Recommendations of the editorial team
So we really can’t get any further. This weekend there will be Rock am Ring and Rock im Park-Congrats to all who Celebrate-but if you look at the line-up, it will be frustrating again. Artists that are not CIS-male have to be searched with a magnifying glass. Sure, there are fantastic artists – including Christin Nichols, Mia Morgan, The Red Flags and a few more – but after at least in recent years has been done again and again as if you at least want to change the gender balance, such pious wishes for the anniversary edition are totally irrelevant! It doesn’t matter that nobody thought anything about booking a guy like Ronald “Ronnie” Radke and his band Falling in Reverse as headliners.
If you want to have a bad mix of slipknot, grain, eminem and this a hardcore band from your home village, which once played a European tour and could have really big, the front man would not have thrown everything for his graphic degree, then Falling can already hitten. In any case, if you listen to Random Trans -hostile song lines and white neoliberal lines over taxes as a robbery that do not all fit the rest of the song, but have probably been out. And if you look away with his god complex, which is more and more obvious in the campaign for the new album. In almost every video he is God, Jesus or smooches with a female potential figure of God. If that’s not a blasphemy, I don’t know now, but you do you.
But even if you like all of this, I dare to say that there are also better options than a guy who was fired by his ex-band Escape The Fate for participation in a homicide in the jail and was in court due to alleged partnership power. Incidentally, Ronald’s re -socialization was so successful that today he does marketing with his 2012 Mugshot. What was in 2012? Oh yes, he was arrested because he was said to have beaten his girlfriend at the time.
Today he collaborates with Marilyn Manson – just like a steadfast fighter against Cancel Culture, who, like him, tends to complain everything and everyone who is talking about allegations against him. Radke tried the previous year, for example, with music critic Anthony Fantano, who rolled up the allegations against him in one of his videos. And at least failed.
In any case, this type stands between Korn and Sleep Token among the headliners for rock am ring and rock in the park, on the same day as Beatsteaks and Idles, Brutalism 3000, The Red Flags and your cousin. Sounds after a relaxed party in the backstage, I am sure, the other bands are happy about such illustrious society that is on the banner with them.
But as I said: everything doesn’t matter. Yesterday evening I moderated my friend Rike van Kleef’s book premiere. Rike wears many hats in the music industry: booker, agent, tour manager and also an author. In the past three years, she has written the book “Cheap Places” next to her day job, which is about “gender, power and discrimination” in the music industry, especially in the live bus. I have spent the last few days with this book, and Rike impressively shows that such accidents such as booking at Rock am Ring and Rock in the Park are not a coincidence, but from the structures that prevail in the music industry, especially in Germany.
I don’t want to assume nasty intentions, few people want to actively create an unfair world. But in which you pretend to bend only the market power or the taste of the audience, you try to take responsibility. As if not every booking decision was also a statement. A statement for what kind of world we want to live in.
In the conversation between Rike and me last night to her book, it was always that none of us asked to have a 50 percent proportion of women on stages like Rock am Ring overnight, a trans and a bipoc quota, a quota for artists with disabilities. But that a little movement and a little more effort with booking would be quite nice. This does not mean that I would not celebrate many of the bands on the line-up.
It is a bit like gender: only a few people demand that everyone gender. But the claim that people who gender, everyone else also want to do it ensures loud protest and rejection. People who like to initiate a serious discourse on line-ups like from Rock am Ring and Rock in the park know that change takes time. But a loud minority has ensured in recent years that there is a feeling that they want to take something away from the audience. A headlining solo for one like Ronnie Radke. Or Bring Me The Horizon’s third appearance in just six years instead of booking another band. Happy Birthday, at least, Rock am Ring and Rock in the Park. I hope Ronnie Radke will not fall into your cake.