Music Is Not Background Music for Politics—Fuji Rock, Massive Attack, Hi-STANDARD, and Whether Boos Are Necessary
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Two radically different antiwar gestures appeared on the same Green Stage at FUJI ROCK FESTIVAL '26.
On the first day, Hi-STANDARD played fast punk while the crowd sang along and said that this was no time to argue about “right and left”: they wanted to “neutralize” the conflict through music, through punk rock. On the final day, Massive Attack filled the screen behind them with words and images about Gaza, military spending, surveillance technology, Palantir, Trump, and Putin. They did not erase the proper names.
One act tried to connect people across political positions through music. The other named actors and systems, pulling the audience away from the comfort of uncomplicated unity. Both rejected war. Yet online, the former was criticized as ignorant or effectively right-wing, while the latter was praised for an overwhelming fusion of music and image. The opposite judgments appeared as well: some heard honesty in Hi-STANDARD's clumsy words, while others experienced Massive Attack's production as a one-way political lecture.
If we reduce this contrast to a contest between the “politically correct band” and the “uninformed band,” the music disappears. The question is not only which position we support. It is what that position did inside the sound.
I was not at Naeba. This essay draws on official information, reporting and records by people who watched the stream, and publicly available social-media posts. It cannot reproduce the pressure of the sound system or the atmosphere in the crowd. Nor do the most visible posts amount to an opinion poll: they are a sample distorted by algorithms and clipped footage. What follows should be read with those limits in mind.
Before the festival, I read this year's lineup and described Massive Attack as “a sound that also accepts the shadow side of celebration.” The actual set showed that this shadow was not an abstract mood. It came with names: Gaza, surveillance technology, and the institutions behind them.
Two Antiwar Gestures, Two Nights on the Same Stage
Hi-STANDARD played the Green Stage on July 24, returning to Fuji Rock for the first time in 27 years. Isolated from the performance, the MC that drew attention sounds strikingly simple.
Akihiro Namba spoke about recognizing ideological differences while trying to move upward instead of continuing to collide sideways; he felt the enemy was not beside them. Ken Yokoyama answered that this was no time to talk about right or left. They arrived at “at least, don't kill” and a call to “neutralize” things through music, through punk rock.1
But there was sound around those words. The band played a drum figure drawing on the Clash's “Tommy Gun,” moving from gunshot-like snare hits into the MC. A “Nippon” chant associated with Japan's national football team spread through the crowd as Japanese flags waved. Then the band returned to short, fast songs.
This “neutralization,” then, was not placid background music. It was an attempt to drive separate bodies into the same pulse at punk speed, and to make that unity the basis for opposing war. But raising fists together is not the same as understanding the source of a conflict. “Right or left” can invite people with different politics into one space, while also flattening the asymmetries between states and civilians, occupiers and occupied, or sides with radically unequal capacities for violence.
Massive Attack took the same stage two days later, on July 26, closing the festival. Low frequencies, flashes of light, news fragments, statistics, names, and Japanese captions arrived at once. The screen did not serve as explanatory scenery. It performed the speed at which information overwhelms human perception. The set delivered more than slogans easy to cheer: fake news, surveillance, and the links between militarism and technology appeared in quantities no one could process at once.2
Massive Attack did not suddenly bring politics into its work in recent years. The group has long spoken about Palestine and participated in cultural boycotts. In 2025, it also announced an alliance supporting musicians facing pressure for speaking about Gaza.3 Translating the visuals into Japanese at Naeba was a way of connecting a long-running production to the audience in front of them.
There is still room for criticism. The stronger and more complete a touring package becomes, the more it can resemble a device engineered to carry audiences in every country toward the same conclusion. Japanese captions close the distance, but they may also narrow the room for interpretation. At what point do the pleasure of surrendering to the low end and the act of agreeing with the answer on the screen become the same bodily motion?
Online, the Argument Was About How to Be Antiwar
Public posts on X, real-time search results, personal blogs, and news coverage from July 24 through 28 do not split neatly into approval and disapproval. Roughly speaking, four disputes overlapped.456
- On the Massive Attack side, many argued that the political language reached the body precisely because the dark low end and the images worked as one.
- Others felt that the production claimed to make the audience think while writing the answer on the screen in advance.
- On the Hi-STANDARD side, some heard a direct antiwar appeal that tried to connect people beyond labels of left and right.
- Others argued that telling both sides to stop fighting blurred the difference between perpetrator and victim, ultimately benefiting the stronger side.
What stands out is that every camp recruits “the power of music” for its own argument. Admirers of Massive Attack say music forced people to face reality. Defenders of Hi-STANDARD say music carried people across division. For the former, music is a device for awakening; for the latter, a device for reconciliation.
Music rarely performs one task so obediently. The same bass can turn one listener toward politics and let another sink into sonic pleasure. The same mass singalong can offer solidarity to one person and sound like national conformity to another. To say that something “got through” does not mean the same thing got through to everyone.
