Live Earth concerts: Anyone at any one or watching on cable tv c/d

Bravo's jumping around. Must be cold blowing that saxaphone in Antartica. Who is that group?

Did anybody see writer Joe Levy from Rolling Stone (and once with the Village Voice) in a suit on CNN last night talking about the shows (and defending them against various criticisms).

The Chinese government will probably arrest everyone involved with the Shanghai show and make 'em work in a factory for the rest of their lives. Who is that operatic-voiced singer with the orchestra? I'm out of the loop.

I missed Madonna and Crowded House and chose to miss Genesis.

I need to go research the Mekong River region Southeast Asian performers I am reviewing at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in DC later. So no Garth Brooks and Native American bands at the Washington DC Live Earth show at the Museum of the American Indian for me.

Oh boy, a special message from Robert Redford.

Shakira's doing "Hips Don't Lie" in Hamburg, and her stomach is covered and she's wearing jeans. What's up with that?

That was not Wyclef with her. Just some dreadlocked substitute. That might have been a good thing.

Oh, Rihanna had alot of backing singers with her and seemed to be getting some technological assistance in making her voice project. Does that make me a rockist for pointing that out?

Discussions of carbon footprints plus Carson Daly. And I forget the names of the Bravo hosts--perky Karen and that other guy. In London, Snow Patrol's singer is wearing a sweater while everyone else is in t-shirts.

Did anybody see writer Joe Levy from Rolling Stone (and once with the Village Voice) in a suit on CNN last night talking about the shows (and defending them against various criticisms).

he was on the PBS News Hour as well, prob in the same suit. he was typically well-spoken but to me came across as more of a music industry spokesman than a journalist. "well we'll have to see what happens" was his response to the interviewer's very mild criticisms/probing q's.

wait, is perky karen karen duffy, aka old mtv hottie duff? did they decide to preserve old music television hosts like her and carson daly as an energy- and resource-saving measure?

nice iphone commercial now. instead of donating money to save the earth, please donate $600 to save steve jobs.

madge has already performed?? low on the bill.

Favorite moment: Shakira, Don't Bother

Most painfully embarassing moment: Genesis attempting to lead a sing-along for Invisible Touch.

I'm gonna wait til 20017 and watch the highlights/naff bits on my youtube brain implant.

2017

That is Karen Duffy! Oh no, not more Phil Collins and Genesis.

not that give the slightest shit about the black eyed peas, but they're kind of popular, or so i have read. why are they playing in the middle of the afternoon UK time and 11:50 am US time? and why has madonna already played? who's scheduling this thing?

maybe madonna will fly by fuckin' f15 or something and play all eight gigs. that would make a point.

she could take off from, and land on, each stage in a harrier jump-jet.

I think that was just a special Madonna video I saw. She may be performing later. I had switched over to Wimbledon for a bit. It looks like Venus Williams won easy.

Portable solar chargers for your portable music listening devises.

I've been half watching on Universal HD. Wonder if it's any different than Bravo. Australia's been the best so far with Wolfmother and Toni Collette & The First (!?!).

Who's this Razorlight? Should I pay attention or fast forward?

x-post. Some uk group.

Duran Duran with the (obligatory) soulful black female vocalist. She's taking the lead on their Sly Stone "I Wanna Take you Higher" insert to "Notorious" . They are pros and can prabably keep dishing out their old hits like this till they are old and gray. Although hearing them do "Girls on Film" when they are codgers might take on a new meaning.

Just switched to Bravo cuz Black Eyed Peas are on Universal. Duran Duran sounds good. Maybe better than when I saw them in '87.

Ha ha: Was fast forwarding through my dvr recording, and I wondered who this new indie band with the shaved heads were performing from Wembley. Ha ha: it was Genesis, and they are bald.

it was Genesis, and they are bald

this is not exactly a new development on the genesis front!

Who's this Razorlight? Should I pay attention or fast forward?

-- MC, Saturday, July 7, 2007 4:33 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

foot through television

Nothing from the Meadowlands show on Bravo yet, and I doubt they'll show any of that small just added event in DC. That band in Antarctica has probably frozen to death by now.

holy shit @ soweto drum choir

Yea, the drums and those beats were great and now the gospel choir sounds great, but who's the white dude singer?

