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The Wedding That Ate Venice
It wasn’t just a wedding. It was an occupation.
For a few deeply strange days in late June, Venice ceased being a city and became a film set, one where no one knew what movie was being made, who the audience was supposed to be, or why the lead actress had clearly studied every frame of Kim Kardashian’s wedding content like it was an NFL playbook. Lauren Sánchez, the new Mrs. Bezos, didn’t just get married. She tried to canonize herself.
And she had a plan. There was a glitzy bachelorette party in Paris. A carefully stage managed sunset cruise down the Seine under the hum of drones. There was a wedding in Italy, just like Kim. There was a Vogue exclusive, albeit digital, complete with a dolce-vita wannabe shoot in her Sophia Loren inspired Dolce & Gabbana wedding gown. And in perhaps the most surreal flourish, Sánchez booked Matteo Bocelli, son of Andrea Bocelli yes, the same Andrea who famously sang at Kim and Kanye’s wedding in Florence.
This is not a coincidence. This is scripting. This is someone trying very, very hard to manufacture a wedding-as-moment.
What she failed to realize is that it is no longer 2014. The culture has changed, the fantasy has expired, and Lauren Sánchez is not Kim Kardashian. She doesn’t have the influence, the intrigue, or the irony like the kind Kanye West once knew how to manufacture, art-directing a wedding that felt both sincerely grand and wryly self-aware. She has money and a lot of it but no myth. And that’s the problem.
To understand just how off Lauren Sánchez’s wedding was, you have to go back to the one she was clearly copying: Kim and Kanye, 2014, the wedding that practically invented the modern celebrity ceremony.
Say what you want about KimYe, but that wedding made an impact on the culture. Optimized for virality: high/low, couture-meets-chaos, social media bait wrapped in Givenchy. From the Parisian pre-wedding fits to the Florence ceremony staged in front of a crumbling fortress, everything was hyper-curated and deeply personal. This wasn’t some random destination wedding with a Vogue shoot tacked on. It was a painstakingly crafted narrative.
Paris made sense, Kim and Kanye were fashion-obsessed, and Paris Fashion Week was their red carpet. They were front row. They were in it. Florence, we later learned, was where their daughter North was conceived. That detail turned what could’ve been a rich-person location flex into something intimate, even romantic. And then there was Versailles, the site of their rehearsal dinner, a deliberately imperial choice that positioned them as pop-cultural royalty. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t supposed to be. It was about legacy wrapped in gilded historic grandeur.
And the aesthetic? Tasteful. Thought out. Kanye commissioned a massive Carrara marble table for the reception. Riccardo Tisci designed Kim’s dress. The guest list was curated like an art exhibit, full of industry insiders and cultural players. This was a cultural event with layers and textures that made sense.
Yes they were showing off but at the same time they weren’t just showing off; they were performing an aspirational lifestyle that millions could obsess over, analyze, and replicate in mini ways online. That wedding birthed endless memes, think pieces, and viral moments. It was maximal but meaningful. It had context.
Venice, however, had no narrative in the Sánchez-Bezos wedding. It was the background, a luxury prop for a story Venice didn’t ask to be part of.
The city did not greet the event with open arms. As Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez exchanged vows, a few hundred protesters gathered at the Venice train station on the following day with one clear message: “Bezos, f**k off,” and “Out of our lagoon!” They chanted in Italian, their voices rippling through the ancient city like a wave of defiance.
Venetian locals like 22-year-old Sofia D’Amato made it clear that this was not about envy. “We are not jealous of the fact that he earns so much money,” she told CNN. “We are jealous when his wealth hits us in the face.”
That wealth hit hard. The wedding reportedly cost $55 million. While Sánchez and Bezos pledged a combined €3 million to three Venetian cultural institutions, D’Amato dismissed the donations as “paltry” compared to the spectacle and disruption inflicted upon the city.
Protesters didn’t just express resentment toward Bezos’s private wealth, they drew stark contrasts between that opulence and the struggles of Amazon workers. One woman, identifying herself as an Amazon employee, shouted into the crowd, “We can barely pay the rent. Many of us come from far away to reach the warehouse… We don’t see these millions.”
