Around 6pm I was standing in the middle-third of the audience for BPM at May Day Festival, the day long free festival of music, workshop, galleries, and films put together by the Antifascist Action (AFA). The festival is now in its third season and exists to show that Antifastist Action is not simply an "extremist" group, but a non-governmental collective using a variety of methods to combat the active elements of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in the Czech Republic. Because it is not a non-violent, but rather physically engages hate groups and also the police, the state has set them as "extremists."  Czech media has historically represented AFA and various hate groups as this generic term "extremists," part of the same group of violent hooligans with no respect for law and order. The May Day Festival is an action to redirect the attention away from the "anti-" of antifascism, and towards the larger promotion of progressive and tolerant pluralist culture while raising awareness about the social problems in our midst. It's part of a larger project called "Good Night White Pride," which started in Germany as a way to signal that a hardcore concert/action was to be racist-free, and has spread quickly through the hardcore scene here, and is now taking root in other subcultures like hip hop and skateboarding.

BPM had just launched into their third song, one in which they bring out their saxophone player for some groove. Which is funny, sort of, because BPM is a hip hop group whose name (básníci pred mikrofonem) means "poets before the microphone." There is some kind of standing joke about how every rock band in this country is ruined by a saxophone player, and I seeing BPM for the first time I was struck that maybe the joke is not genre specific. The group just won the Andel (Czech Grammy) for best hip hop album, and the crowd watching them was significantly younger, more colorfully dressed, more clearly hip hop than the rest of the May Day crowd. Of course at that time the second stage had the Slovak hardcore band Abhorrence, and all the kids in black shirts and full tattoo sleeves were over there, but still there was a seriously different vibe to the BPM set than there was the rest of the day. It was, for lack of a better term, a pretty normal Czech festival crowd. People danced, talked to each other, stood and bobbed their heads, drank - and I too bobbed my head sort of listlessly, gently annoyed at the two MC's attempts to get the crowd more enthused but generally enjoying a rest from the dense chaos of hardcore that seems to make so much less sense on green lawns and in sunshine. 

And in one of the awkward breaks where they were trying to engage the audience they broke the hip hop stage show and began to talk about the day. There was strictly no photography and I didn't record, so my memory is all I have, but it was something like "Our music isn't political, and we're not a political group, but we're here today to support anti-racism."

I was shocked into attention, watching a thin round of applause but general lack of register among the crowd. I looked around, I asked my friend. "What did you think of that?" But she's not really the kind of person who would think about this kind of thing I guess, because it just passed over her. It seemed to pass over everyone. But for me, it was pivotal. I don't really know what to make of it, actually. 

I guess I could see it as May Day's ultimate achievement - the mainstreaming of AFA's values into larger elements of culture, to make them normal, "unmarked." In becoming a large, well-run, safe and successful event that now has a history of quality it is possible to get a group outside of the scene but with potential sympathies to its values, like BPM, who clearly value the roots of hip hop as a music of black American culture, to sign on to the May Day project. In turn, the group brings a new audience in contact with AFA's ideas. What this audience and BPM found - a crowd estimated at 10,000 who were mostly coming from old school punk, metal, and hardcore backgrounds - must have been a bit intimidating, but they hung, they mixed, and it was cool. I mean, there were a lot of punks standing there too with the hip hop kids, but not nearly as many as had been for the more rock-oriented group The Pack A.D. Were they won over, was there a moment of conciousness either from the fans or from the punks, a sense of engagement and potential?

One other thing. I am struck by the incredibly successful use of graphic design by Good Night White Pride and the Antifa community. A lot of it comes from the culturejamming and skate-design appropriations of the 1990s, and because there is a significant crossover between Antifa and the Czech anarchist movement, the appropriation of copyrighted logos for "selling" anti-fascism has a double valience (see the WB logo for example). The shirts are not meant to be tricky or clever - they are clear and direct address: "good night white pride" is a kind of command, however politely framed. The fascists have responded with their own appropriations: "good night left side" has points for linguistic parallelism but fails to summarize their political program since their enemies are two-fold, "the other" and also the Antifa. All the concerns about the failure for a culture jam to be understood or how it might be watered down when circulating in the larger culture seem unfounded in this case, with the possible exception of the fact that so many punks sew the logo on their coats and where hoodies where the "good night" is obscured.

I want to respect Antifa's wishes so if you want to see pictures of all of this, follow this link to their site.

In the seventh picture down, on the left edge midway up, I am the blob to the right of the orange blob. I would say I was wearing a black t-shirt but that would be a dumb joke.