Bono Backs Out of Debate With Dave Marsh–The Full Story

Wow! Someone who hates the hypocritical, Wall Street cheerleading, media whore and muzak monger – and lover of warmongers Tony Blair and George W. Bush - Boner more than we do! Well, aside from South Park!

Nice work Dave!

Don’t call Dave a “Trotskyist” though! Billionaire scumbag U2 manager Paul McGuinness did and now has a contract out on him!

 

Bono’s yelped vocals are another matter, his hollow lyrics – where every platitude yields to an obscurantist pretension and back again – yet another. 

 

by Dave Marsh

from  the excellent ROCK & RAP CONFIDENTIAL

(to which can subscribe free of charge by sending your email address to rockrap@aol.com )

As RRC disclosed in September, last May U2’s Bono confronted Irish journalist Gavin Martin and myself in the lobby of Dublin’s Merion Hotel. He asked what I’d been working on. I said “the premise that celebrity politics has been a pretty much complete failure.” Bono replied that he wanted to debate the topic in public. He reiterated the challenge the next evening. The witnesses included U2’s manager Paul McGuinness and my wife, Barbara Carr, among others.

I made sure that Sirius Satellite Radio, which was to broadcast the debate, knew about Bono’s invitation. By mid-June, U2’s New York office confirmed the plan, asking only that it be delayed until U2 finished recording its next album. I kept it public via RRC and my Sirius show, Kick Out the Jams.

In November, U2 manager Paul McGuinness rang me. After some brief personal palaver—I like Paul even though I know he’s alluded to me as a “Trotskyist” behind my back—McGuinness sheepishly said “Bono has asked me to ask you if he can withdraw” from the debate.

I said “Sure.” McGuinness expressed gratitude that I was taking it so well.

“Of course,” I added, “this was a public challenge. Backing out’s not gonna be private.” I did not ask why Bono ducked the debate. Maybe he’d come to his senses, as his apologetics for world capitalism disintegrated with the stock, housing and employment markets. Maybe he was too busy preparing the banalities he’d blare on the new album.

In the wake of the New Depression generated by Bono’s tutors in world finance, it’s hardly necessary to issue a point by point refutation of his statements about how the world works,. Based on Bono’s response to criticism of U2’s tax avoidance, he plans to carry to the grave the ardently stupid globalization orthodoxy of Forbes, the Wall Street cheerleading rag he co-owns. Can there be anyone else who’s ventured a deep thought in the last several months who still believes that the only path to change involves bending the knee to the powerful?

As for the lyrics, don’t jump to the wrong conclusion. It can’t be denied that Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton and the Edge can still make fascinating music. Bono’s yelped vocals are another matter, his hollow lyrics–where every platitude yields to an obscurantist pretension and back again–yet another. Unfortunately, even if he’d come up with a lyric as great as “One,” Bono also carries into each project his off-stage political pronouncements, and his fawning affiliations with war criminals such as Tony Blair and George W. Bush.

I don’t know why Bono spit the bit on debating these issues in a public forum with a well-informed antagonist. Maybe he decided that he’d fucked up and was about to lower himself by going head to head with a journalist. Maybe he doesn’t want to deal on the spot with descriptions of his repeated appearances at the conferences of the leading capitalist nations where he’s yet to ask his first hard question about anything but Africa; about his settling for promises from world leaders that patently weren’t going to be kept, and never doing more than mewing when they weren’t; about why it is that Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, by no means an anti-capitalist, observes that she met him “at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me,” or why so many other Africans have complained that he claims to speak for them but has never so much as asked their permission. In regard to the last, I did receive more courtesy than Andrew Mwenda, the Ugandan journalist Bono cursed for raising such questions at an economics conference. (But then, I’m white and Celtic-American.)

It certainly isn’t my fault that I have to say “maybe” about all of this. Bono never got back to me, or had any of his handlers get back to me, about the ground rules for our projected “debate”–his term, not mine. I’d have settled for an honest interview although “debate” would have been more fun, even though the result was inevitable. No matter how many people sided with my being able to see through the kind of thing William Burroughs once poetically dubbed “a thin tissue of horseshit” it wouldn’t be enough to outweigh Big Time Pop Star status.

I don’t know. More to the point, you can’t know either.

