They did so with a video showing the coups in Chile, Bolivia, and the Congo — just to name a few — followed by footage of the bombings in Gaza and Iran.
On the Coachella stage, some artists take the spotlight with a MacBook to show the audience old YouTube videos (Justin Bieber, incidentally the highest-paid act booked this year, with a $10 million fee), while others use the opportunity to send messages — political ones, since everything is politics — to one of the largest and most media-receptive crowds in the world. At a festival already making headlines for the prices of lemonade, tents, and phone charging stations ($80 for a full 100 percent battery charge, apparently an acceptable sum to keep creating content), the Strokes decided to take advantage of the spotlight by showing during their set a video montage offering a straightforward but comprehensive timeline of all the coups, conspiracies, and various crimes carried out by the CIA from the 1950s to the present day. Chile, Bolivia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo — just a few of the historical events, because historical events are indeed what they now are, featured in the video. The footage concluded with images of the bombings in Gaza and Iran, carried out by the Israel-US alliance.
The video was shown while the band performed the song Oblivius (2016), which contains the line “What side you standing on?” — in this context also a pointed question about where one’s allegiances lie. And that is precisely the hook chosen by Casablancas and company during the Strokes’ second weekend at Coachella. At the first, the frontman had “merely” joked with the crowd by asking “guys, are you excited for the draft? Oh wait, not the NFL draft” (a joke that needs unpacking: in English, draft refers both to mandatory military conscription and to the event in which American professional sports teams select which college athletes to add to their rosters). The video also mentioned foreign leaders such as former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, former Bolivian President Juan Torres, and former Chilean President Salvador Allende, pairing their photographs with captions accusing the CIA of being responsible for the coups that brought down their governments and led to their deaths. At one point, as Pitchfork also noted, an image of Martin Luther King Jr. appeared, preceded by the caption “The United States government was found guilty of his assassination in a civil trial” — a reference to a 1999 case in which a jury unanimously determined that there had been a governmental conspiracy to assassinate the civil rights leader (in 2000, the Department of Justice reopened its investigation into MLK’s death following that verdict, but stated it had found no evidence of a conspiracy).
The Strokes’ efforts don’t stop at Coachella, however: the band has already planned a tour taking them across North America, Japan, and Europe. On June 26th, their next album, Reality Awaits — their first in six years of silence and side projects — will be released. Last week, through a website styled after the internet of the late ’90s and early 2000s and a hundred cassette tapes mailed directly to the doors of the first hundred fans who answered the Strokes’ call, the band launched the single Going Shopping.
Fines issued because Amazon delivery drivers leave their vans parked in the middle of the street with the engine running, polluting the air.