Ice Cream Wars, Redux
Ginger posted an article on Ben & Jerry’s published statement supporting Unilever’s decision to cease ice cream operations in the West Bank, and the pushback on that statement by Bret Stephens who attacked it as being sanctimonious and a scam. This begs a question for Ginger: what at all does any discussion about ice cream, corporate behavior, the woke or unwoke corporate culture, the power of customers and stakeholders to affect corporate behavior have to do with music and the arts?
Thank you for your question.
Ginger is an arts funding and empowerment platform. (Gingerconnect.com) The “and” is important. Ginger views arts and empowerment as siblings, connected through blood. The arts advances empowerment because the function of the arts has always been to help us comprehend our world, to control it, and ultimately to celebrate it. It is through the arts that we see – literally. Books, music, dance, paint – tools of discovery and enlightenment. It is through knowledge that we can take stock, judge and act, and music and the arts provides us with knowledge - unfiltered, without cynicism, bubbling up from the roots of who we are as a people, what we believe in and how we feel.
Dylan’s The Times They Are A’Changing and the Staple Singers’ I’ll Take You There reduced the ideas and ideals of the Civil Rights Movement to song, and inspired thousands to take action. Gerald Ford’s Drop Dead comment to New York in the 1970’s coincided with a punk rock scene emerging from Greenwich Village dives upon our American consciousness. The rich decadence of the Jazz Age can still be heard in the music of that time and in the words of The Great Gatsby. For most of his working life Springsteen has explored the hollowed-out dreams of common people, desperate, struggling for redemption in a world with little to offer. It is through these artists and others like them that we came to understand who we are and what we need. Once we understand than we can judge our world and we can make demands upon it.
Music and the arts have always played a key role in how we evaluate our world and the tomorrow that we hope to experience. We need music and the arts, it is critical, but musicians and artists are in financial need, hanging on by their fingernails. We think those with money should support music and the arts, and companies have money, lots of it. Since they are already spending this money on you in the form of influencer, advertising and marketing spending, we at Ginger think they should spend this money for you, directed towards your favorite artists. We will amplify the voices of our participating artists, we will dissect and deconstruct what is produced and voiced, and we will all have a better handle on what all of us, every person on the street, thinks about their today and their tomorrow, and like it or not that tomorrow goes hat in hand with any discussion about ice cream, corporate behavior, the woke or unwoke corporate culture, climate change, racial and sexual equality, privacy, and the power of customers and stakeholders to affect corporate behavior, and towards what ends. Music, arts and empowerment – connected through blood.
