A couple months or so I was tooling around in the downtown portion of South Bend, Indiana, my faithful place of birth and current residence, when I came upon something that sparked my attention keenly. Sun Kil Moon was to play a concert on December 6, at Stockroom East, a place I’d never heard of but that was sure to offer an extremely shady vibe in a dirt-cheap, half-abandoned brick building surrounded by transients and violent criminals.
I marked the date on my calendar, anyway, surprisingly encountered pretty much no press about the concert, and nonetheless eagerly awaited its arrival. As the date drew close, I pinpointed plans for scooting their really quickly after work, only to find, suddenly, that it had been cancelled, I believe less than a month after its arrival. The reason for its cancellation stemmed from Mark Kozelek’s (singer) involvement with the “Me Too” movement, which spotlighted, mostly, “sexual misconduct” against women.
As has been reported by a South Bend Tribune article, the venue was tipped off to reports against Kozelek, implicitly, by questions from the Tribune itself. As the story goes, then, the venue, in the wake of the newly received reports (which anyone paying any attention to music of Me Too in the last 10 years would have already heard, you’d think), cancelled the show, on account of the “newly-received information” and out of “sensitivity to our patrons and culture at large.”
Now, if you think depriving fans of a live concert seems like a strange way to cater to the public’s sensitivity, you’re apparently not from my hometown. The Tribune article was written by this fat, sneering lady named Katherine Conway who looks like the type of person who would be really proud of herself from articulating the word “Slovakia” (also, why the fact of Kozelek playing shows in Slovakia this year would be important happens to be presently escaping me), and would almost invariably be bitter at lack of invitations backstage by a stud songwriter like Kozelek, who, from reports, had many. Actually every single accusation made against him was by females who had accompanied him into some private quarters, hence positioning the cessation of said accompaniment as a theoretical negator of the generally purported “misconduct” (some of which, curiously, was framed as “nonconsensual sex,” rather than rape).
Kozelek’s Canton, Ohio show went off without a hitch, on December 9, as far as I’ve heard, featuring even a robust 21 songs on its setlist. It’s my opinion that Stockroom East and the South Bend Tribune were in cahoots, from the beginning, within some sort of cultural initiative to appear authoritative and sovereign within the “Me Too” movement and thereby lunge for some sort of cultural leverage over men. As far as I know, no men were involved in the spread of information about Kozelek or the decision to cancel the show. In the meantime, I sit around 15 or so girls who are dressed in yoga pants in public at the cafe’s music segment, an autistic dude glaring at me like he wants to kill me, and the empty, barren desire for any kind of musical night life to surface in this community. I might be waiting a while, if the type of stupid, ignorant and ham-handed oafs which snuffed out this Sun Kil Moon show are continually in charge of things.
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