Rocking and Rolling for the Environment
The music industry believes the best way to beat global warming is through an unprecedented blast of cool.
Promoters are trumpeting Saturday's 24-hour global rock festival, Live Earth, as the largest multimedia education and entertainment effort ever launched. If all goes according to plan, music of more than 100 artists on all seven continents (members of the British Antarctic Survey will play their own brand of geek rock) will reach 2 billion people through television, satellite radio, and the Internet. In between sets and commercial sponsorships, they can expect plenty of lessons on carbon reduction and Earth science. The extravaganza launches with the concert in Sydney and concludes July 7 half a world away in Rio de Janeiro. For those living in the States, that means the rocking actually begins Friday at 10 p.m. ET.
XM Radio begins its live coverage at 9 p.m. ET and it will be broadcast at varying times throughout the 24-hour cycle on NBC's suite of channels, including MSNBC, Bravo, and CNBC. The concerts will also be streamed live at www.liveearth.msn.com. In their effort to draw an unparalleled audience, Al Gore and his team of music industry organizers have assembled an army of entertainers that comes as close as any ensemble in history to providing something for everyone—at least under the international hipness ceiling of age 35. The likes of American mega-acts Madonna, Kanye West, the Pussycat Dolls, Snoop Dogg, Smashing Pumpkins, the Police, and Metallica will join world artists such as pop and gospel star Angelique Kidjo of African nation Benin, Japanese rock act Abingdon Boys School, and German hip-hop star Lotto King Karl.
The festival continues the long, strange trip of rock-and-roll's impact on our social and political fabric—intentional or otherwise. U.S. News, with the help of rock-music historians, has assembled an unofficial, and no doubt incomplete, list of rock music moments that changed the world, perhaps, for the better.
· It wasn't Elvis Presley's first TV appearance, but his gyrating, sexed-up rendition of "You Ain't Nothing but a Hound Dog" on the Milton Berle Show in 1956 sparked a firestorm among American parents and religious groups. Up to that point, Presley's moves had partly been obscured by his guitar. Shedding the instrument for the show, Presley's hips played louder than anything in pop music to that point, earning him the nickname "Elvis the Pelvis." That moment is largely credited with pushing black music and style into white American living rooms for the first time. "He made it a fact of life that the general public couldn't ignore anymore," says Glenn Gass, a music professor at Indiana University. In a subsequent TV appearance, Elvis was famously filmed by Ed Sullivan only from the waist up, but a new era of music, dance, and race was already born. The Elvis sensation sent record companies scrambling to play black music on the radio, launching the careers of black musicians like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. "It's not [Elvis's] first moment," Gass says. "But it's his finest."
· The conscience of the baby boom generation emerged with Bob Dylan's 1963 release of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, perhaps one of the most important rock albums of all time. Its songs encapsulated a nascent, youth-powered ethos of civil rights, feminism, and peace. A trio of songs, "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" helped galvanize the protest movement while becoming its principal anthems. "Blowin' in the Wind," which asks, "How many years can some people exist, before they're allowed to be free?" was at No. 2 on the pop charts when folk act Peter, Paul & Mary played it at the base of the Washington Monument during Martin Luther King Jr.'s landmark March on Washington in August of that year. "There's little doubt that music was key to carrying the message of the civil rights movement," says Warren Zanes of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
· Soul singer James Brown articulated a new sense of empowerment in the black community with his groundbreaking 1968 hit, "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." The call for black empowerment hit No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a centerpiece of his frenzied live shows. Chuck D of the groundbreaking rap group Public Enemy has credited the song with changing the way the African-American community saw itself. On his website, Chuck D writes that the song "was an implanted soundtrack theme into understanding that our minds, bodies, and souls were black and beautiful." Many believe the song ushered the end within the community of self-descriptors Negro and colored. After Brown, black was not only beautiful; it was a new identity.
· Fittingly, it was a Beatle (preaching "All You Need Is Love") who is responsible for the birth of the benefit concert. Grasping the power of the music industry, George Harrison invited an all-star cast of friends, including Eric Clapton, Dylan, and Leon Russell, to headline the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh in New York City's Madison Square Garden. The event raised $250,000 for the famine-stricken nation in ticket sales alone while generating an additional $14 million over the years through the release of a live triple album and documentary film. With nothing like it before, the concert proved to be a fiasco of financial management; the organization failed to set up the proper tax-exempt framework to channel money to appropriate parties. For years, IRS audits tied up the money bound for Bangladesh.
· The Boss didn't fight in Vietnam, but his work as a rock musician brought the troubles of Vietnam veterans to public attention at a time when the country was eager to forget about the war. In August 1981, Bruce Springsteen staged a "Night for the Vietnam Veteran," which has been described by fans as one of the most emotional shows of Springsteen's career, with some members of the band reportedly tearing up during a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain?" Springsteen also delivered the travails of veterans to the American public in subsequent songs, such as "Born In the U.S.A." Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America, was present at the 1981 concert, which delivered a cash infusion to nascent awareness groups. "Without Bruce Springsteen," Muller says, "there would be no Vietnam veterans movement."
· The benefit concert first went global with 1985's Live Aid benefit for poverty-stricken Africa. Staged in London and Philadelphia, the broadcast of performances by artists like the Who, Elton John, and Run-D.M.C. reached 1.5 billion viewers in 100 countries, raising $250 million for famine relief. The concert was a huge victory for organizer Bob Geldof, who had previously assembled a cohort of rock musicians under the name Band Aid whose single, "Do They Know It's Christmas," also generated profits for Africa.
· The pop single sensation of the same year, "We Are the World," is perhaps the biggest charity phenomenon of the era. The song, written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, generated $60 million and sold 7 million copies. Ken Kragen, director of the umbrella charity group USA for Africa, hailed the response as "the greatest outpouring of public support for charity of this nature in history." It was the fastest-climbing single of its time, jumping all the way to No. 1 on the pop charts amid reports that fans were buying three, four, and five copies of the recording. Kragen reported that among the donations his group received was the savings of a 4-year-old from Colorado that amounted to $76, a family's final food stamp, and the only dollar of a death-row inmate in Alabama.
· An off-the-cuff remark by Dylan at Live Aid, where he mused aloud that musicians should do something to benefit U.S. farmers, spawned the enormously successful Farm Aid concert series. Twenty-two years old and counting, Farm Aid has generated $30 million for farmers with the help of such legends as John Mellencamp, Joni Mitchell, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and Dylan. "Nobody would have thought about the family farm for a second," Gass says. "Then suddenly they're having these huge concerts to benefit them. That's something rock-and-roll did all by itself."