All better than Al Gore clapping awkwardly to Garth & Tricia, while Tipper is thinking "please, no Prince."

Uuugh, Keane.

RHCP are on the channel I'm watching

were duran duran as fantastic sounding on real telly as they appeared to be on a big tv screen i walked past in a square in manchester? i actually stood still to watch. an odd choice of SLY STONE tune to cover in their alloted 1o minutes or whatever too. good on them.

people with bad taste in music - classic or dud?

WTF Kenna is on Bravo right now. Some of these songs must be on the new album, making it better than I thought it might be.

Duran Duran were a highlight, which isn't saying a lot about the lineups. Metallica sounded great in the one song they showed. I also liked John Legend and Corrine Bailey Rae covering Marvin Gaye.

Who's this act that's opening up the NY concert? Jesus Jones and the Blowfish?

I swear they've been showing Enrique Iglesias from Hamburg for 30 minutes on Universal HD.

Spinal Tap opening with Stonehenge.

What networks are covering this besides Bravo? Right now, I'm stuck watching KT Tunstall.

sundance channel and the aforementioned UHD are showing the same thing, but it's different than bravo

It's on Universal HD if you have HDTV. Otherwise it's on Sundance and Bravo. NBC tonight I think.

Well, I guess I'm stuck with Bravo then. :(

it's ok, keane is on sundance right now

i saw a bit of kenna on bravo, which was boring.
and i watched a bit of enrique on sundance, which was also boring.

i wish i was waiting in line for the boredoms, right now.

yeah why can't bravo televise the boredoms instead

I think where we disagree is the idea that they could have brought a similarly high level of awareness to the issue without the concert. Without 100+ bands performing simultaneously around the world I think there would have been a lot fewer people looking.

"people looking" is not going to do very much. in a way, neither is awareness; it'll take concerted government intervention. even a cursory reading of history will tell us that governments won't listen to poxy plebs or their beloved celebrities -- not even bono.

Can musicians and the public change the mind of Congressman John Dingell from Detroit:

Which brings us to Mr. Dingell. He helped beat back efforts to pass a renewable energy standard and a CAFE standards increase because, he says, he wants to take them up in the fall when his committee considers global warming legislation. The fall? There's no reason to wait. Both pieces of legislation have growing support on Capitol Hill and among the American people. If Mr. Dingell is serious about taking concrete steps to help combat global warming, he won't put off to tomorrow what can be done today. Washington Post editorial http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR2007070602036.html

forget the big important issues, who wore better black leggings than rihanna?

I'm just gonna agree to disagree here. I think the impact is more positive than negative, and that it is raising some awareness. I think that's a good thing.

In other words, Madonna was hotter.

she did wear a great dress.

What Live Earth Really Meant

"If Gore was being characteristically hyperbolic when he claimed the concerts could reach up to 2 billion people on the Internet — sure, and so could this story — the sheer size and spread of the events meant that for a day at least, climate change (or, the rock concerts it has prompted) dominated headlines across the world. But would the Earth have been better off if we all stayed home and did nothing, literally? "That's a fair thought," Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson told TIME before his band's Tokyo show. "It's also a cynical one." He's right. It's time to get past the obsession over carbon footprint size and offsets, over who's an eco-hypocrite and who is truly green. We need to use energy far more wisely, both individually and internationally, but with hundreds of millions in the developing world getting richer and producing more carbon every day, the threat of climate change is far, far bigger than our personal conservation habits. It will require technological change and painful political choices such as carbon taxes, gas taxes and mandatory greenhouse gas emissions caps. That means, especially for the young, the un-rock star act of voting.

Live Earth's success will be measured not by the number of trees the initiative plants or the number of energy-efficient light-bulbs sold as a result, but by whether it motivates concertgoers to make climate-change their generation's political priority, and press their leaders to act on it."

Or, as Chris Rock put it, ""I pray that this event ends global warming the same way that Live Aid ended world hunger."

This whole concert was like saying that it's better to do something than nothing at all.