The march, which moved through the city’s iconic bridges and squares, was a kaleidoscope of political symbolism: Palestinian flags, pride flags, anti-fascist banners, and Venice’s traditional red standard. Some even modified the golden lion on the Venetian flag to wear a black balaclava, an unmistakable symbol of resistance.
Predictably, city officials were quick to condemn the protests. In a press release, Venice’s municipal government called the demonstrations “ridiculous” and “grotesque,” dismissing opposition as “folklore of ‘No to everything.’” Their statement claimed that “contesting a wedding (any wedding) is already ridiculous in itself,” as if the billionaires’ invasion was the natural order, and dissent a bizarre outlier.
But for many Venetians, this wasn’t just a wedding to protest, it was a painful reminder of how their city is commodified and controlled by the ultra-rich, at the expense of everyday life.
There’s something oddly fascinating about Lauren Sánchez’s entire trajectory leading up to this wedding. The soft launches. The yacht wardrobe. The increasingly intentional paparazzi strolls. The Paris bachelorette that felt like a Vogue World afterparty with bigger bank accounts. She wasn’t just planning a wedding, she was orchestrating a character arc.
But if the wedding itself was a fantasy no one asked for, the Vogue coverage was the hallucination that followed. Behind it all, the unmistakable hand of Anna Wintour, who still seems to believe that a Vogue feature has the power to manufacture cultural relevance.
But this time, she didn’t just co-sign the narrative, she helped script it. According to reports, Wintour personally advised Lauren Sánchez on which designer to choose for her wedding dress. That wasn’t just a fashion favor. That was the ultimate act of legacy media meddling, as if the right label could turn a billionaire yacht wife into a main character. Wintour, still clinging to the idea that her blessing carries myth-making power, anointed Sánchez with the same institutional pomp once reserved for actual icons.
The thing is, everyone involved in this coverage fundamentally misunderstood who reads Vogue in 2025, especially online. Today’s audience is digital-native, hyper-aware, and deeply fluent in the language of spin. We know when we’re being sold something. And in this case, the product was Lauren Sánchez: aggressively packaged, horrifically over-styled, and force-fed down our throats like a satin-wrapped ad for moneyed mediocrity.
These people aren’t aspirational. They’re not even neutral. They’re actively loathed.
And yes, sure, you could compare this to the backlash when Kim Kardashian got her first Vogue cover. But that outrage was alive. That cover mattered. It arrived right as social media was exploding. Thirst was aspirational. The vibe was peak maximalism. KimYe were the zeitgeist. Whether you loved them or hated them, you were watching.
Jeff and Lauren wanted that. Desperately. But what they staged in Venice wasn’t a cultural coronation, it was a hollow production for people who still think “rich” means “interesting.”
There’s no iconography. No real story. Just a swarm of strategists hovering off-camera in the lagoon.
The difference between a moment and a media stunt is simple: one has soul. This had scheduling.
If Vogue still thinks it can manufacture buzz by throwing up carefully curated wedding posts on Instagram, the comments sections say otherwise. Scroll through any of the ten posts Vogue put up about the Sánchez-Bezos wedding, and you’ll find a consistent theme: anger, disgust, and outright mockery.
Comments like “Who asked?” “So tone-deaf,” “More billionaires ruining the world,” and simply “No one cares” flood every post. The wedding has become a lightning rod for frustrations about wealth inequality, entitlement, and the performative exhaustion of these ultra-rich pageants. It’s a digital rebellion against being sold a fairy tale that feels increasingly grotesque and irrelevant.
The optics are impossible to ignore: a billionaire wedding in Venice, a city suffocated by luxury excess, doubling as a sort of political power mixer for America’s richest, regardless of the ideologies they champion. It’s a reminder of how the ultra-wealthy consolidate influence behind closed doors, far from the consequences their politics inflict on everyday people.
The only real moment of truth in this entire circus didn’t come from Sánchez or Bezos. It came from the Venetians protesting on boats. From the clips of locals being rerouted around security barricades so that billionaires in sunglasses could glide through canals in peace. From the quiet rage of a city that’s been turned into a playground for the ultra-rich, now forced to host their mythmaking rituals.
This wasn’t a wedding. It was a symptom. A symptom of just how far removed the 1% has become from the rest of us and how tone-deaf our media class still is when it comes to documenting them.
