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Gore’s Greatest Hits… and Misses?
In a few weeks the music industry will come together under Al Gore’s leadership and fight climate change. Surprised? Well, you’re probably not so much at the fact that Al Gore is leading anything, nor at the fact that the music industry has the hubris to think that it can make things better; but perhaps instead that 2007 marks the first year that musicians (and the industry they serve) have taken enough interest in the environment to do one of these big charity things for the it—and it’s about damn time.
We’ve seen benefits for Africa, Farmers, Tibet, Flood Victims, Hurricane Victims, AIDS, and Terrorism Victims in the last 25 years, each of which has left a massive pile of waste in its wake while ejaculating umpteen tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, collectively we all kept consuming as though the ice caps weren’t melting and the sea temperatures weren’t rising.
We Can Talk About It… Now
The 40th Anniversary of Rolling Stone came out this May. It is an incredible piece of organizational onanism, led by editor Jann Wenner. The central thrust of the issue seemed to be that the ‘60s were great because Rolling Stone was there to cover it. To celebrate their 40th, RS interviewed a host of venerable cultural luminaries from politics, music and the arts. “Arts” here is loosely applied, covering whatever it is that Jane Fonda has done with her abomination of a public life. Dylan was characteristically gnostic, Jimmy Carter revealed that he used to listen to Dylan, while Jack Nicholson said he saw a picture recently of a party where he and Dylan were both guests, but he didn’t remember that night at all. Everyone in the thing had a Dylan story, falling all over themselves in an attempt to connect with the bard.
The other key point that everyone agreed on is that George W. Bush is an antichrist-level downer for the American experiment. Everyone, that is, except for Nicholson, who came off as too sex-addled to really work up any kind of steam about anything except his next piece of ass. What no one could agree on was how the hell the same people who spent the ‘60s in a revolutionary orgy of sexual liberation, drug use and political engagement—an orgy that existed in symbiosis with a soundtrack performed by the Greatest Bands of All Time—could fall so far as to elect (and re-elect!) a cancer like George W. Bush.
Yet still we look back and struggle with the comparison between then and now. No reality can compare favorably to a myth, much less our own. We see major labels corrupted, shaped only by profit motive. Every week they squeeze out some new sonic gruel that is a bland, base, white noise lullaby easily digested by target markets. Even dissent is commodified and sold. Pretty pop-culture golems demean the sexual revolution by aping it, while gangster rap reduces the pride and righteous anger of the Civil Rights movement to a Jim Crow ditty that propagates and celebrates the ghetto. All of it is buttressed by a corrupt payola-backed radio and television celebrity machine run by five or six conglomerates; their leadership so far removed from what it actually means to grow up in this modern life that they might as well be feudal lords. Threats to the label hegemony for file-sharing or more currently, internet radio, are co-opted, attacked, eliminated.
It’s a Small World After All
by: Edward Scott
We are now through the looking glass into the post-Live Earth era. The world has changed, and never again will humankind look at the planet as a place of infinite resources to be extinguished. Just after the Beatles closed their reunion set with “Imagine” (the projections of John Lennon and George Harrison looked and sounded stunning for two dead guys), the leaders of the G8 announced a new global initiative to eliminate 90% of our current carbon emissions by 2025 in an undertaking of awesome scale that will unite the entire planet.
None of the above is true. Live Earth has come and gone and left behind what looked like a lot of hangovers in New York and London, at least judging by the ever-present beer bottles or beer glasses in the shots of the crowds. Contrary to pre-show speculation, there was no big announcement, no silver bullet to stop climate change, and the show-stopping finish was John Mayer and the Police doing “Message in a Bottle” while an extremely uncomfortable and unpracticed Kanye West did his best to rap during a brief interlude.
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by: Edward Scott
published: July 11, 2007
in column: The Smoke-Filled Room
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