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Live8: "Melding Gravity and Guilt"

Live8 may have been successful in its attempt to raise consiousness about conditions in parts of Africa. [Link]

It was high-tech coalition building. At one point the rapper and actor Will Smith in Philadelphia played host as audience members at simultaneous concerts roared video-screen greetings to one another. Then he had the viewers snap their fingers at three-second intervals; in Africa, he said, an impoverished child dies every three seconds.

Against statistics like that, rock hits can sound lightweight and narcissistic - overly concerned with the preening or the romantic mishaps of people making considerably more than $2 a day. It's a rare band - U2, to be precise - that can make big booming songs sound humble as well as rousing. A few performers, like Sting, also rewrote lines of familiar songs to address the G-8: "We'll be watching you," he sang in "Every Breath You Take."

Others hoped that their love songs would double as songs of empathy. And the rest kept it to themselves if they were worried about the context. Rappers boasted, rockers flailed at their guitars, country singers honky-tonked. Parochial, frivolous, raucous and more, the songs were hits nonetheless, and performing them drew attention. That is what stars are supposed to do, as well as providing fantasies of pleasure, success, rebellion or shared trauma. Whether it was Beyoncé of Destiny's Child boasting "I'm a survivor" because an album sold millions of copies, or the Cure's Robert Smith moaning about angst, the stars provided enough media leverage to put Live 8 on all those television and computer screens.

jon posted this at 11:03 AM
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