Cast your mind back to what now seem like the carefree days before 2015. Public life was still innocent enough to find houseroom for a spat between Johnny Marr, once of era-defining 1980s indie-rock band the Smiths, and David Cameron, then of No 10, Downing Street. Cameron had long proclaimed his fondness for Marr’s old group. Marr did not care for this one bit.
“Stop saying that you like the Smiths, no you don’t,” he tweeted in 2010. “I forbid you to like it.” One would guess Marr found Cameron too right-wing for his liking, although the guitarist’s sentiments were echoed by his former bandmate, Morrissey, who as an outspoken supporter of the For Britain party might be expected to deem Cameron a dangerous leftie.
Cameron, in his turn, was defiant: “I’ve now got Johnny Marr and other members of the band saying I’m not able to listen to the Smiths. When I’ve got the complete and full set, even then, I’m afraid, I will go on and listen to the Smiths.”
This was all very mild compared to today’s discourse. Nobody wished violence or death upon anybody else or denounced them as the embodiment of all evil. Instinctively, I would side with Marr against Cameron, whom I consider a smug, born-to-rule mediocrity, one who complacently staked our country’s prosperity and cohesion on the turn of a card and lost, then walked away humming to himself as if it were no more than the price of a good lunch. But in this particular instance I think Cameron was perfectly right. He understood that, once it was out in the world, the Smiths’ music no longer belonged to the Smiths. It belonged to anyone who cared to embrace it.
This is worth remembering in an era when cultural life is so utterly dominated by antizionist groupthink. It is dispiriting to witness an endless procession of artists deliver itself of unthinking pieties – or outright libels – that do exactly nothing to improve the lot of real people caught up in the horrors of conflict in the Middle East, and serve only to whip up antagonism towards Jews in their own countries. If you think their conduct is performative, you are quite correct. That’s what these people do: they perform. In this instance they are performing the rites of their chosen parareligion – that is, a kind of thinking that functionally replicates every aspect of a fundamentalist sect bar its theism. “Free Palestine”, whether uttered at an awards ceremony or anywhere else, becomes a rote salute, a way of signalling to fellow believers your devotion to the faith – or your submission to it, because you don’t want any trouble.
Generally, when artist and audience hold conflicting world views, it is the audience that rejects the artist. The Cameron-Marr kerfuffle reversed that polarity, but it was also instructive. The discomfort of an ordinary Jewish fan will likely lie in the way you feel directly attacked by your favourite’s rhetoric. But this need not deprive us of the solace of their art in grim times that they are striving to make so much worse for us.
Two albums I return to again and again are Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Remain In Light by Talking Heads. This is music that moves and consoles me deeply. The first features superb lyrics by Roger Waters. The second was made in close collaboration with producer Brian Eno. I don’t doubt that in the two men’s shared demonology, a moderately inclined, left-of-centre Jew, who happens to think Israel possesses the same legitimacy as any other country, numbers among the horde of bloodthirsty Zionists standing between Earth and Utopia. But I keep on listening to their music anyway, not because I think it would enrage them, but because I love it. The possibility that they might hate the joy I take in it is just a bonus.
Similarly, I relish the books of late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, and numerous films featuring Javier Bardem. I thought the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, starring Paul Mescal, was first-rate. My favourite British rock band of the last three decades is Pulp, whose singer Jarvis Cocker – a wry, astute observer of both personal and national life – may be relied upon to affix his name to any open letter that, regardless of its signatories’ best intentions, serves to undermine the protections of British Jews, under the guise of either supporting Palestinians, or promoting the “free speech” for which the likes of us, curiously, do not qualify in cultural circles. I think the gleeful, death-demanding chumps Bob Vylan are a fine agitpop band, but then, this ain’t my first rodeo. I grew up on the masterful polemics of Public Enemy, next to whom the London duo are mere novices in Jew-baiting.
I may, and indeed do, think less of these people as individuals, but their art belongs to me as much as to anyone else, and I decline to relinquish my pleasure in it. I don’t listen to Kneecap – or as a friend unimprovably nicknamed them Sinn Fein Clown Posse – but not because of the poisonous edgelord piffle they spout; rather, because their music is so dull and pedestrian. You have to feel sorry for Lowkey, who has been peddling both substandard rap and antizionist tripe for donkey’s years without gaining a fraction of the attention. “What am I,” one imagines him kvetching, “chopped liver?”
I also see many of these people as joining a long tradition of artistic obtuseness on political or social issues. Go back to any era, light upon a self-harming, faddish cause among the Western left (the IRA, the PLO, Stalinism, eugenics), and you will find plenty of artistic types who were all for it. In fairness, you will also find many of the same people championing causes that have stood the test of time: opposition to the Iraq War, gay rights, anti-apartheid, women’s liberation, the civil rights movement. Put the two things together and one might conclude that what Tom Wolfe memorably labelled “radical chic” is the principal engine of their advocacy, rather than any form of critical or moral discrimination. This does not necessarily mean they are insincere, uncaring or unfeeling. Just that their sincerity, caring and feeling end where their contemporaneous tribal orthodoxies begin. Whether they are right or wrong occurs chiefly by accident.
Which doesn’t help you when it’s your own back on which they’re putting a target. But it never hurts to take a broad historical overview. It would be a fine thing if some of these artists saw fit to try it. In the meantime, one may set aside the often invoked ethical question of whether one should separate the artist from the art, and boil it down to the practical matter of whether one does or doesn’t. I do, and I benefit by it. These artists might disapprove of me, or even despise everything they delude themselves I stand for. But they can’t take their art away from me, any more than Johnny Marr could from David Cameron.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.