Dead on arrival
'IF YOU WANT to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down. Come on, mother-[bleepers]!" Madonna railed from the stage at London's Live Earth concert Saturday. "If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump!"You just can't beat that. What else could capture the canned juvenilia of a 48-year-old centimillionaire — who owns nine homes and has a "carbon footprint" nearly 100 times larger than the norm — hectoring a bunch of well-off, aging hipsters to show their Earth-love by jumping up and down like children? I suppose she could have said, "Now put your right foot in / Take your right foot out / Right foot in / Then you shake it all about…. That's what climate change is all about."
Actually, I think the "Hokey Pokey" makes more sense.
But, hey, I don't want to bash Live Earth, which is not to be confused with Live Aid (1985, dedicated to eradicating African famine) or Live 8 (2005, promising to relieve African nations' debts). So with the African continent so well-fed — and debt free! — who can blame the Celebrity Concern Industry for moving on to its next big success?
The avowed point of Live Earth was to … can you guess? That's right: raise awareness about global warming. Considering the energy required to put on the show, the nine Live Earth concerts doubtlessly raised more CO2 than awareness. But such high-minded objections sail over the chief source of Live Earth's lameness. The acts were mostly fine. But the outrage and passion felt so prepackaged you half-expected to hear from the adverts "this moral outrage is brought to you by GE's 'Ecomagination.' "
Indeed, one could say that Live Earth is proof that global warming has jumped the shark, except for the fact that the phrase "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark.
posted by City Slicker at 11:37 am
13 Comments:
Brilliant post CS. Could not agree more. It's just an excuse for aging rockstars to get on stage rather than retire. Pitiful.
I disagree!!!!
Live Earth is all about awreness raising it's not an end to global warming in itself. If it gets people thinking about it then all the better in my book.
Watch Al Gore's film and you will understand :-)
If I see one more insipid article about these concerts I'm going to throw up. They are put on by a bunch of elitist, hypocritical, snobs for the great unwashed. Global climate change is too complex to be left to these idiots who know absolutely nothing about science other that we breath air and drink water. Al Gore is an even bigger joke.
If I hear Madonna's Hey You song one more time, I may just cry. Did anyone else realise they played this song before and after a celebrity talked about global warming? I suspect I heard this song about 1250 times. I woke up with it still in my head. Perhaps this is a ploy to get us to save energy - by annoying us constantly with ridiculous songs - so we turn our TVs off?
Live Earth change the world? Hah! Once again overpaid self-indulgent prats preach to us to do as they say, not as they do. I'm sick and tired of idiot rock stars who live in castles and mansions the size of large hotels telling us how to give, live and everything else. Let Bono and Geldoff give up their millions to Africa and Greenpeace and just shut the hell up instead of spouting their self glorifying nonsense. What? Give their millions. Oh my God, there goes another private jet. No, we cannot have that. Peaches Geldoff, Bob's daughter, needs her limo and expensive shopping trips and Bono needs his Riviera holidays. As for Madonna, she just needs to be ... well, er, Madonna. All glory, publicity and arrogance, and that doesn't come cheaply. Get off it and get a real life.
Loved the post CS!
I thought it was the Hokey Cokey.
I'm still laughing heartily at Madonna's Live8 appearance, where she wore some huge diamond necklace as she held hands with some poor woman who looked utterly ashamed to be there...
The papers also tell me that more people watched the Diana tribute. Was that due to the lineup? Or concert fatigue? Or something else?
I think the line-ups are pretty lame but the less cynical side of me probably can see some good coming out of this. This isn't an event that's gonna change the course of the world and in a way I'm certain everyone knows this but for some reason the organizers feel a need to hype it up as such, probably just to get anyone to pay attention to it.
If anything some people will probably start recylcing more and being less wasteful which I really think is the only easy thing anyone in today's busy world is ever gonna do to try and help the environmental crisis. Considering how disgustingly wasteful most first world nations are, I can hope that this will result in slight decrease.
Phil Collins looks just like my grandfather.
This makes their set really funny for some reason.
Leave it to you, CS, to wondrously illuminate the inanity of the concert with words instead of wattage.
If the rockers really wanted to do something for the planet, they would have instead performed localized acoustic, non-miked concerts instead, rather than trotting about the earth with their "Do as I say, not as I do" sputter.
No wonder most of the world tuned out.
You are absolutely right. When I saw the images of the concerts around the globe with all that light and all that bulbs and all that electricity, I thought, what the heck... I can do better!
But, hey, if more people gets involved with the movement, it is fine, I guess.
Although power is nominally organized under a multi-party semi-presidential system, whereby the executive power is theoretically divided between the President and the Prime Minister, in practice it has rested almost solely with the President who traditionally has been elected in single-candidate elections for more than fifty years. Egypt has also held regular multi-party parliamentary elections. The last presidential election, in which Mubarak won a fifth consecutive term, was held in September 2005. In 2009, Dr. Ali El Deen Hilal Dessouki, Media Secretary of the NDP, described Egypt as a "pharaonic" political system, and democracy as a "long term goal". Dessouki also stated that "the real center of power in Egypt is the military"
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