When Stephen Stills wrote For What It’s Worth and Neil Young chronicled the events of Kent State in Ohio, they were using their art to speak out on what was happening around them, how it was affecting their generation and getting their messages across through the power of music.
Were these and what Dylan and Lennon sang about “Protest songs”? The mainstream media has always had to label everything and songs of and for our times became “protest songs” and Dylan described as a “protest singer” despite his sardonic, well, protestations that he was just a “song and dance man”.
As for Sam Cooke singing the mighty A Change Is Gonna Come, the great Curtis Mayfield and People Get Ready, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Brother Brother or Sly Stone’s Everyday People, they never passed Go, never collected $200 and remained “soul classics”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYuhLNwh3A
White artists monopolized the “protest movement” and a number of media-made false prophets were created and who parlayed these roles into lucrative businesses and even knighthoods.
(Source: The Times)
Fast forward to the past few decades and we have seen concerts for this and that at the drop of a hat with the scarily horrible version of We Are The World for Haiti where Wyclef Jean makes clucking noises being the worst example of grand-standing and celebrity do-gooders doing no good for anyone except themselves.
That one recording, the Concert For Haiti and Wyclef Jean’s attempt to become President of Haiti showed how today’s do-gooders always have other agendas hidden away. And what’s happening in Haiti today? Do any of those actors and singers and bands who found their cause de jour even know? I doubt it. It was just another celebrity cause célèbre lacking any real feeling or emotion. It was just showbiz.
(Source: CCK)
Today, I look around and wonder what’s happened to Saint Bono and his attempts to save the world? Has he given it all up? Are U2 even making music? Or simply making more money?
(Source: Jay Pinker TOH)
Perhaps it’s the cynic in me, but has any of this “saving the world” through music actually worked along with every “Save The Music” campaign?
(Source: Urban Fusion Online)
Frankly, what were we supposed to be “saving the music” from? Itself? It was a flawed campaign because it should have always been about the artists and it’s the ARTISTS who need to be saved from all those charlatans who make money out of them by asking that their art be given away free including performing for “promotional value”.
Which knob conned musicians into ever believing that music should be free?
(Source: Blog CDN)
Somewhere along the food chain, someone is being paid- and it’s not the artists.
In horse racing parlance, it’s a fix and someone better unfix this con as it has become part and parcel of music just like that other con of having artists hand over their art to music companies in exchange for “royalties on sales.”
That’s it. Nothing else.
No marketing, weak promotion, crooked accounting and, in China, a tarnished gold typhoon of mumbles that are empty promises.
(Source: Sound Is Style)
Still, artists continue to giveth and others taketh away without understanding that when it comes to royalties, a hundred percentage of nothing is still nothing.
Artists aside, people wishing to see Change and see someone on a white horse come from nowhere and save us with smile, a wink and a teleprompter have been chump changed.
(Source: Flickr)
What, for example, did all those ponderous and embarrassing paeans for Obama achieve? Did those artists who jumped on that bandwagon show themselves up for shallow do-gooders grandstanding for the world? Yes, they did.
In fact, what has Obama actually achieved to date? Edward Snowden and our old mate Vladimir Putin showed “junior” up so much as a Big Fail that Michelle Obama is now getting celebrities and the Hip Hop Nation to join her and get the US healthy. Good luck. The US giving up fast food and biting the rich corporate hands that feed it?
(Source: Let’s Move)
A nice gimmick to take the taco off the real problems, but damn silly.
What will happen? George Clooney doing sit-ups with the First Lady? Jay-Z recording a Rap? A fawning Jimmy Fallon in a sack race with the First Lady?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4hXFQJmQXg
Not such stupid thoughts as many have been dumbed down by this steady diet of “politainment” plus Oprah, TMZ, the lives and lies of Kim Jenner and her Kardashians empire and the fakeness of reality television where participants appear looking for love- and fall in love in a week while making arseholes of themselves without any signs of embarrassment.
(Source: Zap 2)
(Source: TV Shows Online 360)
All that is seriously wrong in its stupidity, but more serious from a humankind point of view was when I was speaking recently to some ladies with UNICEF and the Red Cross who mentioned that money donated to all these do-gooders events never ever reached those they were meant to reach.
The buck stopped with corrupt government officials and which is why the areas of Sri Lanka that were washed away after the tsunami years ago is still a mess and with nothing being done to rebuild anything.
(Source: Asia Society)
Somewhere along the way, we have stopped questioning and demanding answers.
We have become sheep and lemmings and have rolled over with complacency and believed too many too easily and not, as Lennon demanded, cut out the bullshit and Gimme Some Truth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlzrNKN3rZI
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