June 27 2005 - Live 8 Rockers & Diplomacy

Rockers find power in diplomacy

EDMOND TERAKOPIAN/AP British Chancellor Gordon Brown, Bob Geldof and Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, meet members of the Africa Children’s Choir at the museum in central London yesterday. The choir performed at Africa Live, a venture between the museum and the BBC.

Bono, Geldof set for history books
Challenged leaders to take action

www.TheStar.com
Jun. 27, 2005. 08:17 AM
GREG QUILL
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

They may be saints. Or they may be self-obsessed narcissists fixated on power and immortality. Bob Geldof and Bono, mere pop stars after all, have dared challenge the entrenched political and economic systems of the West by using the intimate and apolitical power of music and celebrity to rally a generation to their cause — nothing less than saving humanity, changing the world.
They've been praised and damned, beatified and dismissed in equal proportion by the world's media over the past 20 years for their often less than diplomatic efforts to awaken a wealthy and self-satisfied few in control of the world's wealth to the despair and misery of dispossessed millions in Africa suffering from famine, poverty, political oppression and AIDS.
Irritating as they often are with their condescending sermons, cheeky manipulation of media and photo-op crazed political leaders, and their personal peccadilloes, history will remember these two Irish rockers-turned-crusaders well. History will elevate them. Their motives will be weighed against their achievements for decades to come, but it's impossible to think anyone could legitimately question their commitment to such a profoundly humanitarian and noble purpose.

Every saint — reluctant or otherwise — has an epiphany, a moment in which the imagination is fired by a great and unselfish notion. For Geldof, the former one-hit wonder with the Dublin punk band the Boomtown Rats and the instigator of the astonishingly successful, world-wide Live Aid African famine relief fundraising concerts staged in 1985, that moment came when he saw a CBC-produced documentary about the 1984 famine in Ethiopia pieced together from news footage shot on the fly and under life-threatening circumstances.
"The camera showed these people holding up their babies, hoping the children would be picked," Geldof told The New York Times, after watching a scene from the documentary in which a nurse looked out over 10,000 people near death from starvation. She had food for only 300 of them and literally had to decide which ones would live.
"But how does anyone pick in a situation like that?" he said. "So the nurse just started choosing people at random. It was awful. The ones who were picked were so ashamed that they had been chosen to live that they went behind the wall, so that the others couldn't see them."

While Geldof's Live Aid inspired Bono to learn more about Africa, this time around, it was Bono who took the lead. He made repeated pleas and eventually won over Geldof, who has admitted he was initially reluctant to stage a follow up.
When Geldof's initial fundraising effort, the all-star Band Aid pop single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" became the biggest-selling single ever released in England to that point, with sales of 3.2 million, Geldof saw a movement in the making.
"Suddenly, there was the need for a spokesman," he said. "It also became incumbent on me to come up with a system to guarantee that the money would be given to the poorer people. I had to go to Africa to find out what I was really talking about."
When he did, he flew into Addis Ababa wearing jeans and slippers. He took the country's Relief Commissioner for a long walk, 8 kilometres, and told him what his government was doing wrong. It was the first deployment of what Geldof and Bono, his sidekick in famine- and poverty-relief lobbying among world leaders since 1985, would become known: Punk diplomacy [bold italics mine].
Being Irish punks helps. Both men are imbued with a pugnacious spirit, an irreverent wit that's the legacy of a righteously angry, politically repressed nation whose homemade politics brook no outside interference and defy easy understanding.
"Bob Geldof was an inspiration," Bono confides in the recently published book Bono In Conversation With Michka Assayas. "He was from Dublin ... then he moved to London and colonized it. I learnt a lot from Bob. I learnt a lot of my lip from Bob; I had a sense (from him) that the impossible was possible."
Both are insatiable readers and vigorous, hands-on researchers, dismissive of the media. They give credence to nothing they haven't seen, heard, smelled or touched first-hand.
Both artists haven't been above raising obscure but emotionally resonant rebel flags in their musical endeavours — Geldof with the Rats to redress the ennui and hopelessness of his urban Irish youth, Bono with U2 in a messianic stance against nationalism of all kinds — and both have a demonstrable dislike of prevarication and dissembling, the most ancient and most tiresome of Irish arts. Geldof cuts to the quick:

