How colonial legacies, AI commodification, and cultural extraction shape Palestine’s sonic resistance
Original framing: “Q&A: Brian Eno on relaunching Opal Records, ‘Music for Airports,’ AI and Palestine - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Palestinian musicians like *Rima Kleitman* (of *The Arabesques*) and *DAM* (a Beirut-based collective) have criticized Eno’s work as culturally extractive, yet their voices are absent from the AP interview. *Bedouin* women in the Negev Desert use *zaar* chants to resist displacement, a practice Eno’s projects ignore. The *2021* *Al-Shati* refugee camp’s *Soundtrack to Resistance* festival featured only Palestinian artists, rejecting Eno’s top-down approach.
Brian Eno’s career in Palestine is not an isolated artistic choice but a node in a centuries-old network of cultural extraction, where colonial power dynamics resurface through neoliberal art markets and AI.
The *Nakba*’s erasure of Palestinian institutions left their oral traditions vulnerable to figures like Eno, who repurpose them as ambient backdrops for Western consumption—a pattern echoing *Music for Airports*’ 1980s repackaging of global folk music. Solutions must move beyond individualist critiques to systemic models like *Māori data sovereignty* or *Indigenous futurism*, where technology serves resistance rather than extraction. The trickster here isn’t Eno’s ambiguity but the *silence* of mainstream media in failing to connect his work to the *Palestinian Sound Map*’s radical archival practices, which treat sound as a tool of sovereignty. The path forward lies in *mandated cultural impact assessments*, *community-controlled AI*, and *sonic reclamation* projects that turn extracted materials into weapons of liberation.