A white singer with dreadlocks performs at the neighborhood festival. That doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
The singer of the band Ambaroots wears dreadlocks.
It’s 10:15 p.m. and suddenly the spectators at the Röntgenplatz Festival come out from under the eaves and marquees and brave the rain. They welcome the band Ambaroots with applause and shouts. Lead singer Leo Kummer lets his dreadlocks fall over his face and then tosses them over his shoulders. He then turns to the instruments and vocals while the dreadlocks play with the laws of gravity at their own discretion.
For the first time since the corona-related cancellations in the past two years, the quarter festival could take place on the Röntgenplatz in Zurich district 5 – for the 40th time in total. But instead of the anniversary, the organizers were preoccupied with another topic: the uneasiness about dreadlocks among white people. With Ambaroots and Leo Kummer, the organizers had booked a band that fits exactly into the booty scheme of the currently sometimes polemical discussion.
Explosive mixtures
The discussion was triggered a few weeks ago by a canceled concert in Bern. According to the organizers, several guests felt “uncomfortable” because some of the white musicians wore dreadlocks and “African clothes” while performing reggae.
About two weeks ago, the debate about “cultural appropriation” spilled over to Zurich: the “Das Gleis” bar canceled a concert at short notice. The Austrian guitarist Mario Parizek would have performed – a white man with dreadlocks.
As a result, a debate broke out both in social networks and in the traditional media – on the list of ingredients political buzzwords such as “diversity”, “cancel culture” and “wokeness”. To put it bluntly, one side considers the discussion to be overdue and the concert cancellations justified, the other sees it as an example of left-wing intolerance and demands that event companies who invite musicians because of their appearance no longer receive cantonal funds. In the meantime, even the first criminal charges of racial discrimination have been filed.
So that was the unexpectedly explosive situation that the organizers of the Röntgenplatzfest were confronted with. They therefore decided in advance to take a stand. “Like so many, we weren’t really familiar with the issue of cultural appropriation,” said Tobias Langenegger, a member of the organizing committee. “We are in the middle of a learning process.”
In a self-diagnosis, the statement states that the organizing committee of the festival with left-wing sponsorship, which sees itself as “open, inclusive and sustainable”, is made up exclusively of white people. Only whites were invited to the panel discussion on Saturday afternoon. And the artists involved are all white, and most of them are cis men. “We absolutely have to become more diverse,” says the paper.
X-ray site festival: the dreadlocks are flying – and nobody is protesting.
No conclusive answer has yet been found to the question of whether “becoming more diverse” ultimately means that white musicians with dreadlocks will no longer be allowed to perform at the Röntgenplatz Festival in the future. “We noticed that we have to deal with the topic in more depth within the organizing committee, especially with regard to future festivals and the question of who we want to offer a stage for,” said the co-president of the organizing committee Luisa Schwegler. “We agree that the responsibility for booking Ambaroots lies with us and we will therefore refrain from a cancellation.”
Anyone who felt uncomfortable about this or needed to speak was invited to contact the organizing committee. “We have only received positive feedback on our proactive communication,” said Schwegler. Her colleague Tobias Langenegger, however, admitted that he was curious to see how the story would end. “We didn’t know how big the need to speak would actually be and whether there could be protests or something similar.”
Lots of mutual understanding
In the end there were no protests late on Friday evening, but an audience dancing, singing, clapping and chanting the band name “Ambaroots”. Anyone moving around the festival grounds, however, could catch snippets of conversation here and there that showed that the visitors were dealing with the topic of cultural appropriation and the problem of dreadlocks. It became clear: The social networks are not the real world. Instead of emotional trench warfare, many on the Röntgenplatz tried to achieve mutual understanding.
One of the most conspicuous figures in the audience on Friday evening was Glauber Hörler, a dark-skinned man with a piled-up Rasta hairstyle into which he had braided a chain of lights. Hörler is a former reggae singer from Brazil and aspiring TikTok star with forty thousand followers. In easily understandable German he apologized for his bad German and then said in English that he had come especially to support Ambaroots and to celebrate his 36th birthday with friends.
If Hörler wore his dreadlocks open, they would almost reach his ankles. The length of the dreadlocks is like the color of the belt in judo, he says. Because it shows how committed someone is to the idea of reggae. This is precisely what is important for him. It’s not about skin color, it’s about expressing love and respect for reggae and its concerns in the lyrics.
Ambaroots and Leo Kummer apparently did this to Hörler’s complete satisfaction. In the colorful glow of flashing lights, they played their songs in Swiss German, French and English. They sang about summer, mother earth, equality, freedom and reggae. And nobody bothered about it.