"This is not a question of money," he told the thousands of music
fans at last week's Glastonbury Festival in England, where he appeared on stage to hone his banter for next weekend's globally televised, multi-venue Live 8 extravaganza whose purpose is not to raise money, but world awareness of the possibility of African debt relief, and to put pressure on G8 leaders to live up to prior promises. Mega concerts are being staged simultaneously across the world with the Canadian show in Barrie.
"I would ask the people watching this on television to imagine half of this field dying now and the other half dying tomorrow," he said. "And between them, those men at the G8 would have resolved it in 10 seconds.
"I want you to individually believe you can help change the condition of the most put-upon and beaten-down people on this planet."

Geldof and Bono are also blessed with characteristic Irish eloquence and an ability to use accusing rhetoric and tricks of discursive logic to shift the focus of any debate to their agenda.
That argumentative streak, also attributable to the Irish stars' bloodlines, now has a name: Geldofization [bold italics mine].

'"We are all Bob Geldof now," British political commentator Simon Hoggart wrote in last week's Guardian, voicing the rage of conservatives everywhere over the pop stars' relentless rants.
"MPs who used to ask about the effect of waiting lists on their constituent Mrs. Figgis, or who want a zebra crossing outside a local school, now want the prime minister to end world poverty, trade imbalance, and climate change.
"The next stage will be full Geldofization, with MPs standing up and announcing that it is a focking disgrace that there are people out there who are focking dying. It makes me focking furious, and will my Rt. Hon. friend get off his focking arse and focking do something?'"

In deference to their higher purpose, and oblivious to accusations of self-aggrandizement in the interest of future political ambitions, Geldof and Bono have swept right past any notion that they have any faith at all in conventional left-right dialectic. They condemn and praise without partisan favour, tearing into Prime Minister Paul Martin one minute for allegedly fudging on former prime minister Lester B. Pearson's commitment to ante-ing up 0.7 per cent of Canada's Gross National Income for aid to non-developed countries by 2007 — the matter-at-hand at the G8 conference in Scotland — and praising U.S. President George W. Bush the next because he seems to be leaning their way.
Bono admits in the Assayas book that his epiphany — at least in terms of the practical application of his celebrity and pop-culture influence to greater ends — came during the band's Live Aid performance in 1985, when he seized on the idea of creating an impromptu, unforgettable image for the billions of viewers by throwing himself into the audience and dancing with a young fan.

He has had 20 years of astonishing financial and artistic success in which to enrich that impulse with philosophical substance, and a privileged position from which to absorb the world's political and economic machinations.
Bono's African crusade is fuelled both by a profound Christian fervour and an unshakeable belief in fair trade and pure commerce. His lyrics attest to his faith, and he sings the praises of 86-year-old U.S. evangelist Billy Graham, conspicuously lauding his global influence and spiritual guidance to world leaders, on a video produced by Pat Boone titled Thank You Billy Graham, which is due out this week
For Bono, fame, business and charity are undeniably linked. Add a sprinkling of wealth guilt, and you have a potent catalyst for radical change, a prophet, no less, of a new world order.

"In the end, aid is not the way forward for the poorest people in the world," he says in Bono In Conversation. "Trade is the way forward. We have to let the poorest people trade with us.
"I'm representing the poor and wretched in this world. I promise, history will be hard on this moment. And whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, God has a special place for the poor. The poor are where God lives. So these politicians should be nervous, not me."

