Massive Attack urge media to focus on Gaza instead of artist controversies

Massive Attack have taken to social media to admonish the media’s reporting of artist protests at Glastonbury this year.

The band urged journalists to focus their reporting on “what is happening daily to the people of Gaza”, rather than the controversy surrounding Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury sets. 

In the statement, posted on Instagram yesterday (1st July), they explained that multiple media outlets had approached them for comment in the wake of Bob Vylan’s performance, during which the UK punk-rap duo expressed their support for Palestine and derided the BBC, US and UK governments, and the IDF.

Behind the band, political slogans were projected onto a screen, reading: “Free Palestine. United Nations have called it a genocide. The BBC calls it a ‘conflict’”. They also led two chants: “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF”.

In their statement, Massive Attack wrote: “Today, a hot day when 22 Palestinians (including journalists) sat in a seafront cafe were murdered by one Israeli bomb, various national media outlets have contacted us (again) to ask our view of something a musician said.

“For 636 days now, unprecedented & insufferable horror has been recorded by the brutalise communities of Gaza and shown to us on our phone and television screens. It will not stop. No one, it seems, will stop it.

“The natural human consequence of the absence of objective journalism & any moral leadership from government is a sense of acute frustration, deep sadness and rage (much of it quiet, and private) amongst a majority of the British public — including the expressive branches of society, artists and performers. They tend not to have media training, or regularly updated LinkedIn accounts, or social inhibitions.

“As we all watch on aghast, every single day, shouting or typing into an echo chamber of complicity, the media and political classes focus again on… artists.

“Given the total ban by Israel on international journalists reporting from Gaza, and the simultaneous murder of hundreds of journalists in Gaza by Israeli forces, Massive Attack would urge the BBC & other media outlets to redirect their considerable news resource to reporting the truth of what is happening, daily, to the people of Gaza, and critically, to explaining the corresponding inaction of western governments (such as the UK) to their viewers.”

In the wake of Bob Vylan’s performance and the subsequent fallout, they have been dropped by their agency, United Talent Agency (UTA) and had their US visas revoked. The US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau condemned their performance, calling it a “hateful tirade”. Somerset police have reportedly launched a criminal investigation into the set and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said that the BBC’s decision to livestream the performance displayed a “problem of leadership”.

This isn’t the first time Massive Attack has spoken up about the media’s treatment of musicians showing support for Palestine. In April, they expressed a similar sentiment in light of the controversy surrounding Kneecap’s pro-Palestine performance at Coachella earlier this year.

Massive Attack also signed an open letter alongside HAAi and Annie Mac, urging Keir Starmer to “end UK complicity in Gaza horrors”.