Lauren wanted her Kim moment. She got her Marie Antoinette moment instead.
As for Vogue? It’s still playing prestige dress-up in a world that already left the party. The rest of us are rolling our eyes, wondering how many more of these billionaire Barbie weddings we’ll be forced to endure before the fantasy fully collapses.
They barricaded the protesters out of Venice, shutting down dissent with walls and security.
Me? I got blocked on Instagram. Turns out the easiest way to silence a critic in 2025 is just one click away.
{
"article":
{
"title" : "The Wedding That Ate Venice",
"author" : "Louis Pisano",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/wedding-that-ate-venice",
"date" : "2025-06-30 11:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_LaurenSanchez.jpg",
"excerpt" : "It wasn’t just a wedding. It was an occupation.",
"content" : "It wasn’t just a wedding. It was an occupation.For a few deeply strange days in late June, Venice ceased being a city and became a film set, one where no one knew what movie was being made, who the audience was supposed to be, or why the lead actress had clearly studied every frame of Kim Kardashian’s wedding content like it was an NFL playbook. Lauren Sánchez, the new Mrs. Bezos, didn’t just get married. She tried to canonize herself.And she had a plan. There was a glitzy bachelorette party in Paris. A carefully stage managed sunset cruise down the Seine under the hum of drones. There was a wedding in Italy, just like Kim. There was a Vogue exclusive, albeit digital, complete with a dolce-vita wannabe shoot in her Sophia Loren inspired Dolce & Gabbana wedding gown. And in perhaps the most surreal flourish, Sánchez booked Matteo Bocelli, son of Andrea Bocelli yes, the same Andrea who famously sang at Kim and Kanye’s wedding in Florence.This is not a coincidence. This is scripting. This is someone trying very, very hard to manufacture a wedding-as-moment.What she failed to realize is that it is no longer 2014. The culture has changed, the fantasy has expired, and Lauren Sánchez is not Kim Kardashian. She doesn’t have the influence, the intrigue, or the irony like the kind Kanye West once knew how to manufacture, art-directing a wedding that felt both sincerely grand and wryly self-aware. She has money and a lot of it but no myth. And that’s the problem.To understand just how off Lauren Sánchez’s wedding was, you have to go back to the one she was clearly copying: Kim and Kanye, 2014, the wedding that practically invented the modern celebrity ceremony.Say what you want about KimYe, but that wedding made an impact on the culture. Optimized for virality: high/low, couture-meets-chaos, social media bait wrapped in Givenchy. From the Parisian pre-wedding fits to the Florence ceremony staged in front of a crumbling fortress, everything was hyper-curated and deeply personal. This wasn’t some random destination wedding with a Vogue shoot tacked on. It was a painstakingly crafted narrative.Paris made sense, Kim and Kanye were fashion-obsessed, and Paris Fashion Week was their red carpet. They were front row. They were in it. Florence, we later learned, was where their daughter North was conceived. That detail turned what could’ve been a rich-person location flex into something intimate, even romantic. And then there was Versailles, the site of their rehearsal dinner, a deliberately imperial choice that positioned them as pop-cultural royalty. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t supposed to be. It was about legacy wrapped in gilded historic grandeur.And the aesthetic? Tasteful. Thought out. Kanye commissioned a massive Carrara marble table for the reception. Riccardo Tisci designed Kim’s dress. The guest list was curated like an art exhibit, full of industry insiders and cultural players. This was a cultural event with layers and textures that made sense.Yes they were showing off but at the same time they weren’t just showing off; they were performing an aspirational lifestyle that millions could obsess over, analyze, and replicate in mini ways online. That wedding birthed endless memes, think pieces, and viral moments. It was maximal but meaningful. It had context.Venice, however, had no narrative in the Sánchez-Bezos wedding. It was the background, a luxury prop for a story Venice didn’t ask to be part of.The city did not greet the event with open arms. As Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez exchanged vows, a few hundred protesters gathered at the Venice train station on the following day with one clear message: “Bezos, f**k off,” and “Out of our lagoon!” They chanted in Italian, their voices rippling through the ancient city like a wave of defiance.Venetian locals like 22-year-old Sofia D’Amato made it clear that this was not about envy. “We are not jealous of the fact that he earns so much money,” she told CNN. “We are jealous when his wealth hits us in the face.”That wealth hit hard. The wedding reportedly cost $55 million. While Sánchez and Bezos pledged a combined €3 million to three Venetian cultural institutions, D’Amato dismissed the donations as “paltry” compared to the spectacle and disruption inflicted upon the city.Protesters didn’t just express resentment toward Bezos’s private wealth, they drew stark contrasts between that opulence and the struggles of Amazon workers. One woman, identifying herself as an Amazon employee, shouted into the crowd, “We can barely pay the rent. Many of us come from far away to reach the warehouse… We don’t see these millions.”The march, which moved