So much written, but here’s my two cents:
3 musical high points for me, among many:
1. James Brown meets Joss Stone: The night before Live8, two stellar performers involved either directly at Live8 London or heading to the Edinburgh event in a few days time did something we’ll probably never see again: 72-year-old Godfather of Soul Mr James Brown did a duet with 18-year-old Heiress of Soul Ms Joss Stone on The Jonathan Ross Show on the BBC. A joint rendition of “It’s A Man’s World” – defying anything and everything you may have thought about that song before, about old singers, young singers, black singers, white singers. Wow.
2. Sgt. Pepper: at precisely 2PM when, with zero fanfare, blasting out over the crowd you could hear the unmistakable opening 4 electric guitar notes of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (check out the original if these opening “dee-dee-di-deeeeeeee” notes are not immediately popping into your mind)… at which point Sir Paul McCartney, backed by U2, began singing “It was 20 years ago today…” … doubly wondeful as (a) it was the 20th anniversary of Live Aid, and (b) he had never ever performed Sgt Pepper live (complete with horn section etc);
3. We’ll Be Watching You: Sting’s performance of I’ll Be Watching You, with lyrics suitably changed to We’ll Be Watching You… very moving.
And the message? The politics? At the end of the day, I think Live8 was actually a far better idea, by several orders of magnitude, than many smug and cynical critics gave it credit for. These thoughts crystallised in my mind after someone pointed me to a Wall Street Journal commentary on 1st July 2005 by Henryk M Broder entitled Deafining Goodness (that link will, sadly, disappear behind a WSJ paywall). Suffice it to say that Broder dismisses Geldof, Bono, and all Live8 participants as head-in-cloud-cuckoo-land hippies of the “fasting for peace” and “white band of idiocy” dreamer variety.
I found Broder to be smug, pompous, needlessly cynical himself, and somewhat ignorant of the Live8 raison d’etre.
For Broder to say stuff like
..Bono or Bob Geldof, who are so eager to help Africa that they don’t care where the money ends up….
means he cannot have read, listened to, or spoken to either of them.
The reality is that he (Broder) and Geldof and Bono in fact agree on most of the (alarmingly few) substantive comments that Broder made about real action that’s needed and the tragic waste of where current aid money goes, etc.
Just because there are either lazy or opportunistic attendees or performers says nothing about the longer-term objectives, let alone that this dialogue has been happening for a very long time among (yes, of course) the G8 ministers and the rock-star / publicity-seekers as well. So when Broder says
What is a little irritating about this [debt relief plan]is that the finance ministers of the G-8 countries have already decided to forgive 37 poor countries their debts, and others will follow.
it ignores the lengthy discussions undertaken by Geldof and others with Tony Blair and his team over many years that has led to the Africa Commission report, Gordon Brown’s current proposals about debt etc. Of course, it is hard to know the ‘true’ cause-and-effect sequence, but for Broder to write in such a black-and-white way (dismissing the Live8 event organizers as dozy tree-huggers who missed noticing that the G8 ministers are already true heroes in their own right) smacks of a really irritable smugness and ignorance.
I, of course, would never propose the opposite ‘black-and-white’ scenario either (for instance I’d never claim that the G8 minsiters are dozy capitalist lackeys who fail to accept that the thoughful rock stars are full of heroic vision) … but then neither would the more articulate of the rock stars, who have been engaged in such thoughtful dialogue with leading politicians over the past few years that the hardcore left dismisses Geldof as a ‘Blair mouthpiece’ and ’sellout’!!!
Go figure! The truth is obviously somewhere in the middle, and I really haven’t got any more patience for these smug self-congratulatory know-it-alls (like Broder) than I do for the more pompous of last night’s Live8 performers (like Madonna and Robbie Williams), whose pretentious posing also rubbed me the wrong way (though such posing is undoubtedly correlated with Robbie’s ability to wow the crowds so masterfully)!! Having listened at length to Geldof and Bono, I simply wouldn’t pigeon-hole them so easily with what Broder lazily and thoughtlessly calls “The White Band of Idiocy” or “Fasting for Peace” brigade, since even a minute’s reading reveals they’ve done a heck of a lot more background research than Broder!!!!
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