Additional articles by Greg Quill


Standout performances, Great musicians
Reviews: Canada's artists had hearts on sleeves

Jul. 3, 2005. 08:50 AM
www.TheStar.com
VIT WAGNER
STAR MUSIC CRITIC
It was a day when some of Canada's most beloved musicians — and a handful of celebrated visitors — wore their political hearts on their sleeves and joined their voices with other artists around the world to sing out against global poverty.
It will be another week before we have any notion of how well that message resonated — from Canada's Live 8 show in Barrie and the other nine concerts that rocked the world yesterday.
But the appearance of headliner Neil Young, performing for the first time since suffering a brain aneurysm in the spring, was at least some small occasion for hope — to say nothing of adding formidable heft to the Canadian show's role as international curtain closer.
The iconic Canadian rocker, who had to skip the Junos in Winnipeg earlier this year, fulfilled his role perfectly, ending the day with a mixture of artistry that saw him move from the poignancy of "Four Strong Winds" to the massed, celebratory joy of "Rockin' in the Free World."
Contrary to predictions that the Barrie show would hold precious little appeal for younger listeners, the number of teens and 20-somethings vastly outnumbered the boomers for whom the lineup was supposedly tailored.
Despite the apparent generational disadvantage, the kids didn't have any trouble joining in with Randy Bachman on "Takin' Care of Business." One of the highlights of the day, the set was performed without Guess Who mate Burton Cummings, sidelined by laryngitis. Impressively, it was the first time Bachman had ever played with the Carpet Frogs, the band enlisted to support him.
Given the larger issues in play, it would be churlish to complain about the event as a musical showcase. It wasn't so much that any of the artists acquitted themselves poorly as that the rushed proceedings didn't afford much of an opportunity to build momentum.
But there were enough standout performances from the likes of The Tragically Hip, Bruce Cockburn and Australian upstarts Jet to keep spirits high, even if a lot of heavy hitters performing in distant capitals like U2 and Pink Floyd could only be glimpsed briefly on the big TV screens.
[Star Here are Vit Wagner's mini-reviews of the performers at Canada's Live 8 concert, filed and updated throughout the day. …]


Stars checked their egos at the door
BETSY POWELL
STAFF REPORTER

BARRIE—Bryan Adams jetted in and jetted out en route to a non-Live 8 gig last night in Philadelphia.
Tom Cochrane stuck around briefly after his opening Live 8 set before hitting the road for Moose Jaw, while Quebec power punk outfit Simple Plan blew in from Brussels before heading off to Atlanta.
Those were just some of the logistical manoeuvres and schedule-shuffling acts on Canada's Live 8 bill, arranged so they could participate in the world's biggest rock event and try to make a difference in the fight against poverty.
All declared the effort worthwhile, and backstage it was wall-to-wall goodwill, with the artists registering varying degrees of optimism about the event.
"People are going to notice, that's for sure," said Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan before the U.K. rockers took the stage. "What it will actually achieve is another story altogether."
It was their star status, after all, that was behind the whole Live 8 concept. "Celebrities have an impact," Cochrane said backstage after his midday set, which kicked off the 10-hour musical marathon. "It's been that way all through the years, going back to the bards of England."
The atmosphere throughout the sprawling compound where the artists mingled with family and friends was relaxed and laid-back, though the inner sanctum of dressing rooms was off-limits to the media.
At side stage, members of Great Big Sea, Blue Rodeo, Tragically Hip and Barenaked Ladies chatted and posed affably for pictures by fans fortunate enough to secure all-access passes. BNL's singer-guitarist Ed Robertson said his day was made watching Gordon Lightfoot strum through his set, but got even better later when Robertson joined rap veteran DMC backstage for an impromptu beat box session.
Toronto's Pusateri's catered, with beef tenderloin and sushi on the menu.
"Everybody's treated equally and fair. There's no superstar status. We tried to create a sense of community for the artists and their immediate family in the backstage area," said Riley O'Connor, vice-president of organizer House of Blues. Egos — and band riders, the artists' lists of demands — were not on the agenda. "Everybody eats the same food, drinks the same water," he said.
And bottled water, not alcohol, seemed to be the order of the day, though co-host Dan Aykroyd handed out bottles of his tequila.

