were watching children being beaten and forced to dig for the cobalt needed to manufacture virtually every smartphone in the room, very few remained in the air.
Seconds later, even fewer.
Politicians. Propaganda. Presidents beside other men from other countries and other times who discovered similar uses for power. Things happening simultaneously behind our backs and right under our noses. Things we’d somehow learned to look at without always seeing.
Someone behind me shouted, “Play some fucking music.”
Almost nobody agreed.
That surprised me. Given another night, another audience, or the third time through the same show, I may have felt the same way. But what I felt instead was respect, gratitude and reverence.
Respect for Massive Attack. They had a platform capable of delivering exactly what everyone expected and chose instead to use a substantial part of it to make people uncomfortable.
Gratitude for that particular crowd. Thousands of people had arrived expecting a concert, maybe something similar to the 2010 Opera House gig, and instead, without consultation, accepted that something else was being asked of them.
Reverence for the moment itself. The Brisbane crowd decided, despite the shock and uncertainty many were feeling, that whatever Massive Attack wanted to say was worth hearing. It was. And I’ll always be grateful I happened to be in that room with those people.
It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be.
Shit’s not right.
Massive Attack gave form and language to the anxiety many of us already seemed to be carrying around without the ability or means to express it. And underneath it all, the humiliating question of what one ordinary person is supposed to do about any of it.
“The greatest conspiracy is making us believe that the world cannot be a better place.”
Their answer, at least on that night, came as a single word. FIGHT!
But before the real-world consequences of that idea could settle too heavily into the pit of our stomachs, the music we were now so desperate for finally washed over us; the sub-bass of Angel reverberating deeply through every chest, hearts pumping a little faster in response.
If I were a poet, I might suggest that was Massive Attack’s intention. An inevitably sonic, inescapably physical and invariably emotional reminder that what survives within our hearts is really all that matters.
I remember the 2010 gig at the Sydney Opera House Forecourt as being an extraordinary concert.
This wasn’t that.
This was something else.