U2 could be in a fair amount of trouble. The band is old by rock standards, and on the cover of Rolling Stone Bono looked much older than the rest because of a physical makeover that tries to deny it. No Line’s first single flopped on the radio. The band’s decision to have its song publishing company flee Ireland for a tax haven in the Netherlands has been subject to protests in the streets of Dublin and has no obvious justification, despite Bono’s fatuous counterclaim that it is his critics who are the hypocrites because free-market values were what created the “Celtic Tiger” of Dublin’s capitalist boom economy. The Tiger’s death throes look to be particularly messy, in part because of capital flight of just U2’s kind. The band’s attempt to alter the Dublin skyline with its Clarence Hotel expansion is another example of its ruinous distance from everyday Irish reality.

Bono’s self-promotion fares much better on this side of the Atlantic than at home. For instance, he got away scot-free in the American press after declaring during the Inauguration Concert, “What a thrill for four Irish boys from the north side of Dublin to honor you sir, Barack Obama, to be the next president of the United States.” But Shane Hegarty wrote in The Irish Times that only one of the band now lives on Dublin’s working class north side while Bono has lived more of his life on the south side.

“During the band’s performance of ‘In The Name of Love,’” wrote Hegarty, “he described Martin Luther King’s dream as ‘Not just an American dream–also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream . . .’ And then, following a long pause reminiscent of a man who’d just realized he’d left the gas on, he added, ‘. . . and also a Palestinian dream.’ This was his big shout out to the Palestinians… You can’t help but marvel at this latest expression of Bono’s Sesame Street view of the world. Hey Middle East, we just have to have a dream to get along.

“Just ignore the sound of those loud explosions and concentrate on Bono’s voice.”

So listen, Bono, if you decide to suck it up and face me, I’m still available. I can’t win a debate, we both know that, and why you’d want to continue to look feeble and cowardly when you have virtually nothing to lose… well, that’s another question I suppose you’ll never be asked.

It doesn’t mean that those questions are going to go away. Maybe for the tamed tigers of the American pop press, but not for me, or for those people in the streets of Dublin calling you a tax cheat, or for the Africans who feel insulted by your ignorance of their lives, or for that matter, the fans who wonder why you insist on siding continually, if slyly, with the powerful against the powerless.

 

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Bob Dylan by Bono – The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time

Rolling Stone Magazine : 100 Greatest Singers

#7: Bob Dylan
by Bono

from Rolling Stone : 100 Greatest Singers

Key Tracks
“Like a Rolling Stone,” “Lay Lady Lay,” “Visions of Johanna”

Influenced
John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Conor Oberst

Photo: Wilmer/Redferns/Retna Born
May 24th, 1941

It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it’s full of wonder and worship.

Bob Dylan did what very, very few singers ever do. He changed popular singing. And we have been living in a world shaped by Dylan’s singing ever since. Almost no one sings like Elvis Presley anymore. Hundreds try to sing like Dylan. When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn’t understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It’s going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.

To understand Bob Dylan’s impact as a singer, you have to imagine a world without Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Lucinda Williams or any other vocalist with a cracked voice, dirt-bowl yelp or bluesy street howl. It is a vast list, but so were the influences on Dylan, from the Talmudic chanting of Allen Ginsberg in “Howl” to the deadpan Woody Guthrie and Lefty Frizzell’s murmur. There is certainly iron ore in there, and the bitter cold of Hibbing, Minnesota, blowing through that voice. It’s like a knotted fist, and it allows Dylan to sing the most melancholy tunes and not succumb to sentimentality. What’s interesting is that later, as he gets older, the fist opens up, to a vulnerability. I have heard him sing versions of “Idiot Wind” where he was definitely the idiot.

I first heard Bob Dylan’s voice in the dark, when I was 13 years old, on my friend’s record player. It was his greatest-hits album, the first one. The voice was at once modern, in all the things it was railing against, and very ancient. It felt strangely familiar to an Irishman. We thought America was full of superheroes, but it was a much humbler people in these songs — farmers, people who have had great injustices done to them. The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the Voice of a Generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground — these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes — that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.

Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, indignant, jeering, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it’s full of wonder and worship. There is a voice for every Dylan you can meet, and the reason I’m never bored of Bob Dylan is because there are so many of them, all centered on the idea of pilgrimage. People forget that Bob Dylan had to warm up for Dr. King before he made his great “I have a dream” speech — the preacher preceded by the pilgrim. Dylan has tried out so many personas in his singing because it is the way he inhabits his subject matter. His closet won’t close for all the shoes of the characters that walk through his stories.