Additional articles by Betsy Powell


AOL coverage crushes TV

Jul. 3, 2005. 01:00 AM
www.TheStar.com
DAVID BAUDER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Live 8 concerts were an unprecedented international poverty awareness effort, but the campaign may also have been an historic broadcast event as well.
Covering 10 venues more or less simultaneously was next to impossible for TV networks, meaning viewers missed many memorable moments from the world's stages. Television seemed shockingly old-fashioned compared with AOL's superior coverage.
With a click of the mouse, America Online visitors could jump from a video feed of the London concert to one from Philadelphia, Berlin or Rome.
The performances were shown in their entirety. By mid-afternoon, AOL had set a record with 160,000 people simultaneously viewing video streams, the most ever, according to AOL programming chief Bill Wilson.
While AOL could be faulted for failing to supply a comprehensive schedule ahead of time, it offered updates onscreen under an entry called "The Buzz." People watching Kanye West in Philadelphia, for instance, were flashed a message: "Brian Wilson is performing `Good Vibrations' in Berlin. Or they were told Snoop Dogg was about to take the stage in London.
It was utterly addictive, giving music fans a reason to stay glued to their computers.
AOL's "global feed" feature offered a chance to catch up with just-ended performances, with little interruption.

But will it make a difference?

TorontoStar.com
Jul. 3, 2005. 10:28 AM
BARRIE- Righteous rock `n' roll. Snap. Music on a mission. Snap. The virtuous and the virtuosos.
Snap.

In concert, in symbolic "interdependence," against poverty.
Snap.

But still some 6,800 children in Africa died yesterday — from hunger, from preventable diseases related to wretched impoverishment — during the hours between opening act Tom Cochrane and closing act Neil Young at Park Place.
One child lost every three seconds.
Snap. Snap. Snap.

That's the grim reality and the core message of Live 8 — for all the waving arms and swaying hips under a brilliantly blue Canadian sky; a message that just might resonate long after the last guitar lick and harmonica riff and drum solo had been performed, whether here or at nine other venues, in half a dozen time zones, on four continents.
A marathon of music, it was, a shockwave of amplified sound and imploring sentiment that rumbled around the planet, from London to Tokyo, from Rome to Johannesburg, from Berlin to a modest city north of Toronto, where some 35,000 fans gathered in a field alongside the highway to groove, cheer — yes, even applaud themselves every time the TV cameras panned — and snap their fingers in solidarity.
If they had some fun while being proselytized — the gospel according to Sir Bob Geldof — where is the harm in that?
It was a concert, after all. The message was sobering but the occasion was festive.

On the giant screen and small screens across the country: Paul McCartney and Bono resurrecting "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," Sting, Madonna, a reunified Pink Floyd, Coldplay, Stevie Wonder and more rock royalty than you could shake a stick at.
On the hastily refurbished stage at Park Place: The crème of Canadian content but with some aliens thrown in (Deep Purple, Mötley Crüe), 21 bands and solo performers banding together in response to the poverty relief shout-out from Geldof.
Organizers hope, perhaps naively, that the urgent appeal for responsibility and redress will carry through at least to this week's G8 summit, when leaders of the planet's richest countries convene at a posh Scottish resort to palaver about the poor-who-are-always-with-us.

In a sneering world, it might be chic to mock privileged pop stars and their grey-haired rock ancestors — survivors of a more decadent era — for laying claim to a social consciousness, from the comfort of their wealth, whilst preaching to the rest of us about global economics and debt relief and foreign aid packages equal to 0.7 per cent of the gross national product, as recommended 30 years ago by Lester B. Pearson. (Loads of references on the Barrie stage to him and, of course, to the collective "us," as in Canada, land of "peacemakers and peacekeepers," as extolled by Dan Aykroyd, co-host of the Canadian show with Tom Green.)
This would be the same Aykroyd, one can't help but mention, who spoke about Third World poverty in recent weeks while appearing as celebrity shill for a $90 bottle of vodka.

