Today I went to the free Cobra Starship concert in honor of my middle school obsession with the band (it was middle school don’t judge!). Aside from it being a terrible concert and a general waste of time (especially considering the rough draft I had yet to write), I found the premise of the concert interesting.
Like most free concerts, this show was funded by an organization backing a cause; namely, it was funded by the organization “the truth” which aims to educate teenagers and college students on the dangers of tobacco usage.
Now this I have no issue with – I would agree that it’s good to inform teens of the negative health effects of tobacco. What I did have an issue with was how they went about this.
If you go to the organization’s website (thetruth.com), you will find that they clearly state multiple times that their goal is not to tell kids not to smoke. They claim they are not against smokers, that they merely want the facts to be clear and on the table.
However, as the concert progressed, I realized that there was considerably more to it than that. During what I can’t help but assume were purposefully long breaks between acts (I attend a lot of concerts – these breaks were unnecessary), a series of very strange and quite honestly disturbing images played on the big screens on either side of the stage, all of which were aimed in some way at building a very dark and negative view of the tobacco industry.
But I’m not talking the typical “your lungs are filled with tar” images – these were much stranger and more random than that. At one point, there was a frog’s head on human legs bouncing up and down, with a speech bubble above it giving some fact about how ammonia is used to clean toilets and also used in cigarettes. And every piece of information was delivered in an equally random and disturbing manner.
Between facts about tobacco usage, however, were images clearly condemning tobacco usage. The word “SCUM” flashed across the screen over top of a psychedelic background reminiscent of the 60’s or 70’s. Sculls were a ubiquitous component of every scene. And every few minutes a short clip of demented pseudo-humans killing people and stuffing them in body bags would run.
All in all, I found the propaganda more than a little disturbing and, considering their strong assurance that they were not “anti smoking” just “pro facts”, maybe a tad hypocritical…not to mention that I’m sure the members of Cobra Starship all smoke themselves.
I just don’t think that the concert was an effective way to prevent teens from smoking, and I don’t feel dramatically more informed on the issue by any means. It was way too weird and extreme to be effective – I was more concerned with why a demented chicken head had a human body than what that demented chicken head was supposed to be saying.
This is one campaign that just really failed to click with its audience. Better luck next time, I suppose.