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| Photo Credit: AK Rockefeller |
Consider Pussy Riot, for instance:
Has there been a single musical performer in the last decade that exploded into our collective conscious with as much political punch as this candy colored group of Guerrilla Girls?
Or another band that made one ask if its members were musicians or semantic terrorists?
Whatever one might think of the group's music, or even if one questions if the noise its members make is music, I have no doubt that some future young man or woman will stumble upon one of the band's online videos, and find themselves quite intrigued.
What happens next? Well, it's not out of the question to think that someone along the way will find themselves so inspired that they then don a pink balaclava and go try to take down a dictator with a drum stick and an electric guitar. After all, the band may not have dismantled a government, but they did somehow manage to shake up the world, not to mention demonstrate to young people who didn't live through the sixties that music can be weaponized.
Addressing the Russian court, the band’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova described the group's work in this manner:
"Pussy Riot’s performances can either be called dissident art or political action that engages art forms. Either way, our performances are a kind of civic activity amidst the repressions of a corporate political system that directs its power against basic human rights and civil and political liberties."
Clearly, Pussy Riot is not just a band but a manifesto, and I think that if one were to reduce its tenants to tactics, and then describe them as a repeatable formula, it would read something like this:
THE TOP 3 THINGS YOU MUST DO
IN ORDER TO BLOW UP THE CULTURE
* Advance a socially disruptive message.
* Wrap in compelling imagery.
* And then go ignite the damn thing with music
* Advance a socially disruptive message.
* Wrap in compelling imagery.
* And then go ignite the damn thing with music
Handle with care though, because you just might start a revolution.
