Massive Attack issues statement on UK riots

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      The statement below, posted on Massive Attack’s Facebook page in response to the UK riots, is possibly even better than their last album. It certainly comes off a little more, let’s say, thoughtful than Franz Ferdinand vocalist Alex Kapranos reacting to the fire that destroyed the PIAS distribution warehouse in Enfield—costing some 150 independent record labels all of their physical stock. "Thoughts go out to all the labels who have lost their stock in Pias fire," tweeted the angular Scottish dandy. Oh the humanity, Alex, oh the humanity!

      Here’s Massive Attack to put things in perspective:

      In context with the complicit support of the government, the banks looted the nation’s wealth while destroying countless small businesses and brought the whole economy to its knees in a covert, clean manner, rather like organised crime.

      Our reaction was to march and wave banners and then bail them out. These kids would have to riot and steal every night for a year to run up a bill equivalent to the value of non-paid tax big business has ”˜avoided’ out of the economy this year alone.

      They may not articulate their grievances like the politicians that condemn them but this is absolutely political. As for the ”˜mindless violence’”¦ is there anything more mindless than the British taxpayer quietly paying back the debts of others while contributing bullets to conflicts that we have absolutely no understanding of?

      It’s mad, sad and scary when we have to take to the streets to defend our homes and businesses from angry thieving kids, but where are the police and what justice is ever done when the mob is dressed in pin stripe.

      Comments

      6 Comments

      Robert Davis

      Aug 11, 2011 at 6:09pm

      Well said! Am going to go on a Massive Attack binge.

      Doglaw Inc.

      Aug 11, 2011 at 6:17pm

      The show here last year demonstrated a fine intersection of politics and art, right from the opener "United Snakes" through to its visual dissection of BP. And now this posting! Wow, 3D has emerged as an articulate and succinct voice of his generation. Who would have thought that a genre like trip hop, based more on textures and beats, had the intellectual depth? Kudos

      buzz

      Aug 12, 2011 at 9:30am

      I guess the mindless violence these guys support is the deaths of citizens trying to protect themselves.

      Dee2

      Aug 12, 2011 at 12:50pm

      "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it." Martin Luther King Jr.

      Sally

      Aug 12, 2011 at 1:36pm

      How many innocents will now know the terror of incarceration with people whom they cannot understand and who will look upon them as potential victims, in a social substructure where disciple is missing and only the very worst trespasses will be cause for redress?

      The madness of Protest gone to Violence is only going to strip the country of a great number of attentive, and active youths who will now know the hard cuff and the relentless caress of crime in their lives .. as the criminal element is handed new fodder for it's warped ways!!

      I fear the wars of the black psyche have over-ridden wisdom and good truth and are winning also in numbers and events upon the field of human endeavour.

      Hard enough to see the US Black Gov make DC look like a house of scrapping children.
      Worse to see black intent now handing the innocent youth of the UK unto the hands of Crime .. in their own house!

      Could these transient law breakers, these emotionally useable, but not spiritually corrupt "demonstrators" be found some place of incarceration where they will not become the new footpads of the hardened, and the well recognized of Crime?

      Does the UK not value it's youth enough to shield them from the depravity of the local jails, which in themselves are in great need of "adjustment" and repair? Surely, somewhere there is a secure building.

      Con Carroll

      Dec 9, 2011 at 3:19am

      nice one 3D