I thought I was being generous when I let the Arizona music boycott organization The Sound Strike know that one of the artists on their roster, Steve Earle, was seemingly breaking ranks by coming to Tucson, but whoever is running things over there didn’t seem to think so, blocking me from their page. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one:
Yesterday, a federal appeals court again blocked SB 1070, which you can read all about on our Feathered Bastard blog, meaning the extremist Arizona immigration law will likely never take effect. That’s great news for people who support the state’s migrant community, but not necessarily for people interested in using Arizona’s obvious troubles to make a larger political point.
Moreover, the musical boycott of the state has faced several high-profile defections in recent weeks. Though organizers were apparently able to bully guyliner-wearing pop-punk band My Chemical Romance into backing out of their Arizona show a few months back, they haven’t had such luck with Steve Earle and Los Tigres del Norte.
Earle, a country-rock singer-songwriter with a strong activist streak, is listed on The Sound Strike’s artist roster but has a gig scheduled at Tucson’s Rialto Theatre on July 4.
Los Tigres del Norte, a Mexican-bred norteño combo, is also listed as boycotting although they have a show scheduled in Tucson on April 24.
How is Sound Strike organizer Javier Gonzalez, the man who bragged that “haters got schooled” after a group of polite Arizonans begged him to end the boycott and pitch in to help the state during a recent forum, taking this? Not well, it seems.
As the walls close in and the boycott looks more and more ridiculous — bigoted California voters passed an “eerily similar” law that met the exact same fate, thankfully killed by courts before it could do any damage to that state’s migrant community — organizers are clawing to maintain relevance.
And they’re willing to hide facts to do it.
Witness what happened to Dan Gibson. Gibson is Tucson Weekly’s web producer (he also writes a bit for us) and so he shared the news about the upcoming Steve Earle concert on The Sound Strike’s Facebook page. He was both friendly and professional but the comment was deleted and he was subsequently banned from posting on Sound Strike’s Facebook. Having heard this, I left a comment asking why he was banned for sharing information and was myself banned. When I tweeted this, another local man also asked why we were both banned and was himself banned.
That’s right: The Sound Strike will ban you just for asking why a journalist was banned for pointing out their propaganda is inaccurate because the boycott roster includes artists who are playing concerts in the state.
Calls and e-mails to the organization have, of course, not been returned.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.
Maybe it’s just not intended to be a factual boycott?
It’s certainly wrong to not answer your question and ban you from posting. Very sketchy.
But I would like to say that I think the boycott did what it was supposed to do. The crazy anti-immigrant bills that the Russell Pearce tried to get passed this year didn’t fly– not because they were crazy but because the state couldn’t take another economic hit. See
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/us/19imm…
The boycott also appears to have made other states think twice about passing laws similar to SB1070:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/11/s…
The Sound Strike boycott has been a meaningless exercise is ego puffery for its organizers. That is the sum total of what it’s accomplished; oh, other than screwing over venues like the Rialto, the fans of the artists, and completely missing opportunities to actually make a difference instead of posing as someone who actually gives a damn.
Sound Stike boycott is only a way for de la rocha to get publicity again, and many artists people don’t know to get a few lines on some website no one cares about. If these “artists” really wanted to make a difference they would have come to the state to protest the laws, and used they status to draw large crowds to their concerts and could have convinved some people to change their opinion on the matter. But instead they hide in los angeles, act like they are actually doing somehting to the state, but in the end they lost fans in the state, hurt venues and the people employed there. Russel pearse didnt feel any pinch from their “Sound Stike” but I bet a lot of low-wage workers, some of them hispanic, lost their jobs because of it.
I’ve had a back and forth going with Javier for a while now. He actually told me that I should “stop instigating” at one point just for pointing out a joke he had made about the AZ shootings. We were able to come to a more civil way of communicating after a while but the instinct seems to be to silence critics. When I heard about the SXSW panel I was *thrilled* and very eager to attend but was ignored in my requests to do so. I even invited homeboy out to lunch as I am all about understanding one another’s viewpoints and keeping things civil. Unfortunately, I received no response. Perhaps he prefers his critics to be extreme and racist, neither of which would describe me. Our convo is an interesting read and there won’t be many more like it now that the settings have been changed to prevent people from starting a dialogue on their wall: http://www.facebook.com/thesoundstrike/pos…