I love that album Shot of Love. There’s no production. You’re in a room hearing him sing. And I like a lot of the songs that he worked on with Daniel Lanois — “Series of Dreams,” “Most of the Time,” “Dignity.” That is the period where he moves me most. The voice becomes the words. There is no performing, just life — as Yeats says, when the dancer becomes the dance.

Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience’s face and said, “I dare you to think I’m kidding.”

Playlist

1. Like a Rolling Stone
2. Lay Lady Lay
3. Visions of Johanna
4. Hurricane
5. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
6. Mr. Tambourine Man
7. Tangled Up in Blue
8. Blowin’ in the Wind
9. The Times They Are A-Changin’
10. All Along the Watchtower

Bob Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone
Uploaded by jeandeclous

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Aid hurts Africa – Bono attacks Africans (again); Africans fire back

‘When the World Bank thinks its financing an electric power station,’ it’s really financing a brothel.’

- Dead Aid

‘If you wanna save the planet, jump up and down!’

- Madonna at “Live Earth”

‘Saint’ Bono loses the rag in Africa and a look at the new book “Dead Aid” which looks at the futility of most aid programmes for Africa, and indeed the damage this aid actually causes.

“Dead Aid” was written by Dambisa Moyo, who was born in Zambia, and who has a doctorate in economics from Oxford, a masters from Harvard, and who, for several years, has worked for the World Bank in Washington DC.

Comic relief? Top black academic argues western approach is not working for Africa

By Christopher Hart

Daily Mail (UK)
10th March 2009

We are accustomed to bizarre outbursts and posturings from multimillionaire celebrities, especially when they spot a chance to portray themselves as concerned philanthropists with almost painfully big hearts.

Their favourite method is to drop in for a few hours at some televised charity event – Comic Relief, Live8 and Live Earth.

Perhaps the best-known, and certainly the loudest among them, is U2′s Bono. His efforts have won him an honorary British knighthood, no fewer than three Nobel Prize nominations and the adulation of Tony Blair. Yet one of Bono’s most significant outbursts – rude, heckling and laden with expletives – took place away from the world’s TV cameras at a small conference it Tanzania recently.

Not so funny any more: Lenny Henry and Davina McCall lark about in their Comic Relief red noses but a voice from Africa argues western aid is not the best way to help Africa

Bono had been enraged by a Ugandan writer called Andrew Mwenda, who was presenting a powerful case that international aid, far from helping lift Africa out of poverty, might in fact be the very cause of its troubles.

Even the suggestion that this might be the case sent ‘Saint’ Bono into a foul-mouthed rant, accusing Mwenda of being a comedian rather than a serious contributor to political debate.

For his own sake, then, one can only hope that the pop star never comes face to face with the author of an incendiary new book. Called Dead Aid, its very title is a bitter mockery of that great institution and celebrity bandwagon, Live Aid.

Voice of reason? Sir Bob Geldof has done much to highlight the plight of Africa

But what it contains – particularly at a time when people are generously giving time, money and enthusiasm to this week’s Comic Relief fundraising events – is even more provocative. It argues that for 50 years the West has been giving aid to Africa – and in so doing has ruined the continent it professes to help. The author of Dead Aid is no lightweight courting controversy for its own sake. She is a highly qualified economist. More importantly, she is herself African – and what she has to say is as unsettling as it is important.

After years of listening to Western ‘experts’ such as Bono, Bob Geldof or Angelina Jolie pontificating about what Africa needs, here is a refreshing voice from Africa itself.

Dambisa Moyo was born in Zambia, where her family still live. She has a doctorate in economics from Oxford, a masters from Harvard, and for several years worked for the World Bank in Washington DC.

She is now head of research and strategy for sub-Saharan Africa at a leading investment bank. But here, you feel, is one banker who is still worth listening to, not least as she has witnessed the way her home country has become blighted by poverty. At independence in 1964, Zambia was a fresh, optimistic young nation, eager to embrace the future. Its GDP was around a quarter of the UK’s.

Today it is one-26th, and the country is mired in corruption, poverty and disease. So what went wrong?

