In recent days, a lineup announcement for the 2021 edition of the Saudi Arabian festival MDLBeast Soundstorm has spurred criticism in corners of the dance music world. The event plans to feature dozens of international DJs, with EDM megastars like David Guetta, Steve Aoki and The Chainsmokers slated alongside popular names in techno and house. Notable acts include Jeff Mills, Nina Kraviz, Sven Väth, Solomun, Maceo Plex, Amelie Lens, Butch, Charlotte De Witte and Thomas Melchior.

In 2019, Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, hosted the inaugural MDLBeast, touted as the country's "first-ever electronic music festival." With a lineup of dance music stars, the event drew hundreds of thousands of attendees over three days and managed to avoid much of the industry scrutiny this year's edition has already accrued. It's a good thing more attention is being paid to the role musicians, celebrities and publications can play in "culture-washing" campaigns that launder the domestic and international reputation of violent, regressive and authoritarian regimes like the one that rules the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

While MDLBeast inspires some parallels to the debate over whether it's ethical for international artists to perform in Israel (spiting the longstanding Palestinian request for cultural boycott), a more specific avenue for critique is that the festival is at least partially organized by the Saudi government's General Entertainment Authority. Though not supplied on the festival's website, this information has been available since 2019 and was recently referenced by the techno DJ Dave Clarke in a since deleted Facebook post.

"It didn't take long to research these things," he posted, "everyone has to be answerable to themselves, but who here would play an event funded by the Tories for example? Anyone up for a Brexit Festival?"

Clarke points out the hypocrisy of taking support and payment from a repressive ruling class while claiming one's values differ drastically from theirs. His examples make for an apt, perhaps even mild, comparison when equipped with some background on the injustices Saudi Arabia's government perpetrates and how cultural events like MDLBeast represent explicit policy goals of the regime––rendering international musicians small cogs in service of those goals. Saudi Arabia's recent acquisition of Newcastle United F.C. falls under a similar umbrella. Purchased via the Kingdom's Public Investment Fund, a body chaired by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the English football club's fans are largely welcoming the news thanks to the extraordinarily deep pockets of the team’s new owner.

Perhaps in another world, a festival like MDLBeast could be seen as marking progress ushered in by four years of bin Salman's reforms. Before MBS consolidated power in 2017, Saudi Arabia's official interpretation of Islamic law meant that women couldn't drive cars, attend sporting events, dance in public or travel without a male guardian––under legal threat of arrest, lashings and death. The state of women's rights (and the rights of gay people and general ideological freedom) in 2021 is still dire, but a presumptive ruler enacting any liberalizing reforms was a welcome development in the eyes of the international community. And in 2019, there was indeed something astonishing in seeing Saudi women and men dancing side by side as Fisher played "Losing It" at MDLBeast just a couple years after those reforms hit the books.

But in the real world, a few long-overdue reforms hardly make up for the startling evil committed in recent years by the Saudi regime, MBS and their Western enablers. Most significantly, Saudi Arabia is directly responsible for currently the worst humanitarian crisis in the world: the situation in Yemen. In 2015, after the overthrow of Yemen's pro-Saudi government by rebels, Saudi Arabia intervened in the country's civil war, establishing a years-long land, sea and air blockade that sparked a famine and absolutely devastated a country reliant on imports for 90 percent of its food supply. By the end of 2018, an estimated 85,000 children under five years old had died from starvation in a country with a total population under 30 million.

The Saudis, using planes, bombs, and weapons supplied by the US and UK, also reportedly killed thousands of Yemeni civilians and targeted civilian water supplies with indiscriminate bombing raids, in what many deem war crimes. It should be mentioned that the Yemini rebels, while a small part of the country’s overall population, are likely responsible for war crimes, too. In 2021, the scale of human misery is still difficult to comprehend, with more than five million Yemenis on the brink of famine, according to the World Food Programme.

A more isolated, yet still horrific, display of the Saudi government's depravity came in October 2018 when US resident and Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated inside the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul. A Saudi national whose criticisms of the Kingdom drew the ire of the royal family, Khashoggi was killed by Saudi operatives who then dismembered his body with a bone saw. American intelligence agencies concluded that the assassination was ordered by MBS himself, given that such a gruesome, extranational act of retribution against a dissident would require his explicit approval.

One year later, MDLBeast launched in Riyadh, welcoming not just international musicians, but also paid actors and influencers, some of whom reportedly received six-figure sums to attend and make posts (festival organizers dispute the exact amount influencers were paid). They geotagged Riyadh and posed on camels and sand dunes. In one of his several social media posts from the weekend, actor Armie Hammer, famous for playing a gay man in the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, gushed about #mdlbeast via Instagram. "What I just witnessed was truly special," he wrote. Though often not enforced in recent years, homosexual behavior is still legally punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.

