The King Blues: How to play a protest

With police restricting the public's right to march, my band took our sound sytem down to the G20 protest to make people feel like they could dance on the streets again

The King Blues at the G20 protest (Itch is on the left in the red hoodie)
Protest is a democratic right. Yet at last week's G20 protests – which I attended with my band the King Blues – the police made it as difficult as possible to exercise that right. Their intimidation tactics included using FIT photographers to capture images of protesters, showing up in riot gear and penning everyone in for hours without letting people go to the toilet or have water.
In the face of this clampdown on democracy, we wanted people to feel like they could dance on the streets again. That's why we took the King Blues sound system – a PA system on a tiny float wheeled by a rickshaw – down to the Saturday protest. The sound system was inspired by Emma Goldman's quote, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution", and it has seen a fair bit of action in its time.
We weren't officially invited to play by any organisers. We just decided it's as much our march as anyone else's and set up our own space. It's not always easy playing at a protest – the mics cut out and the wind can make it sound haunted. Plus, walking while playing for so long means that an endless amount of things can go wrong. Midway through a speech about how the government cannot silence us anymore, my microphone cut out!
We cycled into the march playing the Dead Kennedys' Holiday in Cambodia at full blast to let people know where the sound was. They quickly gathered around and we set up our instruments – before a police officer threatened us that if we didn't move, he'd move us. Finally we were off and the reaction was amazing. Masses of people dancing around shouting, "The streets are ours!". It truly warmed the heart. We played Don't Let the Bastards Win while walking past the Ritz and Blood On My Hands outside Parliament. It all seemed scarily fitting.


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Theory compelling

Karl Popper was a philosopher of science that was very much interested in this question. He tried to distinguish 'science' from 'pseudoscience', but got more and more dissatisfied with the idea that the empirical method (supporting a theory with observations and experiments) could effectively mark this distinction. He sometimes used the example of astrology “with its stupendous mass of empirical evidence based on observation”, but also nuanced it by stating that “science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth.”
Next to his well-known work on falsification, Popper started to develop alternatives to determine the scientific status or quality of a theory. He wrote the complex yet intriguing sentence “confirmations [of a theory] should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.” (Popper, 1963).

Popper was especially thrilled with the result of Eddington’s eclipse observations, which in 1919 brought the first important confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravitation. It was the surprising consequence of this theory that light should bend in the presence of large, heavy objects (Einstein was apparently willing to drop his theory if this would not be the case). Independent of whether such a prediction turns out to be true or not, Popper considered it an important quality of ‘real science’ to make such ‘risky predictions’. Interesting thought, not?

I still find this an intriguing idea. The notion of ‘risky’ or ‘surprising predictions’ might actually be the beginning of a fruitful alternative to existing model selection techniques, such as goodness-of-fit (which theory predicts the data best) and simplicity (which theory gives the simplest explanation). Also in music cognition measures like goodness-of-fit (r-squared, percentage variance accounted for, and other measures from the experimental psychology toolkit) are often used to confirm a theory. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to think of theories that make surprising predictions. That is, a theory that predicts a yet unknown phenomenon as a consequence of the intrinsic structure of the theory itself. If you know of any, let me know!

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