Before It Becomes History.
What does political change look like before we recognise it as history?

ISSUE 8 / ARTS & CULTURE

From behind the bar of a small music venue, The Memo’s new Culture Editor looks at the spaces  where people gather, the artists trying to survive economic precarity, and the role culture  plays in giving a generation’s frustrations somewhere to go. 

There is a strange disconnect between studying political change and living through it. In a university classroom, change can appear remarkably coherent. Political systems weaken,  economic conditions deteriorate, public dissatisfaction grows and social movements emerge. Decades of uncertainty can be condensed into a lecture, allowing us to look backwards and identify the moment when one political era ended and another began.  

Living through those periods is considerably less straightforward.

Outside the classroom, political change rarely announces itself as history. It looks more like rising rent, insecure work, abandoned ambitions and conversations about whether buying a house will ever be realistic. It appears in the increasingly ordinary compromises people make to remain financially afloat.

I hear those conversations constantly working behind the bar.

Hospitality offers an unusual vantage point from which to observe the political mood of a city. People arrive after work and talk about their jobs, their rent, their relationships and the futures they are trying to build. Few of these conversations would ordinarily be described as political, yet politics sits underneath almost all of them.

A musician considering abandoning their career because they cannot afford to continue is confronting the economics of cultural production. A worker spending most of their income on basic expenses is experiencing decisions about wages, taxation, housing and public services long before those issues become campaign slogans.

The theory has a habit of following you out of the classroom. It is particularly difficult to ignore in a small music venue, where the pressures shaping contemporary life collide with something much harder to quantify: the persistent desire to create anyway.

I did not expect to find much political significance in returning to hospitality. After years of working in larger venues, I had come to associate the industry with precisely the opposite. Hospitality can reduce people to units of labour so efficiently. Workers are rostered according to demand, expected to perform friendliness regardless of how they are treated, and relied upon to provide the emotional labour required to make somebody else's evening enjoyable.

Small venues are not immune from the economic realities of the industry. But working in one has made me reconsider what hospitality can provide when it functions not simply as a service, but as infrastructure for a community.

These spaces are easily overlooked. They are not Parliament nor campaign offices. They do not look like places where political identities are formed, and most people entering them are not consciously participating in anything resembling civic engagement

Yet communities have never been built exclusively through formal institutions.

They are built in the places where people return to one another. Bars and libraries, community halls and sports clubs, music venues and neighbourhood institutions. Places where strangers become familiar faces, and familiar faces can, eventually, become community.

Their value lies partly in how little they demand of us. You do not need an invitation, an occasion, or even a particularly good reason to be there. In lives increasingly organised around private homes, individual routines and digital connection, these spaces offer something deceptively simple and increasingly scarce. Somewhere to exist alongside other people.

For musicians and artists, those spaces serve another function. They provide somewhere for culture to actually happen and that function is becoming so much harder to sustain.

We frequently talk about the importance of art while maintaining economic conditions that make producing it almost too difficult. The contradiction is especially visible at the local level, where creative work depends not only on talent but on time, money, physical space and the willingness to tolerate financial uncertainty.

Watching musicians perform makes that invisible economy difficult to ignore. An audience encounters the moment when all of that labour becomes visible. Perhaps 30 minutes beneath stage lights. What disappears behind those 30 minutes are the years spent learning an instrument, the rehearsals after work, the equipment and transport, the songwriting and promotion, and the countless unpaid hours required simply to arrive on stage.

There is a persistent cultural mythology that talent eventually finds an audience. If somebody is sufficiently gifted and sufficiently committed, we like to believe success will follow.

That is such an appealing story, but it is also so deeply incomplete.

Talent does not exist independently of material circumstances. And an artist's ability to continue creating does depend on whether they can afford the time required to do so. It depends on the access to equipment and venues, on whether they have professional networks, but it is also about their income, housing stability and, crucially, whether failure is financially survivable.

The question then, is not asking whether a society can produce talented people. Every society does.

The more revealing question is who can afford to remain an artist long enough for their talent to be noticed?

The romantic image of the struggling artist has a way of obscuring this reality. Precarity is treated as almost intrinsic to creative life, an unfortunate but character-building period preceding eventual success. 

But for so many people, there is no eventual success. There is simply a point at which rent, food and employment have to take priority.

When that happens, the loss is usually understood as an individual one. Someone gets a more stable job, or a band stops performing. The venue closes and an artist decides there is no longer enough time.

Collectively, however, those decisions determine whose stories a society gets to hear.

In Ōtautahi, the closure of Flux made that loss unusually tangible. It was a place to dance, but it was also a part of the infrastructure of a local culture. A place where DJs could play, promoters could take risks, friendships could form, and people could encounter one another through music.

