Rocking and Rolling for the Environment

By Bret Schulte

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."

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 18 February 2008, 14.11 siang)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.usnews.com)