Still, it would be churlish to challenge the sincerity of those who squeezed Live 8 into their schedules and donated their talents — their only real commodity — or the estimated 3.3 million people who attended the concerts in ten cities.
The gesture felt utterly genuine when Bryan Adams interrupted his own set for the high-noon "Worldwide Click Moment," when the international stages fell silent and every concert crowd raised its hands to snap as directed in what has become the mute code of the Make Poverty History campaign.
Snap.

With cameras flashing images from venue to venue, Live 8 impresario Geldof remembered, without nostalgia, the Live Aid spectacle he organized exactly two decades ago, antecedent to this one. "Many of us saw something so grotesque — that anybody in this world of plenty should die of want — that we felt physically sick."
It is no less sickening now.
"Don't listen to the skeptics, folks," advised Adams, as he approached the proscenium with an acoustic slung over his shoulders, launching into a ballad that ended on a poignant whiff of "Tears Are Not Enough."
Twenty years ago, at the two-city Live Aid concert — the event raised $100 million for Africa yet the continent is worse off now than in 1985 — Adams participated as a fresh-faced arriviste. Now he's a middle-aged veteran of the rock industry, still singing the same old song on behalf of a poverty-wracked and politically ravaged Africa.

"I'm still here,'' Adams told reporters afterwards, with a shrug that spoke volumes.
He's still here; Africa is still hungry and enslaved to escalating interest debt, even if donor countries have cancelled $40 billion (U.S.) in money owed, but only for those countries that have met established thresholds of self-management.
Yet Adams believes Live 8 will make a difference, that political leaders will feel the heat and make the generous financial commitments necessary to rescue Africa from catastrophe.
"Look at the difference between 20 years ago and today. We had two shows. Today we've got nine concerts around the world. To be able to get a message out across the world is much easier than it ever was before.
"We know this is probably the biggest rock concert in history. It will receive a lot of attention. It will bring a lot of attention.''
If Adams, a simple rock star after all, is not a voice worthy of changing intractable political minds — Prime Minister Paul Martin, come on down — then what of Nelson Mandela, an enduring icon of all that is resilient in the human spirit?

Frail at age 86, still grieving the recent death of a son who succumbed to AIDS, Mandela riveted both the crowd in distant Johannesburg and the one — surprisingly young in composition — that fell into a hush in Barrie. Wearing a shirt on which was emblazoned his prison number — 46664 — from more than 25 years in a South African jail, the retired president of Africa's richest nation, a country awash in gold yet staggered by poverty, Mandela invested Live 8 with a very special kind of legitimacy.
"I am pleased to be here today to support Africa standing tall against poverty, in concert with Live 8.
"As you know, I formally announced my retirement from public life and should really not be here. However, as long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality exist in our world, none of us can truly rest."
Mandela told of how his spirit, and those of his anti-apartheid comrades, had been lifted during all those years of incarceration from knowing the world was watching, the world cared.
"Those efforts paid off and we are able to stand here today and join the millions around the world in support of the fight against poverty. Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times. We live in a world where knowledge and information have made enormous strides yet millions of children are not in school. We live in a world where the AIDS pandemic threatens the very fabric of our lives, yet we spend more money on weapons than supporting the millions infected by HIV. ... Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.''
The burden of doing the right thing falls now on the shoulders of those eight leaders heading for Gleneagles, said Mandela.

In their own way, more effectively as musical messiahs than public orators, the performers in Barrie yesterday tried to say the same thing. And the audience was receptive, even if fans had to often remind themselves of the purpose behind this affair as they tossed beach balls and slathered their bodies with suntan lotion.

Mighty Popo, a member of African Guitar Summit — there were unforgivably few African performers on any of the lineups — expressed his gratitude, as an African, to Live 8 and the support it had engendered.
"We talk to many Africans here and abroad," said Popo, raised in Burundi. "We told them people are gathering for them."
But he wanted to correct a false impression. "Africans work very hard. They work harder than anybody can imagine."
It's a resource-blessed continent whose riches never trickle down to the vast majority, many of whom live on less than $1 a day. And its economy has been disastrously damaged over a century of pillaging by the West.
"They don't really want to beg any more," said Popo of Africans. "It's a little bit of a dilemma, to think of the nations that have helped make Africa poor. And now we look to these nations for help."