When spaces like these disappear, the community doesn’t just disappear with them. Instead, people begin searching for somewhere else to go.

Perhaps that is why the warehouse raves that continue to appear around the city feel so significant. There is something defiant in taking an otherwise ordinary space and, for a night, turning it into somewhere people can gather, dance and lose themselves in something collective.

While they are no replacement for permanent venues, nor do they resolve the conditions that made those venues difficult to sustain in the first place, they do demonstrate the persistence of the need those venues fulfilled. Take away the dance floor and people will start looking for another room in which to build one.

Culture does more than entertain us. It provides a language through which people interpret the periods they are living through.

That role becomes a lot more visible during periods of political uncertainty. Election years encourage a very narrow understanding of politics. Attention shifts toward polls, party leaders, campaign announcements and the contest over who will form the next government. Those institutions matter, of course they do, but elections also expose something less easily measured. The stories people are telling themselves about why their lives feel the way they do. 

Across different political positions, there is a growing sense that something is not working, the disagreement concerns what has gone wrong, who is responsible and what should come next.

But before those feelings become coherent political demands, they often emerge culturally. Music has long performed this function. Working-class movements, anti-war campaigns, civil-rights struggles and protest movements have all produced songs because political participation is not just an intellectual exercise.

People don’t often become politically engaged because they have encountered the perfect policy argument. They respond to anger and grief, solidarity and belonging, fear and hope. Music can transform those emotions from private experiences into collective ones.

That is part of what makes the renewed appeal of folk music, and of storytelling grounded in ordinary life, so interesting. Folk has long carried the experiences that official histories struggle to hold. Work and migration, poverty and conflict, love, loss, and resistance.

These songs become records of how history felt to the people living through it, rather than simply accounts of what happened. A song does not need to present a political programme to perform a political function. Sometimes documenting what life feels like is enough.

We have grown up watching wars unfold in real time, economies fracture, temperatures rise, and political emergencies arrive with such regularity that the language of the unprecedented has itself begun to feel routine.

There is a danger in living with that much crisis for that long. Constant exposure does not necessarily produce greater political engagement; sometimes it produces exhaustion. When every problem is structural, every emergency global and all of the solutions impossibly large, caring can begin to feel like assuming responsibility for circumstances an individual has almost no power to change.

Detachment becomes less an expression of apathy than a way of making an overwhelming world temporarily manageable. Culture cannot resolve those crises. A song will not make housing affordable, and a local venue cannot reverse economic inequality. Creativity cannot substitute organising, public investment, democratic participation or structural reform.

But culture can do something that politics depends upon; it can give dissatisfaction a language. It can make private frustrations recognisable to other people and allow us to imagine that the conditions producing them are neither inevitable nor permanent.

Political movements require people to imagine circumstances different from those they currently experience. Before an alternative can become something concrete, somebody has to believe that the existing arrangement can, and should, be changed. That is one of culture's most important political functions: it expands the boundaries of what people are capable of imagining.

It can also determine where dissatisfaction is directed. Periods of instability don’t automatically produce progressive change. Economic insecurity and political disillusionment can generate solidarity, but they can also generate resentment. When people know that something is wrong but lack a convincing explanation for why, there will always be political actors prepared to offer them one and in return, there will be somebody to blame for it.

The struggle over political change is therefore partly a struggle over stories. Whose experiences are recognised, whose explanations become credible and what kinds of futures are believed to be possible. This is why the survival of small cultural spaces matters.

Their importance should not be romanticised. A struggling music venue is not a revolutionary institution simply because somebody plays a protest song inside it, but neither should these places be dismissed as economically marginal forms of entertainment.

They are part of the social infrastructure through which communities encounter one another and  culture is produced outside the institutions powerful enough to guarantee their own survival.

When those spaces disappear, something more than a business is lost. So too is a stage, an audience, a meeting place and one of the relatively few environments in which emerging artists can test whether something they created alone can mean something to somebody else.

Working behind a bar has made this so unexpectedly tangible to me. I still spend my days studying political systems, democratic institutions and the forces capable of changing them. But increasingly, I am interested in what happens before change becomes legible enough to appear in textbooks. 

I do not know what will happen to the musicians I watch perform. Some may build careers. Others will eventually decide that creating music alongside rent, employment and everything else adulthood demands is no longer sustainable. Some of the best songs written in this city may never travel beyond the rooms in which they were first performed. That should concern us.

A society's culture is shaped not only by the people talented enough to create, but by the people afforded enough security to continue creating. And at a moment when so many people are questioning the political and economic assumptions they inherited, we should pay attention to the places where different possibilities are already being imagined. 

Political change does not always begin with a manifesto. Sometimes it begins much less dramatically. With a room full of people, a small stage and someone deciding that what they have experienced is worth turning into a song.