Putting MDLBeast in the context of MBS's highly publicized cultural goals makes it impossible to regard the festival as an independent endeavor disconnected from the government's ulterior motives. In 2016, as millions of Yemenis faced famine and the Saudi blockade intentionally prevented humanitarian aid from entering their country, MBS announced "Vision 2030," his plan to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil and to become a major tourism destination in the region. He's since opened his usually hermetic country to visitors and earmarked $2.7 billion to spend on entertainment. According to Billboard, the Saudi government is willing to subsidize events by paying musicians up to six times their normal fees, seemingly anticipating possible objections to playing in the country but able to offer enough money to mitigate moral queasiness. With (quite literally) overpaid international DJs posting in-the-booth Instagrams at MDLBeast as if it's no different than a European stop, and with paid influencers playacting Saudi Arabia's chicness as a vacation destination for millions of combined followers, Saudi elites buy a new kind of cosmopolitan ally to help allay criticism and achieve political ends. Western musicians and models get a bag of cash and five-star treatment. The US government gets $350 billion arms deals.

It's helpful to revisit Resident Advisor's 2018 piece "Perspectives On The Cultural Boycott Of Israel," which showed musicians and organizers weighing the merits and consequences of international artists refusing to perform in Israel as protest against the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians. A few important points are raised there that belong in the conversation around MDLBeast. One is a government's ability to leverage art and performance to defang societal and policy critique, presenting a problematic state as "relaxed, liberal, and cultured." A broader theme that comes across is the necessity for artists to delineate the circumstances in which they find it ethical to perform in a given country or space.

For instance, DJs might abhor the criminalization of homosexuality mandated by the Russian government or the abuses of the Georgian state, but could ethically perform at clubs like Клуб or Bassiani, accepting spaces created by people who share the values they profess, bravely existing in opposition to the laws outside their walls. Someone who's disgusted by America’s treatment of migrant children could refuse to perform at a festival sponsored by Amazon Web Services (a company that provides logistics for immigration enforcement agencies), but could ethically play a New York warehouse party where proceeds go to RAICES.

Such nuance doesn't seem applicable to the case of MDLBeast, where the event is sanctioned and cheer-led by an authoritarian regime, with no separation between the values of the space in which artists perform and the values of Saudi leadership. Even if the festival's organizers made efforts to downplay government involvement, or sold artists a convincing vision wherein they're helping manifest a liberalized future despite a violent and intolerant present, the unfortunate reality isn't difficult to ascertain. The festival only exists because of its usefulness to the country's irredeemably compromised ruling faction, perfectly aligning with officially stated reputational and tourism ambitions, and valuable as geopolitical PR fodder.

"In many cases you can think if it is a local promoter trying to get music into a country (no matter what genre, EDM or Business Techno) that they are trying to shape things towards a more positive future no matter the human rights record of that country," Dave Clarke posted in the same Facebook post. "But if the event is funded … by the regime's own money from a government organisation you might think it would be wise to in fact decline."

For some of the MDLBeast performers who've publicly defended their booking, a sincere belief in the power of dance music is a chief justification. Commenting on Clarke's post, Jeff Mills wrote that he was "aware of the human rights issues in SA … But we never know who might be there in the audience, listening and trying to connect with something greater than ourselves! This music needs to be accessible to anyone and everywhere! For those of you who don’t understand, I recommend doing research of how much music has played a role in shaping opinion and even policy." Others perhaps show less of a desire to mediate the ethics of any gig. After her performance at the 2019 edition drew criticism, Peggy Gou told i-D, "It doesn’t matter if it's Israel or North Korea … If there's people who want to hear my music, I will go. I don't give a fuck."

Music's actual capacity to deliver us a more just and loving world, an idea proselytized as loudly today as it was in the halcyon days of Woodstock and '90s rave, should be seriously interrogated as our current decade continues to be shaped by the likes of Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and MBS. It would be nice to believe that, simply by appearing in an oppressive country, artists are doing good, but it's wishful thinking. As Brian Eno said of people who cross the cultural picket line in Israel, "They believe in the power of art to cure everything. I don't."

A lot of money earned in the global entertainment industry, when followed up the ladder, benefits people with bad politics. One of many examples is Coachella, which is put on by Goldenvoice, the company owned by AEG Live, which is owned by conservative billionaire Phillip Anschutz. Relatedly, when the US, UK and France support the Saudi regime militarily, decent citizens should be outraged by their elected officials' complicity in travesties like the famine in Yemen. But to equivocate the flaws of the Western music industry (that welcomes gay people and allows performers unrestricted freedom of expression) and this Saudi event means promulgating a nihilistic worldview where nothing can be deemed less ethical than anything else.

MDLBeast is a government-supported festival in a country where people are imprisoned and killed for voicing discontent with Saudi Arabia's royal family. A place where the term "misogyny" is wholly inadequate in reflecting the state's tolerance for violence and discrimination against women. Where people can legally be executed for homosexuality. Can artists who take a paycheck from these organizers claim to respect the personhood of their queer fans and the queer artists with whom they share stages at countless other events?

If artists were interested in making a more legitimate case for their performances being a force for social good in Saudi Arabia, they could try to collaborate with independent musicians, clubs and organizers more able to (even if subtly) demonstrate oppositional politics, rather than appearing in a state-sponsored tourism initiative that offers scant opportunity to air dissent. Saudi Arabian people deserve to hear electronic music and to experience all kinds of art. But top DJs should know better than to perform in an environment like MDLBeast, which so flagrantly and purposefully divorces dance music from its origins in queer and marginalized communities, and its supposed liberatory values.

Disclosure: In December 2019, RA accepted money to run an advertising campaign for MDLBeast Festival. The full amount was donated to the International Committee of the Red Cross on February 25th, 2020.