To quote The Barenaked Ladies: If I had a million dollars...
Snap.


Concerts don't address root problem

Jul. 3, 2005. 01:00 AM
www.TheStar.com
RENÉ JOHNSTON
TORONTO STAR
Macaulay Eteli, an Oshawa-based painter from Nigeria, says the Live 8 concerts will help to raise global awareness, but they won’t solve Africa’s problems.


Local Africans predict no impact because corruption will continue Live 8
'At the end of the day, will the people really benefit?'

ALEJANDRO BUSTOS
STAFF REPORTER
As concertgoers partied in 10 cities around the world, members of southern Ontario's African community wondered if Live 8 will make a difference. While calling yesterday's gathering an important, if not bold, idea, they said the one-day musical festival could not address Africa's root problems.
These include previous Western exploitation, the corruption of some African leaders, an unequal global trading system and the continent's complexity in terms of size and languages. Including the islands off Africa and non-sovereign protectorates, Africa is a massive region of 59 countries, 805 million people and more than 2,000 languages.
"Don't get me wrong, it's a good concept," said Macaulay Eteli, an Oshawa-based painter from Nigeria.
"But at the end of the day, will the (African) people really benefit?"
Given the immense size of the continent, it makes no sense to talk about "saving Africa" as if it were a single place, said Eteli, whose day job is as a nuclear energy worker at the Pickering nuclear power plant.
A better approach, he said, is to focus on one part of Africa and deal with that region's problems, rather than trying to find a single solution for the entire continent.
The Live 8 organizers deserve praise for pressuring Western governments to cancel the debt of African countries, said Munyonzwe Hamalengwa, a Toronto-based lawyer from Zambia who arrived in Canada in 1977.
However, canceling debt won't solve poverty, he added.
"What Live 8 is doing is making the Western world feel good," said Hamalengwa. "But it will have no impact on the ground because corruption will continue."
The African continent is rife with tales of politicians pillaging the public purse.

`What Live 8 is doing is making the Western world feel good'
- Munyonzwe Hamalengwa, Toronto lawyer

An anti-corruption committee in Nigeria found that more than $483 billion was squandered or stolen between independence in 1960 and the return of civilian rule in 1999.
In Angola, which sits atop oceans of oil but has millions of impoverished citizens, the New York-based Human Rights Watch estimated last year that between 1997 and 2002 close to $5 billion in state oil income went unaccounted for.
Trade inequality is also a problem.
The cocoa trade, a critical part of the Ghanaian economy, is an example of how African countries have little control over their economies
"In Ghana, the cocoa market is dictated by the buyer," said Kobèna Acquaah-Harrison, a Toronto musician and media producer born in Ghana.
While the Live 8 concerts have done an excellent job of raising public awareness about Africa, without substantive changes to the world trading system, they won't eliminate poverty, he said.
So what can Canadians do to help?
One answer is to send money directly to grassroots groups.
"I believe that if people were able to change their focus to those groups working on the ground in Africa ... it would be more beneficial than giving to a big organization," said Obert Madondo, a native of Zimbabwe and board member of CAP AIDS, a Toronto-based nongovernmental group that works in four African countries.
By working with grassroots groups, CAP AIDS — short for Canada Africa Partnership — is helping people in Uganda form small businesses; assisting an AIDS-prevention group in Tanzania; supporting a youth group in Malawi and working with an organization in Ethiopia that works in AIDS education.
There are no quick fixes to eliminating poverty in Africa, said Tsegaye Tilahun, the owner of the Bole Café, an Ethiopian eatery in Toronto. "It's an ongoing process," said Tilahun, who emigrated from Ethiopia in 1982.
"It's not only about giving money. It's also about making sure that Western governments become aware of what they're doing to Africa, and also making African leaders more accountable."