Pitchfork: Desaparecidos, Cursive Join Plea For Peace Tour

Desaparecidos, Cursive Join Plea For Peace Tour
Iraqi insurgency crumbles following announcement; Israelis announce "open house" tours of holy land

[Posted Tuesday, December 9th, 2003 06:00:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

It's time to stock up on little white candles and peace-sign medallions, for Saddle Creek has announced that Desaparecidos have signed on to the 2004 Plea for Peace tour, along with Cursive and Mike Park. Let's take a moment to inspect the principals.

PLEA FOR PEACE TOUR: The Plea for Peace Tour was initiated in 1999 by the Plea for Peace Foundation, a 501C non-profit helmed by Asian Man Records founder Mike Park. The Foundation is dedicated to "promote the ideas of peace through the power of music." To date, they've curated three U.S. benefit tours, two Japanese tours, and numerous compilations, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for various charities.

Their ultimate goal (besides, you know, peace) is to open a year-round teen center in Northern California's Bay Area. The 2004 tour, which will range from April to June (venues and dates currently unspecified, although in the interest of supporting media diversity, no ClearChannel venues will appear on the schedule) and focus on raising voter awareness and participation. While it's clear that Plea for Peace is firmly anti-Bush, the tour will attempt to take a nonpartisan stance and focus on the importance of voting itself, and will give voters in each state the opportunity to register with the party of their choice. Each band will donate a tithe (that's ten percent, heathen) of their earnings to charitable organizations.

While the brainwashed Pitchfork reporter instinctually longs to tear into the absurdity of lovelorn, navel-gazing emo bands taking up the altruistic banner of world peace, this is an endeavor wholly worthy of praise, and in truth, the prevalent cultural fear of hypocrisy and cliche from which the desire to cynically illuminate this perceived absurdity arises is exactly the sort of cultural force that political music needs to subvert. Too good a cause to take the piss, even if it means forgoing some funny copy and exposing you to a little bit of poisonous earnestness.

MIKE PARK: Founder of the Plea for Peace Foundation and Asian Man Records, ex-member of Skankin' Pickle and currently of The Chinkees and the B. Lee Band and a solo artist, the man seems to have a strange predilection for racial stereotypes for someone so dedicated to equality-- though he is, of course, Korean (which, according to current cultural values, transmutes any deployment of Asian racial slurs into strident political commentary). Park began Asian Man records in his parents garage, and now the label boasts over 50 bands (including Alkaline Trio and Less Than Jake) and over 500,000 units moved. The Plea for Peace tour will find him showcasing his solo material.

DESAPARECIDOS: This is Conor Oberst's "other" band, the one where he gets all political and stuff. Their name refers to the thousands of Argentines who were abducted, tortured and killed by the military junta that escalated Argentina's "dirty war" of 1976-1983. With Desaparecidos, Oberst surgically removes the stool from his ass (and I mean the kind of stool he sits on as Bright Eyes), jumps around with an electric guitar, and instead of singing about how bad he feels when girls are mean to the boys who love them and how damn depressing depression can be, he waxes Holden Caulfield-esquely about how bad all the problems in the world make him feel and how damn political politics can be. Consumer culture, globalization and its malcontents, war, American imperialism are all, apparently, bad (okay, just a little piss-taking for form's sake, but well-intentioned). Also features Denver Dalley of the Jade Tree electro-poppers Statistics.

CURSIVE: Saddle Creek artists who play like a collabo between The Cure and Shudder to Think, with songs ghostwritten by John Barth. You know this; we're just establishing the Dramatis Personae. Wildly apolitical (musically if not ideologically), it's unclear how Cursive's songs about love gone stinky and metamusical smoke and mirrors tricks contribute to the overarching cause of peace-- overtly, at least. In truth, proselytizing to people that they shouldn't hit one another is probably less effective in creating a sense of unity than songs that remind us of our shared and universal experience (in this case, heartache and the fear that art is completely meaningless). Peace through solipsism? It could happen.