Isn't it?

Obviously that kind of mentality contributes to the idea that just doing "something" is going to save the world, which it's not, and that kind of thinking should be critiqued, but empirically speaking it IS better to do something than nothing.

If you were in a burning building, and "something" was running up and down the stairs screaming, then doing nothing would be better.

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/2437263/2/istockphoto_2437263_a.jpg

In more mundane stuff about the performers I was just reading Jon Pareles' blogging at the NY Times about the shows(he went to Giants Stadium and watched or listened to the others online and via cable tv) and his favorite was the new Smashing Pumpkins. Uh, not me. I saw a picture of Baaba Maal at the Johannesburg show. Now, that's whom I wish I saw.

Yeah I saw that Smashing Pumpkins set televised, it was funny.

The other day Andy Langer was filling in on the morning show and he said something about how the new SP record is "uniformly bad; the only people that will like this thing are people that were at last night's 311 show."

Other morning DJ chimes in: "I was at that show last night...it was...pretty good, you know. 311, they've got some grooves to em..."

SO refreshing to hear somebody be critical on the radio.

Pareles liked The Smashing Pumpkins best?!?!? They were lifeless and Billy was in usual crap voice. On the TV they came after the great set by Madonna--was that the actual live order in London? Because if I were there, I would have left early they were so bad. (And I'm speaking as a former, former SP fan.)

If you were in a burning building, and "something" was running up and down the stairs screaming, then doing nothing would be better.

-- bontempi scott, Sunday, July 8, 2007 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

best analogy ever.

i don't think these concerts will achieve anything. but the idea that nothing needs to be done is ridic.

Terence Stamp: "We MUST DO SOMETHING and here are the DETAILED REASONS WHY!"
Audience: "Ma-don-na! Ma-don-na!"

That Madonna set was quite good though, with the predictable exception of the Horrid Specially Written Song, which failed to live up to the standard set by "Throw Those Guns Away."

Now here's a thing.

I get to my mum's house for the weekly family visit, and there's a fuck-on massive limo, bedecked with Live Earth finery (properly part of the bodywork), and an "Artist - Priviledge" badge in the window. So, we're all "ey, Madonna visiting?"

Apparently, a family friend was one of many, tasked to go collect performers and deliver them to the place, and back home too.

No-one famous in the house. Nor, the driver. So my mum says, he had been down to pick up "someone called Rick Wakeman?" who is at least someone my mum has heard of (actually, we've all met him, btas).

So, god knows who he actually drove. He's not the sort of bloke who knows who any of these people are.

Still, nice for the environment.

(had been = someone else who lives closer to Bath got that job)

Miles Kington?

For John Mayer, the raised awareness that Live Earth U.S.A. brought to the issue of climate change made the event a success. "I think a lot of people at Giants Stadium today want to listen," he said. "Awareness works likes a vitamin. You go to the bathroom and 99 percent of it is gone but you hope that you retained 1 percent."

I see now why Scholastic recently ditched the analogy portion of the SATs.

And my other favorite quote:

However, Etheridge aside, it was nonmusicians at this concert who made the most passionate pleas about demanding action for the environment. "Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son, who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."

I don't think Democrats have had Congress for nine months but now even the leaf people are clamoring for warm bodies to fill the GULAG. Yikes!

"someone called Rick Wakeman?"

Just out of idle curiosity, was R Wakeman Esq. actually appearing at / involved with the event in any capacity, or were the organisers just creating demand for the manufacture of more of these gas-guzzling decadentposeurmobiles, by ordering fleets of the things which could then be driven all round the country at 6-7MPG in order to ensure that the VIP areas at the event were appropriately filled with sufficient numbers of the right calibre of disinterested Tory-voting freeloading parasites, thereby preventing the place from getting overrun with too many of those strange over-earnest tree-hugging planet-saving Green types?

Well, you wonder don't you?

Maybe he was short of a gig, and they'd told him it was the Diana gig part two!

I am aware that Mr. Wakemen has expressed an interest in journeying to the centre of the earth (I have always assumed that this must be because there's a particularly exclusive golf course down there or something) but I've never known him show any particular interest in saving it.