Naruyoshi Kikuchi's “Politics as Husband, Music as Good Wife”
In his commentary on Massive Attack's set, Naruyoshi Kikuchi wrote that the group had done work worthy of its name by causing a “troublesome commotion.” His judgment of the performance itself was much harsher. He felt that flags and captions had simply been attached to a sound that had always been dark and weighty, and warned that if music was going to be used for politics, it should not be treated as “background music for something else.”7
In a follow-up post, he argued that from the viewpoint of politics, musicians can amount, at best, to a “premonitory abstraction,” and at worst to little more than a public blunder. He also questioned familiar stories of successful cooperation between music and politics: do they not still leave “politics as the husband, and music as the good wife”?8
The metaphor is nasty, but difficult to dismiss. If a concert is judged solely by the correctness of the statements on its screen rather than by rhythm, voice, low end, or sequence, then music really has been made subordinate. The same is true in reverse when Hi-STANDARD's performance is discarded and a few seconds of MC are used to classify the band as right or left.
Kikuchi's argument works not because it drives politics out of music, but because it asks political language to accept being transformed by music. Words may disappear into bass. A flag may become part of the lighting design. An antiwar statement may be swallowed by the rush of the fast song that follows it. To use music means accepting that uncertainty.
His commentary cannot, however, be adopted whole. Kikuchi wrote that “nearly 2,000 people” were killed at the Nova music festival on October 7. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry confirmed at least 364 festival attendees killed, and 379 people when the surrounding area is included. The same report cites an Israeli security assessment stating that the armed groups did not know about the festival in advance. Correcting those claims does nothing to diminish the gravity of the murder and abduction of civilians. That is precisely why there is no need to inflate the number or present an unverified scenario as fact.9
Britain's major historical role in shaping the present crisis through the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine is also well established.10 But it is crude to make a British band inherit that responsibility through nationality and turn history into a test of who has standing to speak. Massive Attack has also been an outspoken critic of the British government. Interrogating a state's history is not the same as treating an artist from that state as its representative.
The aesthetic question is sharp enough that the factual carelessness becomes especially regrettable. If history must not turn music into its accompaniment, history should not be made to accompany a critic's argument either.
Sound Cannot Specify Politics; Words Cannot Command Sound
I agree with Kikuchi that meaning does not only exist where something has been stated in words. Massive Attack had been sounding out urban anxiety, surveillance, violence, and the absence of escape long before the word Gaza appeared on the screen. Hi-STANDARD's speed could connect an individual to a crowd before the MC said anything.
But sound alone cannot name Palantir. Who signed which contract, and where a particular weapon or system was used, belongs to the work of language and verification. Bass can convey menace, but it cannot identify who is responsible for it. Words, conversely, cannot by themselves produce the bodily tremor of learning who is responsible.
Avoiding a hierarchy between music and politics therefore requires more than silencing one side. Words need room to be carried somewhere unexpected by sound. Sound needs enough resistance not to let concrete facts dissolve into a compelling atmosphere.
From here, counting approval and disapproval is not enough to answer Kikuchi's question about booing. The issue is less whether an opposing voice was heard than whether the audience could remain something other than part of the production.
Were Boos Really “Necessary”?
Kikuchi wrote that alongside the admiration and praise for Massive Attack, it mattered whether there had been strong boos—and that, properly speaking, there should always have been some.
I do not think he was demanding booing as support for a particular political position. He was asking whether some foreign body remained when an enormous screen and sound system bound the audience into one correct emotion. If everyone sees the same images, applauds at the same points, and carries the same phrases home to social media, a concert of accusation risks becoming a ritual of confirmation.
Even so, I would not say boos must occur. Silence is not necessarily assent. A listener may have been overwhelmed, withheld judgment, refused to disrupt the performance, or simply had no idea what to shout. The same quiet can have many causes. Assigning dissenting spectators the role of booing would become another form of stage direction.
What matters is not that boos occur, but that the space does not collapse if they do. A festival becomes a temporary public sphere only when it also contains the freedom not to applaud, to walk away, or to write a criticism the next day. The audience cannot be reduced to the chorus for a political message. That applies equally to the side making explicit claims and the side promising “neutralization.”
But the mere presence of boos does not guarantee a public sphere either. To see why, we need to move to another stage where the boos were unmistakable.
1992: The Air Sinéad O'Connor Broke Open
Even within the long history discussed in Why Do Musicians Speak About Politics?, Sinéad O'Connor's act remains an extraordinary collision of sound, words, gesture, and an audience's rejection.