One by one, Moyo examines the usual lame excuses for African backwardness, and dispatches them with ruthless efficiency. Africa has a harsh, intractable climate, with huge natural barriers such as jungle and desert? Well, so does Brazil, or Australia.

Many African countries are landlocked, always an obstacle to economic growth? That hasn’t done Switzerland or Austria much harm.

Happy birthday tyrant: Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe celebrates his 85th birthday with wife Grace

African countries are too ethnically and tribally diverse? So is India, and its economy is booming.

Africa lacks democracy? So do China, Thailand and Indonesia, all Asian tiger economies.

As for any lingering mutterings about Africans simply not being up to it, or inherently lazy, she doesn’t even consider them. She herself is eloquent proof of the idiocy of such Victorianera racism. No, the problem can be summed up in one short word – aid.

Aid isn’t Africa’s cure, she believes. It’s the disease.

Let’s be clear, though, Moyo is scrupulously fair about distinguishing between three different types of aid. There is emergency relief for famine, which many of us support through donations or charitable fundraisers, which is not only well-meaning but absolutely necessary at times of international crisis.

Heartbreaking: malnourished children continue to die in Ethiopia

Then there is the everyday work of the charities themselves, about which she appears neutral, although she quotes one cutting comment from a senior economist: ‘They know it’s c**p, but it sells the T-shirts.

‘ This year, it is Stella McCartney’s Comic Relief T-shirts – featuring images of The Beatles and of Morecambe and Wise – that have become the must-have accessory of those who like to wear their conscience on their sleeve.

Despite the cynics, it is worth remembering that since its creation in the mid-Eighties, Comic Relief has generated £600 million – roughly two-thirds of which has gone to fund charities working on the ground in Africa (the other third goes towards charities in the UK).

That is an awesome achievement that has made a genuine difference towards alleviating suffering on a local scale in some of the most deprived nations on Earth. No one should belittle that work.

But charities are ‘small beer’ compared to what Moyo perceives to be Africa’s real problem: the billions of pounds’ worth of aid poured into the continent by Western governments.

Consider the figures. In the past 50 years, the West has pumped around £35 trillion into Africa. But far from improving the lives of ordinary Africans, the result of stateadministered charity on such a colossal scale has, argues Moyo, been ‘an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster’.

The effects are easy to see, yet always ignored. Over the past 30 years, the economies of the most aiddependent countries have shrunk by 0.2 per cent per annum.

Yes, in the UK we have been in recession for six months or so now, but countries like Malawi and Burkina Faso have been in recession for three decades. How is this disaster related to thoughtless Western aid? Directly.

All smiles: Madonna performed at Live Eight in 2005 – but has celebrity endorsement really improved the lot of ordinary Africans?

And Moyo cites a brilliant example of how the whole concept is flawed. Imagine there’s an African mosquito-net maker who manufactures 500 nets a week. He employs ten people, and this being Africa, each of those employees supports as many as 15 relatives on his modest but steady salary. Some 150 people therefore depend on this thriving little cottage industry, producing a much-needed, low-cost commodity for local people.

Then, Moyo writes: ‘Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who rallies the masses and goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets to the afflicted region, at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive and a “good” deed is done.’

The result? The local business promptly goes bust. Why buy one when they’re handing them out for free? Ten more people are unemployed, and 150 people are without means of support.

Not just a pretty face: Angelina Jolie has visited much of Africa to highlight the poverty faced by its people

Like all such aid hand-outs, it’s an idiotically short-sighted way to treat a complex problem.

And that’s not all. In a year or so, those nets will have sustained wear and tear, and will need either mending or replacing. But the local net-maker is no longer around.

So now those previously independent and self-sufficient Africans have to go begging the West for more aid. Intervention has actually destroyed a small part of Africa’s economy, as well as its spirit of enterprise. Thus aid reduces its recipients to beggary in two easy moves.

Yet despite this ongoing disaster, we still have the celebrity harangues, the self-applauding rock concerts, ‘making poverty history’ from the comfort of your private jet.

At some point in the Eighties, as Dambisa Moyo observes, ‘Public discourse became a public disco’, reaching its eventual nadir, perhaps, with Madonna addressing her audience at Live Earth as ‘motherf***** s’ and declaring: ‘If you wanna save the planet, jump up and down!’

