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3:10: After her performance, KT Tunstall tells Dave Holmes and Karen Duffy that there?s a forest of 6,000 trees in her native Scotland that is offsetting her carbon emissions. Wait? What? What is it with these offsetting schemes? According to
this website, ?KT Tunstall has supported enough forestry to ?neutralise? the CO2 emissions that were given off as a result of producing her new album ?Eye to the Telescope.?? It doesn?t say if these trees were newly planted or anything that might
actually offset her carbon emissions ? never mind that planting 6,000 new trees for every energy-intensive occupation isn?t exactly a practical plan for addressing the problem. It does say on that website, however, if you send in ten dollars you get a certificate saying you have a tree in Tunstall?s forest dedicated to you personally. Looks like a pretty bad deal, especially considering
I can buy an acre of land on the moon for $30.
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4:13: Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, famous chiefly for her
Sports Illustrated cover and being caught at a Thai resort during the 2004 tsunami which killed her fianc?, takes the stage in London to explain that she wasn?t angry at nature, but that she saw the tsunami as nature?s cry for help. She wonders whether we will answer ?the call of the nature.? So now we?re blaming earthquakes on global warming?
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4:58: The scantily clad Pussycat Dolls bump and grind their no-talent-but-well-proportioned derrieres through something approximating a song in such a way that I wonder where the poles are. I believe the chorus is ?Loosen up my butt-ons, babe.? Wasn?t this exactly the kind of thing that Tipper Gore used to rail against with the Parents? Music Resource Center?
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5:38: Rapper T-Pain performs his hit single, ?I?m N Luv (Wit A Stripper).? Again was Tipper Gore completely MIA when they booked this thing? As if to underscore the age inappropriateness of the whole thing, they go straight from T-Pain to an interview with eleven-year-old actress Abigail Breslin.
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5:47: Linkin Park performs from Japan. It?s no mean feat that the rap/rock group is one of the biggest bands on the planet, considering that they are bar none the whiniest. One music press writer recently
compared the band?s lead singer Chester Bennington to an ?an apoplectic five-year-old wailing for a juicebox.? Chester Bennington is also notable for
revealing in recent
Blender magazine interview that a few years ago when he hit it off with a Playboy model he met at a party, he drove home and broke up with his wife and the mother of his child
that evening. Classy. Considering Al Gore recently told the
Washington Post global warming ?is not a political issue; it?s a moral issue,? I really can?t think of a better bunch of spokesmen for morality than rock musicians.
...
6:26: Al Gore?s personal troubadour, Melissa Etheridge, takes the stage. Etheridge wrote the turgid theme song for
An Inconvenient Truth, and today is premiering two new songs. The first, ?Imagine That,? near as I can tell, is written from the perspective of Cindy Sheehan. Etheridge is the only musician I?ve seen today that seems really revved up about the cause. Unfortunately, for her there?s really just no way for her to sing lyrics this overtly political and not have it be extremely awkward:
A mother was grieving he loss/her soldier the ultimate cost/she went to the man who?s been told he?s a king/waited outside of his compound to ask him a few things/she said ?for what noble cause did my son have to die/where are there weapons and why?d you have to lie.?
No artistic interpretation needed there.
Unfortunately, the sub-par dirge-y ?Imagine That? lasts almost eight minutes because in the middle of the song, Etheridge begins to break it down and lecture the crowd to get her political rocks off. Too bad she doesn?t know what the hell she?s talking about
:
AmeriKKKa! [emphasis added] What happened to us? I mean last thing I remember I was in like eight grade, right? I was in about eight grade and I remember that was the first time I heard about this global-warming stuff, whatever, something's gonna happen in the future. I remember sitting in my eight-grade social-studies class, thinking ?oh yeah, I?m sure glad that?s going to be taken care of so when I become an adult I don?t have to worry about this global-warming stuff? because people were doing stuff back then. Because it was it was America, people were doing things. People were standing up when there was an unjust war.
Where to begin? It?s incoherent for starters, and I?d like to forget the bile-inducing Sixties? nostalgia. Most importantly, it?s completely factually wrong. As for the scientific consensus on global warming, everyone agrees that there is no significant evidence that global temperatures were starting to rise until 1979. Melissa Etheridge was born in 1961, and by my rough calculations that puts her in the eight-grade in 1975.
Here?s a
Newsweek article from that same year that begins, ?There are ominous signs that the Earth?s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production ? with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.? Naturally, the article is discussing the emerging scientific consensus on global
cooling.
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6:45: Second song, remarkably indistinguishable from the first. More ranting and raving. ?You?re gonna tell your children?s children about how we almost lost democracy.? Thanks Melissa, I?ll forego parenting advice from someone who chose
an alcoholic walrus to father her child. Seriously, she just WON?T STOP. Speaking of stopping an unjust war, as a journalist being forced to listen to this I?m beginning to think this is my personal Vietnam. Not to trivialize the experience of veterans, but my father?s a Marine and I?m pretty confident he would have called in an airstrike by now.
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6:49: Al Gore takes the stage following Etheridge, acting a bit goofy and clearly energized. He then asks Live Earth viewers to enter into a
seven-point pledge on global warming. There?s a lot too it but he kind of loses me on the first point: ?Demand that my country join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global-warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth.? 90 percent? Can we see an economic-impact study on that Al? Far be it from me to suggest that poverty is actually the root cause of much of the world?s pollution, particularly in the developing world.
Al segues into introducing a ?wonderful American rock band? the Foo Fighters performing in London. I?ll just note that the Foo Fighters last radio hit was a cover of Prince?s ?Darling Nikki,? the song supposedly so obscene when Tipper Gore heard her daughter listening to it, she formed the Parents? Music Resource Center and the ensuing congressional hearings forced the music industry to adopt parental warning stickers. Either she has no integrity whatsoever, or I?m imagining that concert organizers locked Tipper in a trunk under the under the stage with a ball gag in her mouth.