through the city’s iconic bridges and squares, was a kaleidoscope of political symbolism: Palestinian flags, pride flags, anti-fascist banners, and Venice’s traditional red standard. Some even modified the golden lion on the Venetian flag to wear a black balaclava, an unmistakable symbol of resistance.Predictably, city officials were quick to condemn the protests. In a press release, Venice’s municipal government called the demonstrations “ridiculous” and “grotesque,” dismissing opposition as “folklore of ‘No to everything.’” Their statement claimed that “contesting a wedding (any wedding) is already ridiculous in itself,” as if the billionaires’ invasion was the natural order, and dissent a bizarre outlier.But for many Venetians, this wasn’t just a wedding to protest, it was a painful reminder of how their city is commodified and controlled by the ultra-rich, at the expense of everyday life.There’s something oddly fascinating about Lauren Sánchez’s entire trajectory leading up to this wedding. The soft launches. The yacht wardrobe. The increasingly intentional paparazzi strolls. The Paris bachelorette that felt like a Vogue World afterparty with bigger bank accounts. She wasn’t just planning a wedding, she was orchestrating a character arc.But if the wedding itself was a fantasy no one asked for, the Vogue coverage was the hallucination that followed. Behind it all, the unmistakable hand of Anna Wintour, who still seems to believe that a Vogue feature has the power to manufacture cultural relevance.But this time, she didn’t just co-sign the narrative, she helped script it. According to reports, Wintour personally advised Lauren Sánchez on which designer to choose for her wedding dress. That wasn’t just a fashion favor. That was the ultimate act of legacy media meddling, as if the right label could turn a billionaire yacht wife into a main character. Wintour, still clinging to the idea that her blessing carries myth-making power, anointed Sánchez with the same institutional pomp once reserved for actual icons.The thing is, everyone involved in this coverage fundamentally misunderstood who reads Vogue in 2025, especially online. Today’s audience is digital-native, hyper-aware, and deeply fluent in the language of spin. We know when we’re being sold something. And in this case, the product was Lauren Sánchez: aggressively packaged, horrifically over-styled, and force-fed down our throats like a satin-wrapped ad for moneyed mediocrity.These people aren’t aspirational. They’re not even neutral. They’re actively loathed.And yes, sure, you could compare this to the backlash when Kim Kardashian got her first Vogue cover. But that outrage was alive. That cover mattered. It arrived right as social media was exploding. Thirst was aspirational. The vibe was peak maximalism. KimYe were the zeitgeist. Whether you loved them or hated them, you were watching.Jeff and Lauren wanted that. Desperately. But what they staged in Venice wasn’t a cultural coronation, it was a hollow production for people who still think “rich” means “interesting.”There’s no iconography. No real story. Just a swarm of strategists hovering off-camera in the lagoon.The difference between a moment and a media stunt is simple: one has soul. This had scheduling.If Vogue still thinks it can manufacture buzz by throwing up carefully curated wedding posts on Instagram, the comments sections say otherwise. Scroll through any of the ten posts Vogue put up about the Sánchez-Bezos wedding, and you’ll find a consistent theme: anger, disgust, and outright mockery.Comments like “Who asked?” “So tone-deaf,” “More billionaires ruining the world,” and simply “No one cares” flood every post. The wedding has become a lightning rod for frustrations about wealth inequality, entitlement, and the performative exhaustion of these ultra-rich pageants. It’s a digital rebellion against being sold a fairy tale that feels increasingly grotesque and irrelevant.The optics are impossible to ignore: a billionaire wedding in Venice, a city suffocated by luxury excess, doubling as a sort of political power mixer for America’s richest, regardless of the ideologies they champion. It’s a reminder of how the ultra-wealthy consolidate influence behind closed doors, far from the consequences their politics inflict on everyday people.The only real moment of truth in this entire circus didn’t come from Sánchez or Bezos. It came from the Venetians protesting on boats. From the clips of locals being rerouted around security barricades so that billionaires in sunglasses could glide through canals in peace. From the quiet rage of a city that’s been turned into a playground for the ultra-rich, now forced to host their mythmaking rituals.This wasn’t a wedding. It was a symptom. A symptom of just how far removed the 1% has become from the rest of us and how tone-deaf our media class still is when it comes to documenting them.Lauren wanted her Kim moment. She got her Marie Antoinette moment instead.As for Vogue? It’s still playing prestige dress-up in a world that already left the party. The rest of us are rolling our eyes, wondering how many more of these billionaire Barbie weddings we’ll be forced to endure before the fantasy fully collapses.They barricaded the protesters out of Venice, shutting down dissent with walls and security.Me? I got blocked on Instagram. Turns out the easiest way to silence a critic in 2025 is just one click away."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Legalized Occupation: Dissecting Israel’s Plan to Seize Gaza",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/legalized-occupation-dissecting-israels-plan-to-seize-gaza",
