[ATTENDED: May 12, 2024] Reverend Bill & the Stop Shopping Choir
I didn’t know there was going to be an opening act for this show until a few days before the event. I was glad that there would be one because Freedom Mortgage Pavilion is a pain in the ass to get into on time.
When we saw Pearl Jam, we missed the opening act entirely because of the poor infrastructure there.
It was even better that the opening act was a band I’d never heard of and didn’t care about.
So who are this Choir? Wikipedia says
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is a radical performance community based in New York City. The Stop Shopping Choir is accompanied by a comic preacher, Reverend Billy, portrayed by performer William (Billy) Talen. The philosophy of the Church of Stop Shopping surrounds the imminent “Shopocalypse”, which assumes the end of humanity will come about through manic consumerism.
The Stop Shopping Choir accompanies Reverend Billy and stages guerrilla theater style actions, singing on the property of the Disney stores, Monsanto facilities, and Trump Tower, among others. They are often considered part of the Culture jamming movement.
The group uses the content from their direct actions to create songs that are performed on concert stages and in cabarets. The director of these shows is church co-founder Savitri D.
The character of Reverend Billy was developed in the early 1990s by actor and playwright, William Talen. His family was Dutch Calvinist. The Reverend Billy character isn’t so much a parody of a preacher, as a preacher motif used to blur the lines between performance and religious experience. “It’s definitely a church service,” Talen explained to Alternet, but, he added, it’s “a political rally, it’s theater, it’s all three, it’s none of them.
I Just Read About That... 