Moyo is blisteringly critical about the ‘Western, liberal, guilt-tripped morality’ that lies behind these jamborees, about the tax-avoiding Bono lecturing us all on poverty and advising world leaders at summits, and Blair’s craven admiration for him. Ordinary Africans do not, on the whole, have much admiration for Western pop culture at its noisiest and most foul-mouthed.

So what do they make of the bizarre spectacle of some ill-qualified Western pop star moralising with such supreme arrogance on ‘what Africa really needs’? Africans themselves have ideas about what they really need, if only someone would listen. But as one such African comments: ‘My voice can’t compete with an electric guitar.’

Another effect of aid, well known in the West and yet consistently and shamefully ignored, is that it props up the most thuggish and kleptomaniac of Africa’s leaders.

That parade of grotesques who have filled our TV screens almost since independence, it seems – Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobutu in Zaire, Mengistu in Ethiopia, the ‘Emperor’ Bokassa in the Central African Republic – were always the greatest beneficiaries.

Bokassa spent a third of his country’s annual income on his own preposterous ‘coronation.’ The genocidal Mengistu benefited hugely, it is said, from the proceeds of Live Aid.

Today we have Mr Robert Mugabe’s wife Grace, 40 years his junior, going on £75,000-a-time shopping trips to Europe or the Far East, while her people starve, inflation runs at 230 million per cent, and Zimbabwe’s Central Bank issues $100 trillion banknotes.

Such tales echo Mobutu’s reign of terror in Zaire. He once asked the West for a reduction of his country’s colossal debt. The West, feeling guilty, promptly granted it.

Mobutu’s response? He hired Concorde to fly his daughter to her wedding on the Ivory Coast. In all, Mobutu may have looted £3.5billion from his country’s coffers. Nigeria’s President Sani Abacha stole about the same.

Even the World Bank itself reckons that 85 per cent of aid never gets to where it’s meant to. ‘When the World Bank thinks its financing an electric power station,’ says one jaundiced commentator whom Moyo quotes, ‘it’s really financing a brothel.’

Out of control inflation: a young boy holds the new 1 million Zimbabwe dollar note

So the aid industry causes poverty, corruption and war. Yet it continues. Why? Could aid just be something the West indulge in to buy itself an easy conscience – regardless of what effect it has on Africa?

Whatever the case, we should turn the taps off immediately, says Moyo. Would this mean the end to the building of new roads, schools, hospitals? No.They’re mainly built by investment, not aid.

Would it be the end to many a kleptomaniac despot? Most certainly. But would millions would die of hunger within weeks? Of course not.

The aid we send doesn’t reach them anyway. Life for them would in the short term be no different, but in the longer term immeasurably better.

What makes Dead Aid so powerful is that it’s a double-barrelled shotgun of a book. With the first barrel, Moyo demolishes all the most cherished myths about aid being a good thing.

But with the second, crucially, she goes on to explain what the West could be doing instead.

We all share the well-meaning belief that ‘the rich should help the poor, and the form of this help should be aid’. The first part of this is plain morality. But the second part, as she so forcefully demonstrates, is false – lethally false.

Another grim day: Children collect stagnant water in Zimbabwe as cholera continues to claim lives in the southern African country

We shouldn’t be giving aid to Africa. That’s not what Africa wants. We should be trading with it, and idle chatter of ‘economic imperialism’ be damned. She has no time for such Left-liberal pieties. Of course we should be using Africa’s vast pool of cheap labour to make our clothes, assemble our cars, grow our foodstuffs. In fact, one country already is – it’s called China.

China is building roads in Ethiopia, pipelines in Sudan, railways in Nigeria. It’s buying iron ore and platinum from South Africa, timber from Gabon and Cameroon, oil from Angola and Equatorial Guinea. China is pouring vast sums of capital investment into the continent, enriching both itself and Africa in the process.

Dambisa Moyo is not much bothered by Western concerns that China does nothing to further democracy in Africa. An villager with six children doesn’t lose sleep over not having the vote, she loses sleep over what she will feed her children tomorrow.

Address poverty first, says Moyo, and democracy later.

The greatest example for Africa today, she believes, could be the Grameen Bank, which means, ‘The Bank Of The Village’, in Bangladesh. Moyo hopes that, in time, the nations of Africa can develop such a bank for themselves. For it is an extraordinary and heart-warming success story.

