There and Back Again

Listening: Aqualung (Strange and Beautiful)
Pondering: Well if we wrote a song about hard core mother crunchers and gangs and such…well no one wants to hear it from us. Like the Jamelia song, it was in a girl’s point of view. If that was our first single, people would think we were transvestites…not that it’s bad…but she sings it better. (Chris Martin)

Was it just me or was VH1/MTV’s coverage of the Live 8 concert a total waste of time?

I tuned in to see the performances, not the faces of VH1 and MTV’s many v-jays, screaming at the top of their lungs on what a milestone the day has turned out to be.

I tuned in because I wanted to see Keane or Travis or The Killers, not Rachel Perry prancing about in her shorts or to hear fans say “Kanye West is the bomb, and oh by the way - the poverty in Africa sucks!”

I tuned in to see a bit of UK coverage because the US line up was totally inferior, in my opinion. I didn’t get any, other than Madonna’s smashing routine and Mariah’s Carey’s affected performance. If there were more, I didn’t see it cause I stopped watching.

I tuned in to see recaps of what we missed everywhere else like Coldplay or U2 in London, A-ha in Berlin and JET in Canada. I did not, however, tune in to see full commercials and previews for the next episode of VH1’s Surreal Life or what happens next with the horny kids from Real World – Austin.

I fully understand the need to cover Stevie Wonder’s full performance but was it really necessary to totally ignore the performances of Keith Urban, Kaiser Chiefs, Annie Lennox, Josh Groban and other non-mainstream acts?

Perhaps I’m just getting old or is Linkin Park really the next best thing since slice bread because we had to endure thirty odd some minutes of Chester Bennington SCREAMING non-sense from atop a speaker and only bits-and-pieces of Green Day’s Berlin performance? Was I supposed to be impressed by Linkin Park’s collaboration with Jay-Z? Because I wasn’t…

And finally, I get the point – Live Aid ‘85 hardly featured any black/hip-hop/rap/R&B performers and so this time around, Russell Simmons (who was part of the production of the US show) made sure they were represented. Boy, did they get TV coverage. Heck, they dominated the whole show. About forty-five minutes into the TV coverage and I was still yet to see a non hip-hop/rap/R&B artist. Funnily, the UK line up has been branded ‘hideously white.’ Well, I guess that makes it even in my book.