This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
March 14, 4 PM Austin Time. I’ve ambled through downtown, crossing under the overpass that links Austin proper to its growing neighborhoods across the river. As an official artist, however, I’ll be staying on the north side. While many of the more free-spirited events are happening to the south, I’ve come here to take part of the festival’s official showcases, corporate warts and all.
My walk, punctuated by the ineligible vocals and poorly mixed kick drums of a dozen bands on every block, interspersed with parties playing Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots” (apparently this year’s DJ anthem), nears its end at the Hilton Austin Downtown. I walk through the lobby doors to see a Starbuck’s on my right. I look at a moderate line of upwardly mobiles in indistinct outfits lining up to order their beverages. Do they know? I think to myself.
Not even in the most banal moments am I able to forget the looming sense of dread attached to this trip. Following the most recent round of apartheid oppression in Palestine, there seems to be little else that many of my closest friends can think about, talk about, or emotionally process. Bombarded with horrific images every minute of every day on social media, every interaction with someone under 30 carries a similar sense of situational dissonance. We can’t ask or answer, “How are you doing?” without the inevitable disclaimer. I’m doing great. I’m alive and safe. That’s the problem.
I was aware of SXSW’s “super sponsor”-ship with the U.S. Army when I wrote my previous piece on the festival several weeks ago. In that piece, I decided to steer clear of the more ethical issues clearly presented by a creative festival being sponsored by the most expensive, most powerful military on the planet. I have friends and family in the military, and am not unaccustomed to recruitment tactics. At worst, I thought, the sponsorship would include a Top Gun: Maverick style panel about “The Need for Speed In An Evolving, Digital, A.I., Climate Change, Globalized…” (insert other Bloomberg headline here.)
It was so much worse. RTX, formerly Raytheon, was also a sponsor of the festival. As a military equipment manufacturer and now second largest military corporation on the planet, RTX has aided U.S.-sponsored terror campaigns in multiple parts of the world. In the United States’s proxy war in Yemen, Raytheon’s Paveway bombs have been uncovered in village strikes that have killed civilians. At the Southern border with Mexico, Raytheon oversaw the development and implementation of an extensive surveillance system to monitor migration. Similar technologies would also be deployed by law enforcement to surveil protests in 15 American cities in response to George Floyd’s death in 2020. And then of course there’s the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which Raytheon has been instrumental in supplying weapons to Israel through U.S.-approved foreign military financing programs.
To understand why SXSW would partner with RTX is to understand the mind of SX majority stake-holder Jay Penske. An ultra-conservative heir to a Trump-endorsed oil empire, Penske obviously has a lot of conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, as titular head of magazines such as Rolling Stone, Penske’s been reported as having an almost reverential relationship with cultural cache. Yet he also wants traditional power and influence. Whenever I overheard questions like, “Why would SXSW partner with a weapons manufacturer?” over the course of my Austin stay (and I heard them a lot), I kept coming back to Jay Penske. Penske’s both a relic from a magnate mogul past, and perfectly in step with how wealth and power are distributed in the 21st Century. He’s a tragicomic caricature of someone too self-aware to ignore the kids, yet too indoctrinated to have an identity outside the offices he’s mostly inherited. I could imagine Jeremy Strong playing him in a television series…if he didn’t already.
As I passed the Starbucks and got onto the elevator to the fourth floor, I was struck by the diversity of characters making their way to the various official SXSW panels and meetups. Some were artists, some were young, corporate upstarts, and some were dressed-down professionals in resolutely drone-like demeanor. Were they booking for Faye Webster, or were they building the Solaronite bomb from Plan 9 From Outer Space? In Jay Penske’s military-industrial/media-industrial utopia, either were just as likely.
I walk to 405, where the Manager-Artist meetup was scheduled. I planned to be calm, cool, and lie through my teeth about my accomplishments (a skill I’ve picked up from the greats.) Yet upon entry, the SXSW employee scanning my pass looks verklempt. They scan again, an ear-grating beep erupting from her (…Raytheon?) barcode scanner. “So… your pass has been deactivated. You’re going to have to go to registration to get it relinked.” The employee delivers this information politely, albeit with a weathered, knowing tone.
I wasn’t the only artist who dropped out of our official showcases a day earlier in protest to SXSW’s partnership with a weapons manufacturer aiding Israel’s destruction of Gaza. I was one of dozens, if not many more. The final tally is still unclear, in part because media coverage of the protest has thus far largely strayed from implying the protest outshone the festival. Even NME’s relatively strong reportage of the protest stops short of offering a tally. Janey Starling’s great piece in Kerrang, that also includes some great criticism of an official SXSW punk band who refused to speak out about Palestine (who coincidentally, I wrote about in my previous SX piece) suggests the number of artists who pulled out topped 100.
Regardless of the real number, Governor Greb Abbott’s unhinged reaction, and SXSW’s Biden-chic non-response response, I choose to believe that the South by Southwest Festival of 2024 was a moment of change. Despite the vast majority of the festival continuing business-as-usual, it’s now written in stone who did and didn’t use their voice to protest the genocide we’re watching unfold in real time. No, it’s not simple for many people. International artists who had to secure visas couldn’t easily turn down the opportunity. Still, a lot of them pulled out regardless of those challenges, including every single Irish artist originally scheduled to perform official showcases.
As I slowly exit 405 and walk through the carpeted halls of the Austin Hilton, I feel a sudden sense of shame. It was understandable that my pass had been cancelled as retaliation for my act of protest, but I was still benefiting (if rather unsuccessfully) from my involvement in the first place. I might have been protesting, but here I am, walking from room to room in this maze of American power. What’s the value of my knowledge of oppression when I materially and consciously benefit from the system that oppresses? I’d forgive you if you rolled your eyes at that question; it’s so inherently privileged and trite that it belies a naïveté about the world, if not an outright sophomoric understanding of it. But I can’t help but be reminded of it once again as I get back into the elevator. At the very least, I’m being demoted from the fourth floor. Perhaps, that’s a start.
What do you think about the artist protest at SXSW 2024? Did you attend? Leave a comment below!
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