On October 3, 1992, the Irish singer appeared on the American television program Saturday Night Live. She sang Bob Marley's “War” a cappella, changing part of the lyrics to address child abuse. At the end, she held a photograph of Pope John Paul II toward the camera, tore it up, and said, “Fight the real enemy.” It was a protest against the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church and its concealment. The program's staff had not been told what she planned. The studio went silent, and fierce condemnation followed. Less than two weeks later, at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, she was booed so loudly that she could not begin her song.11
As abuse and institutional concealment within the Church later became widely documented, the act was reassessed as a warning delivered too early. Yet to conclude only that “she was right after all” would once again reduce the music that night to political evidence.
There was no accompaniment. There were only voice, silence, a photograph, and the action of paper tearing. An existing song, “War,” was remade as an accusation of child abuse; the gesture after the final line fixed its interpretation on a specific institution. Music did not become background for politics. The song itself changed shape into an accusation.
At the same time, the few seconds of tearing the photograph were so powerful that the destroyed image of the pope remained in public memory longer than her altered lyrics or the grain of her voice. The gesture completed the music and consumed it. It both refutes Kikuchi's criticism and proves his point.
O'Connor's case also gives a cold answer to the question of booing. Boos do not automatically demonstrate the freedom of a space. In 1992, they were not the sound of healthy deliberation. They were also the sound of a crowd pushing back an accusation that remained difficult to see. Yet her performance left a wound in public life that included even that rejection.
Massive Attack enclosed its audience in information and bass. Hi-STANDARD tried to cross differences through a mass chorus. Sinéad O'Connor broke the shared air itself. None of the three is the correct model of political music. But in O'Connor's act there was an urgency willing to risk popularity and belonging before asking the audience for agreement.
What remains from Fuji Rock in 2026 is not a victory for Massive Attack's specificity over Hi-STANDARD's ambiguity. Proper names do not automatically turn music into politics, just as bringing people together does not automatically bring peace closer. Music does not solve politics. It can, however, disrupt the order of political language and drive it into the body at another speed.
The value of political music cannot be measured only by whether history later declares its claim correct, or whether a venue contains boos. The question is whether words, sound, and action refuse to let one another retreat to safety, and whether they cause a change the person who made them cannot undo. The 1992 broadcast remains because even the cost was visible on the screen.
I want to end not with footage of the incident, but with “Nothing Compares 2 U.” This is not a way of looking away. It is a way of refusing to imprison her in a single image: “the woman who tore up the pope's photograph.” The frame is almost entirely a face; anger and fragility move through the voice, and tears arrive near the end. With little more than voice and expression, she could stop a viewer in place.
Sinéad O’Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U
Sources and Scope
Footnotes
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Ryuji Ogura, “Hi-STANDARD's ‘Right or Left’ Remarks Stir Debate After a ‘Nippon’ Singalong at Fuji Rock,” Shueisha Online, July 28, 2026. The MC transcription follows this report; the date was also checked against Hi-STANDARD's official announcement. ↩
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Ryuji Ogura, “Massive Attack's Contrasting Stage Production,” Shueisha Online, July 28, 2026. The appearance date was checked against the official FUJI ROCK artist page. ↩
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Emily Zemler, “Massive Attack Launch Alliance for Musicians Facing ‘Intimidations From Within Our Industry’ for Supporting Gaza,” Rolling Stone Australia, July 18, 2025; “What Brian Eno’s ‘Together For Palestine’ Concert Says About Music Activism,” Rolling Stone MENA, September 2025. ↩
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X, “Debate Over Hi-STANDARD's ‘Right or Left Doesn't Matter’ MC at Fuji Rock '26,” last updated July 25, 2026. Because X itself warns that its summary may contain errors, it is used only as an entry point into the discussion. ↩
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Yahoo! Real-Time Search for “MassiveAttack”, accessed July 28, 2026. Used as a non-representative sample for identifying types of response, not for measuring opinion. ↩
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Takashi Hamamoto, “Does Punk Belong to the Left? The Unease of Watching Hi-STANDARD's MC Used for ‘Left-Bashing’,” note, July 26, 2026. ↩
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Naruyoshi Kikuchi, “I Repeat: The ‘Porn’ in ‘Decline Porn’...,” X, July 27, 2026. The complete text supplied by the user was also consulted. ↩
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Naruyoshi Kikuchi, “This Is a Typical Politics-Only Brain...,” X, July 28, 2026. The complete text supplied by the user was also consulted. ↩
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United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, “Detailed findings on attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel,” A/HRC/56/CRP.3, paras. 68–69. The report also found grave violations of international law, including the killing and abduction of civilians and sexual violence. ↩
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UK House of Commons Library, “Balfour Declaration,” November 14, 2016; United Nations, “History of the Question of Palestine.” ↩
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“12 times ‘Saturday Night Live’ made a cultural bang over the past 50 years,” Associated Press, February 14, 2025; Brenna Moore, “Once decried as sacrilegious, Sinéad O’Connor’s music and life were deeply infused with spiritual seeking,” PBS NewsHour, July 28, 2023; “People Need a Short, Sharp Shock: SINEAD O’CONNOR,” TIME, November 9, 1992. ↩