"date" : "2025-08-09 10:13:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Cover-Legalized_Occupation.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Israel’s newly approved plan to “take control” of Gaza City and other key areas of the enclave is being presented to the world as a security imperative. In reality, it is an extension of a long-standing settler-colonial project—another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.",
"content" : "Israel’s newly approved plan to “take control” of Gaza City and other key areas of the enclave is being presented to the world as a security imperative. In reality, it is an extension of a long-standing settler-colonial project—another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.The language of “control,” “buffer zones,” and “security perimeters” is not neutral. It is a calculated rhetorical strategy designed to obscure the material realities of occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing. This is not a temporary maneuver aimed at stability. It is the consolidation of power through the seizure of land, the dismantling of Palestinian civil society, and the deepening of Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe—all in violation of international law.The Political Calculus Behind the OperationTo understand the decision, we must first acknowledge its political function for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Facing mounting domestic discontent, the collapse of public trust, and arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for war crimes, Netanyahu is cornered. His far-right coalition partners demand an uncompromising expansionist agenda, and his own political survival depends on delivering it.Occupation has always been a cornerstone of this political project. By launching a military campaign to seize Gaza’s largest urban center, Netanyahu signals strength to his base while sidestepping accountability for the escalating humanitarian disaster. That disaster is not collateral damage—it is a form of collective punishment meant to force submission. It is also a bargaining chip: an occupied, starved, and displaced population is easier to control and harder to resist.A Continuation of the NakbaThis plan is not an anomaly; it is the latest manifestation of a decades-long pattern. Since the Nakba of 1948, the forced displacement of Palestinians and the destruction of their communities have been central tools of state policy. In Gaza today, we see the same logic: empty the land of its people, destroy the infrastructure of life, and claim it under the guise of security.International law is explicit: annexation through military force is illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment and the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. Yet, as with the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has consistently acted with impunity—shielded by the political, financial, and military backing of powerful allies.The Humanitarian FrontGaza has already been described by UN officials as a “graveyard for children.” The enclave’s population has endured a near-total blockade for 18 years, compounded by repeated bombardments that have destroyed hospitals, schools, and basic infrastructure. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced since the start of this latest escalation. Food insecurity is at catastrophic levels; medical supplies are almost nonexistent.Israel’s seizure of Gaza City—home to hundreds of thousands—will further collapse what remains of civilian life. Humanitarian organizations warn that the move will trigger mass displacement, deepen famine, and cut off the few remaining supply routes. These are not accidental outcomes. They are part of a strategy that weaponizes deprivation as a means of political control.Narrative as a BattlefieldThe battle over Gaza is not only military—it is discursive. The words chosen by political leaders and media outlets shape how the world understands, or misunderstands, what is unfolding. In Netanyahu’s framing, Israel is not occupying Gaza; it is “liberating” it from Hamas. In this telling, Palestinian civilians become invisible, reduced to collateral casualties in a counterterrorism campaign.This is why reframing is crucial. We must reject the sanitized vocabulary of “security zones” and “temporary control” and speak plainly: this is occupation, annexation, and the forcible seizure of Palestinian land. It is not liberation, it is domination. And it is not about peace, it is about power.Global ConnectionsIsrael’s actions in Gaza are not isolated from broader global struggles. From the forced removal of Indigenous peoples in North America to the apartheid regime in South Africa, the tactics of dispossession, militarization, and narrative control follow a familiar pattern. This is why solidarity movements around the world—led by Indigenous, Black, and other colonized peoples—see their own struggles reflected in Palestine’s.The link is not merely symbolic. Israel’s military technology, surveillance systems, and counterinsurgency tactics are exported globally, often marketed as “field-tested” in Gaza and the West Bank. These technologies underpin policing, border control, and repression from Ferguson to Kashmir. In this way, Gaza is both a site of profound local suffering and a laboratory for global authoritarianism.Discrediting the PlanIf the goal is to discredit this plan in