In life, you’re occasionally going to have to make choices which could be divisive or controversial. Such is the way with the DJs who made their decision to go to the MDL Beast Soundstorm festival. Going to Saudi Arabia, a country with a dreadful human rights record, was always going to have people asking questions.
And they are legitimate questions. Is it right for DJs to accept six-figure sums of money to perform at an event which gets substantial amounts of its funding from the Saudi Arabian government? Yes, there are other countries which do this – but few have a human rights record quite as poor as Saudi Arabia.
Those legitimate questions deserve answers – and DJs who had time and respect for their fans would have answered those questions and explained their thinking. And yes, the defence used by Jeff Mills in a deleted Facebook post was beyond hopeless, but he was literally the only one who publicly stood by his decision to attend. None of the other cowards did.
MDL Beast were hoping to use this festival as a propaganda opportunity for the Saudi regime. Lots of DJs publishing stories and posts showing lots of people dancing and having fun would have been the type of propaganda beyond the dreams of Joseph Goebbels – and many of the DJs going are privately aware of this.
So let’s just say it would be understandable if MDL Beast now withheld their gargantuan fees – most of the DJs who went haven’t posted anything at all before or after the event. But one person who’ll certainly have enough money to order the biggest turkey at the butchers this Christmas is David Guetta – who posted this…
However, anyone wishing to question his decision to play in Saudi Arabia at all will quickly find themselves deleted – and that’s assuming you can say anything at all. Comments have been limited on Guetta’s Instagram page – meaning he joins the long list of DJs currently pretending that this criticism doesn’t exist by simply scrubbing it.
In the case of one particular DJ – not Guetta or Mills, by the way – this has led to a curious situation. I understand he’s a “rabid anti-vaxxer”, to quote one of his own friends – and whenever his ridiculous views on the pandemic are questioned, he asserts that “freedom of speech gives me the right to say what I think”.
A right which he’s currently denying people who go to his social media pages expressing disquiet with his decision to play at the Soundstorm festival. It seems it’s not hypocrisy when he does it…
