Setting the Mood Music of Global Summitry
The following piece was written by members of the GLI team at the G20 Hamburg Summit. Please check here regularly for all their blogs and opinion papers from the summit.
International Media Centre – G20 Hamburg Summit. Alongside the issues and the leaders, music has played an important, but often overlooked, role in global summits. On the one hand, it has been used on many occasions by summit hosts as part of the ceremonial activities that accompany gatherings of the world’s most important leaders and allow the host city to showcase itself on a global stage. So, a pop concert will often feature in the summit schedule and seek to create a positive atmosphere that is conducive to a successful summit, in the same way as food and drink do on the leaders’ and journalists’ menus, or logos, or the itinerary laid on for the leaders’ spouses.
This strategy obviously invites the accusation that summits are little more than a carnival. However, summit hosts have persisted in placing musical performances on the leaders’ schedule at several summits. For example, in preparation for the 2000 G8 Summit held in Okinawa, Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo commissioned Japanese pop music mogul Komuro Tetsuya, to write a theme song for the summit entitled ‘Never End’ and sung by Okinawan-born pop star Amuro Namie at the banquet on the second day of the summit. The Korean hosts of the 2010 G20 Seoul Summit brought together twenty leading K-Pop artists to perform a theme song entitled ‘Let’s Go’. At last year’s China-hosted G20 in Hangzhou, the leaders were treated to an elaborate moonlight concert on the iconic West Lake orchestrated by famed film director Zhang Yimou, also responsible for the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies.
On the other hand, music can be used as a means for building awareness on an issue and seeking to hold the leaders to account outside of the official summit. The Live 8 concerts of July 2005 that preceded the G8 Gleneagles Summit exemplify this approach; as part of the London concert, Sting performed ‘Every Breath You Take’ singing the lyric ‘I’ll be watching you’ as the faces of G8 leaders were projected behind him. Although Live 8 was a deliberate reference to and update of the Live Aid concerts that had taken place almost exactly twenty years earlier, the original template for this kind of event was George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.
The Hamburg G20 summit will see both models in operation. The Global Citizen Festival takes place on 6 July, the evening before the summit begins, and will seek to press the G20 leaders on issues related to extreme poverty. On the following evening the leaders will gather for an official concert in one of the world’s largest concert halls, the Elbphilharmonie, opened at the beginning of the year. The latter will no doubt follow a tried and tested format and receive only passing media attention. The former is likely to command considerably more attention but has a number of lessons to learn.
The Global Citizen Festival usually takes place in early Autumn every year to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. This free concert represents the first time for a Global Citizen concert to be held in Germany and the 9,000 tickets were awarded by lottery to fans who had to qualify by tweeting Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron asking them to attend the concert, and then tweeting the US government to fund food aid fully. Headline acts in Hamburg are Herbert Groenemeyer, Coldplay, Shakira, Pharrell Williams, Ellie Goulding, Andreas Bourani, The Chainsmokers and Lena. Although initial reactions might be to ask ‘who?’ or ‘why?’, the more important question is who has not being invited.
The Live 8 concerts were criticised for a number of reasons. On the one hand, their efficacy in sustaining a political campaign was questioned and summed up in inimitable fashion by Noel Gallagher of Oasis: ‘[a]re they hoping one of the guys from the G8 sees Annie Lennox singing “Sweet Dreams” and thinks “Fuck me, she might have a point there, you, know?” It’s not going to happen, is it?’ On the other hand, Live 8 was seen as creating a simplistic identity of a Global Citizen that did little more than legitimise the neo-liberal agenda on development and drown out more critical voices.
A related, but more salient issue, was that the headline acts were predominately white with Snoop Dogg and Ms Dynamite only added at the last minute. This led Damon Albarn of Blur to refuse to play at a predominantly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ concert. The line-up for the Global Citizen Festival ensures that a similar criticism cannot be levelled; however, the accusation of why no acts from the Global South have been invited to headline could easily be made. No doubt the response will be that the aim of the event is to raise awareness through acts with wide appeal rather than showcase little known musicians. However, the audience for this event is self-selecting and likely to already be aware of the related issues. If the event is to succeed in creating genuine global citizens, the organisers should be more mindful of this aspect, rather than trying to balance international artists with German acts that appeal to local tastes.
G20 Team: George Ashley, Lucy Branford-White, Hugo Dobson, Remi Edwards, Johanna Greco, Emilija Lazarevic, Helia Nazari, Henry Poust, Joseph Richardson and Gregory Stiles – Global Leadership Initiative, University of Sheffield. Please see here for more outputs from the team.
Photo credit: andrewasmith via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