the eyes of the international public, the strategy must be twofold: expose contradictions and center Palestinian agency.Expose contradictionsNetanyahu insists Israel does not seek to govern Gaza permanently, yet the seizure of land, establishment of military perimeters, and destruction of civilian infrastructure point toward long-term control.Israel claims to act in self-defense, yet the scale and method of its campaign far exceed any proportional response under international law.Center Palestinian agencyElevate Palestinian voices—journalists, doctors, teachers—who are documenting life under siege.Highlight grassroots forms of resilience and resistance that defy the portrayal of Palestinians as passive victims or inevitable threats.Name the enablersIdentify the governments, corporations, and financial institutions providing material or diplomatic cover for the occupation.Show how this complicity undermines their stated commitments to human rights and international law.Connect to global strugglesFrame Gaza as part of a worldwide resistance to settler colonialism, authoritarianism, and militarized capitalism.Build coalitions across movements to break the isolation that occupation depends upon.Everything Is PoliticalFrom a political-analyst perspective, the key insight is that this is not simply a geopolitical crisis—it is a crisis of narrative. If we accept the occupying power’s framing, we have already conceded the first battle. That is why the work of reframing—naming what is happening, connecting it to historical patterns, and centering the perspectives of the colonized—is not ancillary to the struggle; it is the struggle.In the end, Israel’s plan to seize Gaza is not about security—it is about sovereignty. Not Palestinian sovereignty, but the sovereignty of a state built on the denial of another people’s right to exist on their land. That is the truth the world must see clearly, and that is the truth we must continue to tell, relentlessly, until occupation becomes not a political fact but a historical memory."
}
,
{
"title" : "Ziad Rahbani and the Art of Creative Rebellion",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ziad-rahbani-creative-rebellion",
"date" : "2025-07-28 07:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_for-EIP-ziad-rahbani.jpg",
"excerpt" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.",
"content" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.Ziad Rahbani’s passing marks more than the end of a brilliant life—it marks the closing of a chapter in the cultural history of our region. His funeral wasn’t just a ceremony, it was a collective reckoning; crowds following his exit from the hospital to the cemetery. The streets knew what many governments tried to forget: that he gave voice to the people’s truths, to our frustrations, our absurdities, our grief, and our undying hope for justice. Yet he died as an unsung hero.Born into a family that shaped the musical soul of Lebanon, Ziad could have taken the easy path of replication. Instead, he shattered the mold. From his early plays like Sahriyye and Nazl el-Surour, he upended the elitism of classical Arabic theatre by placing the working class, the absurdity of war, and the contradictions of society at the center of his work. He spoke like the people spoke. He made art in the language of the taxi driver, the student, the mother waiting for news of her son.In his film work Film Ameriki Tawil, Ziad used satire not only as critique, but as rebellion. He exposed the rot of sectarian politics in Lebanon with surgical precision, never sparing anyone, including the leftist circles he moved in. He saw clearly: that political purity was a myth, and liberation required uncomfortable truths. His work, deeply rooted in class consciousness, refused to glorify any side of a war that tore his country apart.And yet, Ziad Rahbani never lost his clarity on Palestine. While others wavered, diluted their positions, or folded into diplomacy, Ziad remained steadfast. His support for the Palestinian struggle was not an aesthetic position—it was a political and ethical commitment. And he did so not as an outsider or savior, but as someone who understood that our futures are intertwined. That the liberation of Palestine is integral to the liberation of Lebanon. That anti-sectarianism and anti-Zionism are not contradictions, but extensions of each other.He brought jazz into Arabic music not as a novelty, but as a defiant act of cultural fusion—proof that our identities are not fixed, but fluid, diasporic, ever-evolving. He blurred the lines between Western musical forms and Arabic lyricism with intention, not mimicry. His collaborations with his mother, the legendary Fairuz, carried the weight of generational dialogue, but his own voice always broke through—wry, melancholic, grounded in the everyday.Ziad taught us that being a revolutionary doesn’t require a uniform or a slogan. It requires listening. It requires holding complexity, laughing in the face of despair, and making room for joy even when the world is on fire. He reminded us that culture is the deepest infrastructure of any resistance movement. He refused to be sanitized, censored, or simplified.As we mourn him, we also inherit his clarity. For artists, for organizers, for thinkers: Ziad Rahbani gave us a blueprint. Create without permission. Tell the truth. Fight for Palestine without compromising your own roots. And never forget that the people will always hear what is real.He was, and will always be, a compass for creative rebellion."
