Celanthropy, music therapy and ‘big-citizen’ Samaritans

Abstract

Music therapy is a vigorous, well-established field of theory and practice. The attribution of healing power to music goes a long way back. However, since Live Aid (1985) a new dimension of music therapy has emerged. This pertains to the role played by unqualified music superstars who act as activists and diplomats providing music therapy for mankind. World-renowned celebrities like Sir Bob Geldof, Bono, Sting, Michael Stipe and Madonna transfer the kudos they have won in the field of popular entertainment to produce stateless solutions to global incidents and emergencies, and wider questions of inequality, hunger and injustice. They act as self-appointed global ‘big citizens’. They are unelected and mostly accountable. Yet they have the ear of many elected world leaders and the widespread support of the public. This aggregate tendency is known by the name of celanthropy. It represents a remarkable switch in attention capital from state departments of health, education and foreign aid to celebrity advocates and campaigners. The celebrity big citizen is now the focal point of what might be termed stateless solutions to many global ills. This paper examines the rise of this new relationship between celanthropy and music therapy. It demonstrates the contradictions involved, not least in the matter of trying to live with capitalism, rather than to change the way in which it works as a system of organised inequality and sanctioned injustice.

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