Listen up Lefties, our wokeness is killing us

There’s always a moment as a performer where your guts are gripped by the cold fist of an imminent disaster. You know it’s about to happen a second before it does, and then you’re swept by blank, paralytic nothingness as you watch everything pirouette elegantly into the jaws of a total catastrophe.

It happened to me the other night at a burlesque gig. I stood on the side of the stage watching as the performer took their place for their set, the lights dimmed, the music swelled . . . and it was the wrong music. Not just that, it was R Kelly’s Remix to Ignition.

In previous years, that song has been a surefire intergenerational banger. It’s like Nelly’s Hot In Herre, you put it on and you know that everyone from the white girls at the front to Granny at the back is going to jump up and start twerking. So it was a perfect song for a set.

But, unless you’ve been living in an igloo in 2019, you’ll know that this year the documentary Surviving R Kelly exposed Kelly’s supposed careerlong history of sexual abuse of underage girls.

Understandably his music has been blacklisted everywhere, from major radio stations to our little show. Not only that but in many polite circles if someone did play or even admit to liking the song, it’d draw the long, spiky suck-the-breath-inthrough-your-teeth noise of silent judgment. So we’d redone the music to make a new version without R Kelly.

As the now notorious opening croon, ‘‘now I usually don’t do this but uh . . .’’ filled the room, and cold panic flooded my guts, I realised we’d somehow accidentally loaded the old version. This was going to be very, very bad . . .

And I was totally wrong.

I watched in complete disbelief as the crowd went wild, an enormous cheer erupted and Granny rose on her one good leg and started shaking it.

Of course, said a tiny corner of my brain, this isn’t Wellington. It’s not even Auckland. If it had been, there would have been nothing but a caustic, bubbling silence right now. But here, in this tiny bourbon-and-coke-by-the-bucket kinda country pub, where everyone including the blokes were called Shirl, it was going off.

It was utterly depressing. Not because I wanted everyone to react with hushed disgust. Actually I was relieved we hadn’t just totally killed the entire night. But rather because I was hit by the grim realisation that there really is an enormous gap between so many of the things the Left care about

. . . and how deeply, utterly irrelevant they are to everyone else.

See at that point, as MC I obviously could have stopped the show, apologised deeply, and then given the audience a long rant as to why we should be banning R Kelly’s music because the sales from his career inevitably bankrolled his efforts, and his record company’s efforts, to help him evade proper investigation for decades. Theoretically, I’d have a sound moral case.

But what would have been the point? Clearly no-one gave a damn. That’s depressing. Lefties spend so much time earnestly debating issues like this in the pop-culture-identity-politics-morality-universe. And yet evidently no-one except us is listening.

(That’s not to say the audience approved of R Kelly’s behaviour. It’s just that they don’t make the connection between enjoying his music and endorsing his behaviour. Whereas in woke liberal circles, enjoying his music carries moral weight.)

And if I stopped and called everyone out for not showing appropriate wokeness, I’d sound like a colossal arse. Especially in light of the recent research out of the US around ‘‘wokeness’’. It found the general ‘‘exhausted majority’’ of the public, far from seeing wokeness as an effort to educate on/ stand up for civil rights, actually see PC culture as something fancy liberals do to make everyone else feel small.

Now, let’s be real. There are some lefties who do that. There are people in the Left/Right/Centre/ your Mum’s house who all vocally correct and judge others’ behaviour in order to look good. And yet I know first-hand the majority of the Left have good hearts and great intentions.

And yes, there will always be people who rail against any perceived threat (however tiny) of being told what to do. Even if it’s actually for a good reason. In fact, especially if it’s for a good reason. But clearly the backlash against woke culture is much more deeply rooted than just kneejerk huffyness.

And this makes me worried for us Lefties. If we actually want to change anything we care about, we need to take a look at how we’re coming across. If we just come off as dicks all the time, it makes us really easy to ignore.

I watched in complete disbelief as the crowd went wild, an enormous cheer erupted and Granny rose on her one good leg and started shaking it.