It was devised by Muhammad Yunus, who quite rightly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his efforts. Yunus’s inspiration was to ask: ‘Where lies the wealth of the typical Bangladeshi village?’

A village may not have money, goods or assets. Yet it is a wonderfully tight-knit, loyal little community, where nobody locks their doors at night, nobody steals, everyone knows each other. This is a tremendous kind of wealth – but how to translate it into money for these impoverished, decent, hard-working people?

Yunus realised you could lend money to such a community and be sure of getting it back if you worked according to a plan – a plan with the simplicity of genius.

You lend not to an individual but to a group, but only one member at a time. So you might lend one woman £20 (and an amazing 97 per cent of the Grameen Bank’s customers are women. That’s enough for her to buy a new sewing machine, and so start a thriving little tailoring business.

A year later, she repays the amount, with interest. At which point, the original £20 is passed on to the next person in the group.

But if she doesn’t repay the loan – and here Yunus saw how to turn the village’s ‘social capital’, its trustworthiness and deep-rooted sense of community, into economic value – then the next person in the group, quite possibly her next-door neighbour, her sister or cousin, doesn’t get it either.

The result? This humbly named Bank Of The Village now has 2.3 million customers, and a portfolio worth a colossal £170 million- in one of the poorest countries on Earth.

There is something deeply moving about it, especially when you learn that the reliability of the Grameen Bank’s customers has proved to be virtually 100 per cent.

No greater contrast between our own inept but limitlessly greedy banks and Bangladesh’s Bank Of The Village could be imagined.

The failed fat-cat Cityboy still awards himself a £500,000 bonus for his own incompetence, while these trustworthy women care for every single cent of their precious £20 loan.

More than that, though, it is a humbling example of the way that trade – not aid – can help Africa lift itself out of poverty. Certainly, there is still much that we can do to help Africa help itself. We should act, and fast. But pouring billions more in aid won’t change a thing.

Moyo concludes her book with a wise old African proverb. ‘The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.’

By all means give to Comic Relief when the fun gets under way this Friday. It is a worthwhile humanitarian cause that makes a real difference to people in desperate circumstances.

But as for a long-term solution to Africa’s immense problems – that may require a new way of thinking.

DEAD AID by Dambisa Moyo (Allen Lane, £14.99). To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.

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‘U2 robbing world’s poor’

Bizarre one this! The Emerald Isle’s turning on their best known sons for the management of their massive moolah and their flooding of cash into external tax havens.

Street protests, even!

Maybe next they’ll finally realise how bad the U2 music is and protest about that!!

The billionaire quartet launch their new clutch of ditties this week on an LP called “No End To This Bullshit” or something like that.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/

Rock band U2 has been accused of robbing the world’s poorest people by storing some of its wealth in a tax haven.

On the eve of the launch of the group’s new album, No Line On The Horizon, protesters held a demonstration outside the Irish Department of Finance in Dublin.

U2 – frontman Bono, guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr – are depriving the Irish exchequer of much-needed revenue which could be spent on overseas aid, campaign group the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI) claims.

The band moved the company U2 Ltd, set up to deal with royalty payments, to a finance house in Holland in 2006 after the Irish Government scrapped an artist income tax exemption scheme. The new limit was capped at 250,000 euros (£223,000). Accounts for 2007 show U2 Ltd paid out more than 21 million euros (£19m) in wages.

Oxfam and Concern Worldwide are among 70 organisations involved in the coalition, which met Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan before protesters gathered. DDCI’s Nessa Ni Chasaide said: “We wanted to raise our concern that while Bono has championed the cause of fighting poverty and injustice in the impoverished world, the fact is that his band has moved part of its business to a tax shelter in the Netherlands.”

She added: “Tax avoidance and tax evasion costs the impoverished world at least $160 million (£142.5m) every year. This is money urgently required to bring people out of poverty.

“U2 is just one part of the problem. This is a much wider and systemic problem in our global financial system. Every company and individual has the responsibility to pay the right amount of tax.”

Mr Lenihan said: “We have tax treaties with other countries that regulate where you pay tax. There is a problem with smaller countries that have to set up deliberate tax havens. We are raising that at EU level.”

Andy Storey from justice group Afri said tax is a fundamental question of global justice.

