What politicians had neglected for decades, rock and jazz bands did in the same period. In 1970, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Phil Ochs enabled the founding of Greenpeace with a concert. Criticism of the existing conditions can be seen in various forms, such as in 1976 the performances of "Plastic People of the Universe" in Czechoslovakia and the related founding of the Charter 77; Bruce Springsteen or James Taylor and Carly Simon with "Mocking Bird" at the "No Nukes" concert against nuclear power in 1979; Manfred Mann's Earth Band with the song "Tribal Statistics" about apartheid in 1982; BAP's "Kristallnaach" at a Greenpeace concert about Nazi pogroms against Jews in 1983; Charlie Haden's and Carla Bley's Liberation Music Orchestra with "The Ballad of the Fallen," a folk song from El Salvador about US power politics, in 1986 at the anti-nuclear concert in Wackersdorf, there Udo Lindenberg performed "Sie brauchen keinen Führer" (They Don't Need a Leader), together with Wolfgang Niedecken's BAP; Sting's "Soledad" in 1987 as a protest song against the violence of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile; and the 1988 concert for Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday celebration at London's Wembley Stadium included performances by Special Aka with "Free Nelson Mandela"; the 1998 concert for Amnesty International, and many others. Mark Knopfler's Dire Straits, who performed "Money for Nothin' and Chicks for Free" with Sting at the Live Aid concert for the Ethiopian famine relief and at the Mandela concert in Wembley Stadium, stand out from today's perspective. This song presciently addresses the Harvey Weinstein scandal, exposed by Ronan Farrow in 2017 in "The New Yorker," and Jeffrey Epstein's network, which existed from 1996 to 2019 with the abuse of underage girls, including Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Prince Andrew of the House of Windsor. Meanwhile, politics is constantly preoccupied with the idea that "rewriting one's own history is one of the Central European delusions," as formulated by the poet Václav Havel in his opening address at the Salzburg Festival. 1990.

Herbert Gantschacher is author, director, and producer