Massive Attack call for global change in new EP Eutopia, and beyond

July 12, 2020 2:10 PM

After posting cryptic images on Instagram (Meaww), Massive Attack recently released ‘Eutopia’, a new audio-visual EP featuring three different collaborations, recorded in three different cities during lockdown, with three different messages: Massive Attack x Young Fathers + Professor Guy Standing (CNBC), a co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (Wired.co.uk) and long-time proponent of Universal Basic Income (UBI) // Massive Attack x Saul Williams + Professor Gabriel Zucman (The Hill), inventor of the US “Wealth Tax” policy (Ekathimerini) // Massive Attack x Algiers + Christiana Figueres, head of the UN climate change convention when the Paris agreement was achieved in 2015 (The Guardian).

From NME:

Commenting on the project, Massive Attack said: “Lockdown exposed the best aspects and worst flaws of humanity. That period of uncertainty and anxiety forced us to meditate on the obvious need to change the damaging systems we live by.  By working with three experts, we’ve created a sonic and visual dialogue around these global, structural issues; taking the form of climate emergency, tax haven extraction and Universal Basic Income.

“The spirit of this EP, its elements and ideas have nothing to do with naïve notions of an ideal, perfect world, and everything to do with the urgent & practical need to build something better. In this sense, Eutopia is the opposite of spelling mistake.”

The videos each end with quotes from Thomas More's Utopia (Project Gutenberg; 1878 translation on Internet Archive; Wikipedia).

As recapped on Wikipedia, Massive Attack (primarily Robert "3D" Del Naja) have been politically active for years, and the group have addressed or touched on issues of addiction, classes, poverty, social inequalities, racism, and wars through their music and music videos, going back to "Unfinished Sympathy" (YouTube; Wikipedia) in 1991.

Their more explicitly political videos and events include:

• 2010: The music video Saturday Come Slow features Ruhal Ahmed, a victim of music torture, speaking on his experience (archive of article from Reprieve).
• 2011: Thom Yorke & Robert Del Naja played at "The Bank of Ideas" UBS Xmas party, where Occupy London reclaimed an empty building belonging to the Swiss Bank UBS (The Guardian).
• 2014: At the 100% FEST in İstanbul (full show, audience recording; Inertia Creeps recorded from a better angle to see the text), the stage was lit with names and events from Turkey (Radikal; Google auto-translation), including the names of those who lost their lives in the Gezi Park protests (Wikipedia).
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• Since October 2018, Massive Attack have also been supporting the climate activists of the Extinction Rebellion group. Rob from Massive Attack visited Extinction Rebellion (XR) sites and brought backpacks containing mini PA systems and gave a voice to the protestors; and he's also DJed at some XR events (short clip).
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• On 28 Nov. 2019, Robert Del Naja wrote an Op Ed in The Guardian on behalf of Massive Attack: "We’ve toured the world for years. To help save the planet we’ll have to change. The music industry has had a big carbon impact. As a band working with climate experts, we’re going to try to minimise ours."

And the Massive Attack website (archived for future reference) currently has a message in response to the murder of George Floyd, the ongoing police brutality against Black people in the UK and US, and the tyranny of the "normal."

posted by filthy light thief (5 comments total)

Wow, fuck yes.
posted by trappist system at 5:15 PM on July 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

MA + SW oh hell yes. Also I've just recently twigged to Algiers, and holy moly do they kick ass.
posted by FatherDagon at 11:50 PM on July 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Massive Attack was a big part of my soundtrack back in the '90s-'00s. Gotta check this out. Thanks for the alert.

I barely "follow" music news anymore. I'm 50 this year and have drifted away from music media. I kinda miss the days of physical media, because having those $15 jewel cases laying around really made me give new music I had purchased a chance. I felt like I paid the money, I gotta make an effort to really listen to it. These days it all feels so ephemeral to me that I just haven't connected to anything new in a long, long time. Not that I dislike new music that I hear... far from that. It's just that it kind of "floats" in reality between digital devices and I have a harder time getting things to stick.

Gonna make an effort with this.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:03 AM on July 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'm 50 this year and have drifted away from music media.

Hey, welcome to the club! So this will sound the most cliché of clichés but the last two months or so I've gotten back into records. One of the tropes about vinyl is it engages you more fully with the music, and you know what? This is true.

For example, Massive Attack released a "new" record featuring Mad Professor dub remixes of their album Mezzanine and I'm enjoying it a great deal. In a covid world where time feels ever more like an arbitrary construct, putting the record on the turntable and knowing it's going to end and not just become a never-ending stream of music is strangely comforting to me.
posted by jeremias at 6:05 AM on July 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Interested in seeing how this looks/sounds. I saw MA last year, only my second time after seeing them in the '90s, and they sounded amazing. Their light show was also terrific. That said, the projections they screened on large flat backdrops throughout the show featured visual/textual messaging that was, alternately, unclear (Was it about fame? Was it about corporations? Was it about bad government? Was it about privacy?) and simplistic.

I respect and appreciate a band that decides to fold political thought into their music, but this was just clunky. I ended up wishing they'd just gone with their light show and kept the video out of the performance altogether, as it didn't seem to work either on its own or with the song(s) it accompanied. So, I'm hoping this new project is a better shot at their goal.
posted by the sobsister at 11:53 AM on July 13, 2020