I first heard about Occustock in an email that was sent out to a group of my friends a week or so before the event. Intrigued by what seemed to be a portmanteau of Occupy Wall Street and Woodstock, I followed a link to the Facebook event page, which gave a tentative list of acts but no schedule. It was obvious from the fan page that the concert was planned last minute and on a tight budget, but the quality of the musical acts was decidedly of less importance than the resourcefulness of the organizers in setting up the event against difficulties, since Occustock is embedded in a broader social movement that is not just about music. With cultural images of “protest music” having been fed to me by pop culture my whole life, but with no real-world experience of it, I was interested to see what lay at the intersection of protest and music in Providence in 2011.
Occustock was planned as a three-day event, organized as an impromptu free music festival by the local Occupy Providence group. The second night of the “masquerade music festival” was scheduled for Saturday evening (10-29-11) at India Point Park, but rain and snow moved the concert indoors to the Whiskey Republic, a bar just off of College Hill. Curious to see what kinds of political and cultural messages would come through -- if any -- at this event, which promised not just local musicians and acts from Boston and New York, but also “speakers and workshops” according to a Providence Phoenix article written about Occustock a few days before the festival, I went to observe. The same article also recognized the difficulties of setting up an ambitious show like Occustock in such a short amount of time -- the organizers claiming to have conceived of the idea for the event only a week earlier -- while relying on the good will of local businesses and Occupy sympathizers for resources. As a result, the show on Saturday had a definite “feel of the improvised, the thrown-together,” especially in the small turnout that ended up making it to the snow location. On the other hand, this also created a more intimate setting, which I feel was conducive to the exercise of building solidarity between Occupiers and sympathizers alike.
While the concert was free, the organizers were enthusiastically offering Halloween masks in exchange for donations to keep Occupy Providence going through the winter. Occustock was in fact supposed to be masquerade themed, although few people besides some of the organizers were actually wearing masks on Saturday night. However, the concept of “masked mirth” (as the Phoenix put it) is fitting with the cultural messages that are being attributed to the Occupy movement lately. In our contemporary society, anonymity and equality are closely connected, both in practical life and in the cultural myths we share with each other. We see the connection between anonymity and free society in the comic book and film V for Vendetta, and a real-life example of this connection is the adoption of the same mask (based on the likeness of Guy Fawkes) for the purpose of anonymous protesting, most notably by the hacker group Anonymous in anti-Scientology protests in 2008. In their contemporary social context, masks are aligned with several of the ideals that are common across the Occupy movement. On a practical level, they protect one’s First Amendment rights, especially during peaceful protest; the mask also symbolizes the decentralization of a mass movement which gains strength through solidarity and numbers, not through leaders or individual identities. In the context of Occustock, the masquerade theme also emphasizes the inclusivity of the “Occupy subculture.” All that is needed to join the movement is geniune interest, such that even anonymous individuals would be welcomed. As one of the organizers, a 27-year old local hip-hop musician originally from Seattle, says of Goldman Sachs bankers, “They're welcome to throw on a mask and a costume and come dance with us.” The invitation to wear masks to Occustock is also a call for public participation in the creation of a unique social event, which is intended not to be in the realm of passive consumer culture, but to be, instead, a social participatory experience.
Neither specific political messages about the widening economic divide, nor “99% vs. 1%” rhetoric, already repeated and re-posted ad infinitum on and off the internet, were brought up in this Saturday evening of Occustock. The mood was not one of anger or resentment, but of simple musical empowerment and the self-aware creation of a peaceful community space. The opening act of the evening was two Indian men playing classical Indian music on the sitar and a hand drum. The musicians commented on the spiritual quality of the music, and talked briefly about the role music has played in Indian politics after being prompted by one of the organizers. The speaker for the evening, a Brown professor specializing in Indian history, followed right after this performance. I had seen her speak before at a “teach-in” that was held on campus, and she gave a brief and less academic version of the short speech she had made there, to the Occustock crowd. After making parallels to Gandhi and his committed nonviolence, she emphasized the importance of creating new mythologies for this movement to explain to itself how the country reached such a level of inequality.
An astute observer could recognize that the myth-making process she described was already under way at Occustock. For instance, the resourcefulness of the movement was brought up throughout the evening, and the diverse ideologies of the Occupy movement were reduced to their simplest elements, almost to the point of juvenile emotional appeals. After the professor’s poetic words, one of the organizers spoke about Occupy as simply “an excuse for all of us to be nicer to each other,” again elevating the power of collective good will and collaboration without verging into political rhetoric. He suggested that people in the audience should take this time to look around them, meet new people, include others into their discussions, and see what thoughts others might have to share. Another Occupy organizer at the event spoke to the movement’s reliance on donations from small businesses and the kindness of people who sympathize with “the 99 percent,” emphasizing the collective bargaining power and representation that “Occupy” confers to someone who is organizing an event. Through this narrative, new economic strategies can be vocalized, as it is well known that people are increasingly realizing the illegitimacy of the current (especially economic) systems in place. In the same vein, the organizers supplied the audience with free beer and appetizers, giving the credit to the manager of the bar, and making sure everyone knew there was free food and drink available. This attitude subverts the prevailing consumption culture, and imagines resourcefulness as the alternative social paradigm. The rest of the show consisted of Providence-based Last Good Tooth, then a series of solo and duo guitar and singing acts. The performers were overwhelmingly young white males in their 20s, and the audience was predominantly Brown students. They played songs mostly in the rock, folk and punk genres, and none of them brought up anything political while they played, focusing instead on the music. At one point the singer for Last Good Tooth sarcastically remarked on the excessive number of televisions that were on in that corner of the bar, more than he had ever seen in his life. Through such subtle gestures, the mood of the evening stayed at odds with the status quo of consumerist culture, and by extension passive TV-watching culture. Interestingly, the concert setting opened up a different level of discourse than the protest atmosphere, a level that never appeals to politics directly. It articulates certain discourses on equality, compassion, resourcefulness and anonymity that are common across the movement, but on a level that is more appropriate for the social setting created by a musical event.
This type of concert, reminiscent of an eclectic music festival but also with the feel of an open mic, is very effective in extending the efforts that are going on in streets, public squares and parks around the country. It allows a different form of social engagement to take place, between the creation-consumption of culture and the act of protest. It consciously rejects the bland consumerism that is usually so ingrained in the creation-consumption of culture. Bringing people together for the purpose of enjoying music, and claiming association with the mythical 99 percent allows Occustock to prove that rules, permits and restrictions are weaker than the will of the collective, either in planning a last-minute series of outdoor concerts or occupying a public space. This re-imagining and mythologizing of collective agency in the public space is always an important part of sustaining and spreading a movement, and significantly one can observe a self-conscious process of hashing out new myths and narratives at music events like Occustock, suggesting that “protest music” still has some social efficacy despite having somewhat changed its form since the days of Woodstock.
* credit for “Rock-upy” goes to the Occustock Facebook fan page
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