I wouldn't have liked to have been one of those 'cellists when he was doing King Arthur On Ice.

Come on cynics, if just one person is persuaded to buy a couple of energy-saving lightbulbs by this event then the massive expenditure of energy and promotion of global capitalism will have been well worth it.

Buy no lightbulbs! Go to bed when it gets dark and get up when it's light! Think about the CHILDREN!

I do! We had to get heavy lined curtains to persuade them that it really *is* nighttime at 20:30!

For some reason I keep thinking of the Economy Drive episode of Hancock's Half Hour. "We don't need a light to climb a dozen stairs!"

Pause, followed by BOOM CRASH BANG.

Did Swampy die in vain?

Blimey I'd forgotten about him. Probably a Tory councillor now.

I reckon he's Shadow Cabinet material.

Mr. Grout, my missus wants to know if your Mum still lives in Woodley and whether the chap who was supposed to be driving the limo for Mr. Wakeman used to drive a lorry for Challenge Anneka.

Holy fucking shit I'm happy I didn't watch this.

Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son, who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."

Well, Bush needs a "war czar," so...

I flicked over a few times during the evening and hopped about to see if there was anything interesting happening, and the most striking thing as far as I was concerned was how incredibly SMALL the event at Washington DC was - it just looked like a few local bands playing at some school fete!

fucking co-sign x100, that shit is like "did u know CHRISTMAS IS PAGAN OMG" & is highly fucking annoying

Stop pointing out the bleedin painfully obvious but never acted upon hypocrisies of late-capitalism? Yeah, how fucking passé.

It sure is.

it's a bit like "did u know THE ATTEMPT TO INSTALL DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST HAS ENDED UP BOLSTERING FUCKING IRAN OMG" and highly fucking inconvenient.

If you were in a burning building, and "something" was running up and down the stairs screaming, then doing nothing would be better

Isn't that what Simon Le Bon was doing on stage?

Stop pointing out the bleedin painfully obvious but never acted upon hypocrisies of late-capitalism? Yeah, how fucking passé.

-- Venga, Tuesday, July 10, 2007 11:20 PM

haha a+ senor jameson

i watched that show a little bit trying to catch ymo and noticed that at least during one performance there was a giant informative "marquee" ( text onscreen to scroll from right to left across the screen") projected behind the performer ; they should have displayed those environmenal advices and tips non stop on tv to for maximum effect.

yeah when we had this on we kept saying "what is the text saying behind?" and there never seemed to be a good shot of it except maybe once when it said something really dumb

the "non stop marquee" thing should have rolled even during ads. I have not memorized who they were, but i remember some of em set a different "feel", those advertisers , more earth friendly right? they would have been down with such an ordinary idea, yes?. .
going by al gore's fairly ambitious and elaborate pledge , i must bet some of his people must have thought of that idea, and even if we live in the age of information it turns out such a feat turned out to be undoable.

feelin everso faintly alcoholized glucose-fructose nauseous right now. strike flagship pop feeling for live earth concerts strike

Mr. Grout, my missus wants to know if your Mum still lives in Woodley and whether the chap who was supposed to be driving the limo for Mr. Wakeman used to drive a lorry for Challenge Anneka.

-- Stewart Osborne, Tuesday, 10 July 2007 22:45 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

I don't know, why would he? Oh, and my mum doesn't live in Woodley anymore...

'Cos my missus comes from Woodley (her Mum still does) and she used to know someone who used to drive a lorry for Challenge Anneka and she wondered if it might have been the same guy.

Oh right. No, the guy does not come from or live in Woodley.

We used to live in Beechwood Avenue.

My missus used to live / her Mum still lives on Loddon Bridge Road.

Our second date was at a disco at the old St. John's Ambulance Brigade Hall on Headley Road - I went with my mate Cally and we took along a copy of New Rose which we somehow managed to persuaded the unsuspecting halfwitted DJ to play.

Me and Cally immediately started pogoing and almost managed to keep going for the whole 2:44 duration of the song before we were punched to the ground, dragged outside and given a bloody good kicking.

I later worked for John Hicks on Headley Road.