Just don’t hurt anyone: In order not to expose some visitors to “bad feelings”, a pub in Bern canceled a concert. Shouldn’t one expect a little more reflection from adults?
Music, a few dreadlocks and a lot of excitement: the band Lauwarm played in Bern’s Brasserie Lorraine – as long as they were allowed to.
Cancellation of the concert due to being unwell: That can happen, you think, especially on hot days like these. It was more than 30 degrees on July 18 in Bern. The band Lauwarm played in the Brasserie Lorraine in the evening, but only until the break. After that, the five men did not return to the stage. However, none of them has become ill, none was dehydrated or otherwise unwell. On the contrary, a few people in the audience felt “uncomfortable”: Some concertgoers found it problematic that the band members of Lauwarm, all white, played reggae music and some even wore dreadlocks.
They reported their “discomfort” to the organizer, who ended the concert and submitted a written apology. Not for breaking up, but for letting the group perform like that. The issue of “cultural appropriation” had not been sufficiently addressed in advance and the audience “should have been better protected”. There is obviously a “sensibility gap” here – the Brasserie Lorraine now wants to close this and hold a discussion event on August 18th.
There is definitely a need for discussion in a society in which accusations of “cultural appropriation” lead to concerts being abandoned. Discussions on this topic have so far been known mainly from the USA. For years there has been a constant argument about whether certain forms of cultural expression should be reserved for certain groups of people.
This can range from plays that should only be reviewed by indigenous critics because they were written by an indigenous person, to edibles – like Indian curries – that shouldn’t be prepared by people from former colonial powers. In the background there is always the thought that representatives of a dominant majority are not entitled to claim things for themselves that belonged to the culture of (once) oppressed groups.
The Reign of Sensitivity
In our part of the world, cultural appropriation has so far been a more carnivalesque topic: whether you can still put an Indian feather on the head of the youngsters at the carnival or snub the American natives with it has already been discussed in Switzerland. The incident in Bern now raises the problem to another level.
While cliched carnival costumes expose children to stereotypical images that one would like to differentiate, the story of the reggae concert takes place in front of adults, i.e. in front of people who have at least some idea that things in the world are more complex than a carnival costume. But if you want to protect all adult concert-goers, like Brasserie Lorraine, from any “bad feelings”, you treat them exactly like children.
The Bernese trifle thus expresses a tendency that characterizes our present: the sensitivity of the – adult – individuals is above everything else. In order not to hurt any of the listeners in any way, an entire concert is cut short.
Our civilization has evolved towards greater respect and consideration for centuries, and there is much good in that. But where the sensibilities of individual individuals reign supreme, society is no longer possible. Those who express their sensibilities should therefore bring a minimum of resilience with them. A concert-goer could, for example, seek an open conversation with the band instead of whining at the organizer for canceling the event and thus ultimately forcing his personal feelings on the entire audience.
Apparently, the majority of this audience didn’t have the slightest problem with the performance of the white reggae singers and dreadlock wearers. The cancellation of the concert caused a storm of indignation on social networks, and the band members were shocked. He had never heard the charge of “cultural appropriation” before, the band leader said in an interview with “20 minutes”. And anyway, he doesn’t know what to do with the term: he’s interested in taking something inspiring, positive from another culture and passing it on, and this process is “super nice”.
Down with the family tree
In fact, it is, and it also describes quite precisely how culture works. Whether it’s music, theatre, technology, cuisine or literature: the forms of culture are never rigid and tied to one place. They form somewhere and develop further through contact between people who may live in very different parts of the world. Cultural transfer is part of being human, in all contexts and on all sides: the Native Americans developed perhaps the greatest virtuosity in dealing with horses – after the Spaniards brought the animal to the continent. The whites discovered snowshoes with them and are now hiking through the Alps on these devices.
Today it seems to be forgotten that culture is a process that thrives on exchange – that is a second contemporary tendency, which is shown in the Bern incident. Increasingly, culture is presented as an essence: as a thing that belongs to the essence of a particular group of people. Reggae is therefore considered the music of the Jamaicans, dreadlocks as a hairstyle for Afro-Americans – as if something like the collective soul of the blacks lived in the braid of curls.
For the longest time, anti-racists have rightly been outraged by essentializations such as the whites used to make, for example when they claimed that blacks could not think in abstract terms because of the color of their skin. Those who bind cultural forms of expression, be it musical styles, hairstyles or clothing, to supposedly fixed identities in an exclusive way are going back in this old direction.
In the interview, the lead singer of Lauwarm emphasized that he himself has ancestors from Africa. This is interesting, but irrelevant to the present case. Because kinship cannot be a legitimation. In a society where once again the family tree determines what a person can and cannot do – in such a society one could get really uncomfortable.