}
,
{
"title" : "Saul Williams: Nothing is Just a Song",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Collis Browne",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/saul-williams-interview",
"date" : "2025-07-21 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_SaulWilliams_Shot_7_0218.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.",
"content" : "Collis Browne: Is all music and art really political?Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.Even now, we are reading the writings of Palestinian poets in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention those who are part of the diaspora, who are charting their feelings and intimate experiences while living through a genocide. These works of art are all politically charged because they are charged with a reality that is fully suppressed by oppressive networks and powers that control them.Shakespeare’s work was always political. He found a way to speak about power to the face of power, knowing they would be in the audience. But also found a way to play with and talk to the “groundlings,” the common people who were in the audience as well.Collis Browne: Was there a moment when you realized that your music could be used as a tool of resistance?Saul Williams: Yeah, I was in third grade, about eight or nine years old. I had been cast in a play in my elementary school. I loved the process of not only performing, but of sitting around the table and breaking down what the language meant and what the objective and the psychology of the character was, and what that meant during the time it was written. I came home and told my parents that I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. My father had the typical response: “I’ll support you as an actor if you get a law degree.” My mother responded by saying, “You should do your next school report on Paul Robeson, he was an actor and a lawyer.”So I did my next school report on Paul Robeson. And what I discovered was that here was an African American man, born in 1898, who had come to an early realization as an actor that the messages of the films he was being cast in—and he was a huge star—went against his own beliefs, his own anti-colonial and anti-imperial beliefs. In the 1930s, he started talking about why we needed to invest in independent cinema. In 1949, during the McCarthy era, he had his passport taken from him so he could no longer travel outside of the US, because he refused to acknowledge that the enemies of the US were his enemies as well. He felt there was no reason Black people should be signing up to fight for the US Empire when they were going home and getting lynched.In 1951, he presented a mandate to the UN called “We Charge Genocide.” In it he charged the US Government with the genocide of African Americans because of the white mobs who were lynching Black Americans on a regular basis. [Editor’s note: the petition charges the US Government with genocide through the endorsement of both racism and “monopoly capitalism,” without which “the persistent, constant, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide would be impossible.”] When Robeson met with President Truman, Truman said, “I’d like to respond, but there’s an election coming up, so I have to be careful.”Paul Robeson sang songs of working-class people, songs that trade unionists sang, songs that miners sang, songs that all types of workers sang across the world. He identified with the workers and with the working class, regardless of his fame. He was ridiculed by the American Government and even had his passport revoked for his activism. At that early age, I learned that you could sing songs that could get you labeled as an enemy of the state.I grew up in Newburgh, New York, which is about an hour upstate from New York City. One of my neighbors would often come sing at my father’s church. At the time, I did not understand why my dad would allow this white guy with his guitar or banjo to come sing at our church when we had an amazing gospel choir. I couldn’t understand why we were singing these school songs with this dude. When I finally asked my parents, they said, “You have to understand that Pete—they were talking about Pete Seeger—is responsible for popularizing some of the songs you sing in school.” He wrote songs like “If I Had a Hammer,” and he too was blacklisted by the US government because of the songs he chose to sing and the people he chose to sing them for, and the people he chose to sing them with. I learned at a very early age that music and art were full of politics. Enough politics to get you labeled as the enemy of the state. Enough politics to get your passport taken, or to be imprisoned.I was also learning about my parents’ peers, artists whom they loved and adored. Artists like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, all from the Black Arts Movement. Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka made a statement when they started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem that said essentially that all art should serve a function, and that function should be to liberate Black minds.It is from that movement that hip-hop was born. I was lucky enough to witness the birth of hip-hop. At first, it was playful, it was fun, but by the mid to late 1980s, it began finding its voice with groups like Public Enemy, KRS-One, Queen Latifa, Rakim, and the Jungle Brothers. These are groups that started using and expressing Black Liberation politics in the music, which uplifted it, made it sound better, and made it hit harder. The first gangster rap was that… when it was gangster, when it was directly challenging the country it was being born in.As a teenager, I identified as a rapper and an actor. I would argue with school kids who insisted, “It’s not even music. They’re just talking.” I would have to defend hip-hop as music, sometimes even to my parents, who found the language crass. But when I played artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy for my parents, they said, “Oh, I see what they’re doing here.”When Public Enemy rapped, “Elvis was a hero to most, But he never meant shit to me you see, Straight up racist that sucker was, Simple and plain, Motherfuck him and John Wayne, ‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped, Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” my parents were like Amen. They understood. They understood why I needed to blast that music in my room 24/7. They understood.When the music spoke to me in that way, suddenly I could pull off moves on the dance floor like doing a flip that I couldn’t do before. That’s the power of music. That’s power embedded in music. That’s why Fela Kuti said that music is the weapon of the future. And, of course, there’s Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. What’s Billie Holiday’s most memorable song? “Strange Fruit.” That voice connected, was speaking directly to the times she was living in. It transcended the times, where to this day, when you hear this song and you understand that the “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees are Black people who have been lynched, you understand how the power of the voice, when you connect it to something that is charged with the reality of the times, takes on a greater shape.Collis Browne: Public Enemy broke open so much. I grew up in Toronto, in a mostly white community, but I was into some of the bigger American hip-hop acts who were coming out. Public Enemy rose to a new level. Before them, we were only connecting with punk and hardcore music as the music of rebellion.Saul Williams: Public Enemy laid down the groundwork for what hip-hop is: “the voice of the voiceless.” It was only after Public Enemy that you saw the emergence of huge groups in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, and across the world. There were big acts before them. Run DMC, for instance, but when Public Enemy came out, marginalized groups heard their music and said, “That’s for us. Yes, that’s for us.” It was immediately understood as music of resistance.Collis Browne: What have you seen or listened to out in the world that has a clear political goal, but has been appropriated and watered down?Saul Williams: We can stay on Public Enemy for that. Under Secretary Blinken, Chuck D became a US Global Music Ambassador during the genocide in Gaza. There are photos of him standing beside Secretary Blinken, accepting that role, while understanding that the US has always used music as a cultural propaganda tool to express soft power. I remember learning about how the US uses this “soft power” when I was working in the mid-2000s with a Swiss composer, who has now passed, named Thomas Kessler. He wrote a symphony based on one of my books, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and we were performing it with the Cologne, Germany symphony orchestra, when I heard from the head of the orchestra that, in fact, their main financier was the US Government through the CIA.During the Cold War, it was crucial for the American Government to put money into the arts throughout Western Europe to try to express this idea of “freedom,” as opposed to what was happening in the Eastern (Communist) Bloc. So it was a long time between when the US Government started enlisting musicians and other artists in their propaganda campaigns and when I encountered this information.There’s a documentary called Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which talks about how the US Government used (uses) music and musicians to co-opt movements and propagate the idea of American freedom and democracy outside the US in the hope of winning over the citizens of other countries without them even realizing that so much of that art is there to question the system itself, not to celebrate it. Unfortunately, there are situations in which an artist’s work is co-opted to be used as propaganda, and the artist buys into it. They become indoctrinated, and you realize that we’re all susceptible to the possibility of taking that bait."
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