He said: “Lost taxes in impoverished countries far outweigh what they receive from rich countries in aid. There are trillions of dollars stashed in tax havens. If that money was taxed in the countries where it was earned, governments would have their own resources to improve the lives of their people.”

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BBC love U2 Muzak (and Moolah!)

Amazing what throwing around a little moolah can do!

Free me from the dark dream, Candy bars, ice cream ….

uk.news.yahoo.com

Bosses at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have denied giving U2 free publicity by airing a series of programmes about the band.

Heads of the publicly-funded network have come under fire for broadcasting a string of shows about the Irish rockers across its radio and TV stations just days before the release of the group’s new album No Line On The Horizon on 2 March (09).

They even have a section of the BBC’s website dedicated to the sale of tickets for an upcoming U2 tour.

British politician Nigel Evans has called the coverage “the sort of publicity money can’t buy”, adding: “Why should licence fee-payers (public audiences) shoulder the cost of U2′s publicity?”

But the BBC maintains the shows fall within broadcasting regulations about promotional appearances.

A spokesperson says, “We take extreme care in making fair decision about how we make popular artists accessible to our audiences, especially when the timing is around the release of a new album, book, film.

“U2 are one of the world’s most popular bands who have a diverse fanbase and we are reflecting this in our content.”

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Bono monkey-man

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“Can’t we all just get the f**k along ?!”

At the Grammys – Bono

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“Can’t we all just get the f**k along ?!”

U2 – Get on Your Bike !

Free me from the dark dream, Candy bars, ice cream ….

Yap, it’s out there! The U2 machine’s a rollin onto the planet!

“Get on Your Boots” the lead single from U2′s upcoming album, No Line on the Horizon.

We’ve given it a few listens and it’s, well, predictably bland. Sounds the same as any number of songs – especially that “Vertigo” thing – they’ve rattled out in the past decades since they went all “youth” and “ironic” with “Achtung Baby”

The single was originally scheduled to be available as a download on 15 February, 2009, however, the band moved up the release due to reported leaks on the internet.

Damn that pesky internet! Expect news this week that U2′s management team have shut the entire internet down!

The physical format will be released on 16 February. We’ve got our order in already! (zero copies please, Mr Boner!)

More here – if you really want it! wiki/Get_on_Your_Boots

Lyrics here – if you really want em!

What wonderful style and content … imagine Sam Beckett crossed with Hank Bukowski crossed with Paris Hilton crossed with GW Bush crossed with a chimp suffering from migraine! This should win the Nobe Prize for Literature!!

Future needs a big kiss
Winds blow with a twist
Never seen a move like this
Can you see it too
Night is falling everywhere
Rockets hit the funfair
Satan loves a bomb scare
But it won’t scare you

Hey…Sexy Boots
Get on your Boots
Yeah…

Free me from the dark dream
Candy bars, ice cream
All the kids are screaming but the ghosts arent real
Heres what you gotta be
Love & community
Laughter is eternity if the joy is real

You dont know how beautiful
You dont know how beautiful
You are…
You dont know
You get it do you
You dont know
How beautiful you are…

If someones into blowing up
Were into growing up
Women are the future
All the big revelations
Ive gotta submarine
Youve got gasoline
I dont wanna talk about wars between nations
Not right now

Sexy Boots
Get on your Boots
Yeah…
Foxy boots

You dont know how beautiful
You dont know how beautiful
You are…

Sexy Boots
I dont wanna talk about wars

Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound
My God Im going down
I dont wanna drown now
Let me in the sound

Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound

Get on your Boots
Get on your Boots
Yeah…

Listen here – if you really wanna!

NOTE:

We do not host any files here. If this post contains a link to content hosted elsewhere, this is content found by a simple search on the worldwide freedom web. However, if for some valid reason, you object to a said content, or any content here, please let us know and we will remove the content in question.

Any content linked to here is only meant as a taster for the original work itself and is posted on the strict understanding that anyone who downloads the taster, deletes said content within 24 hours. We would assume that these fans will then buy the original work and we greatly encourage them to do so.

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Barack Obama’s “We Are One Concert” – 18 January 2009

Barack Obama’s “We Are One Concert”
18 January 2009
mp3/ 150mb

Some very strange contributors here – what the fuck are the likes of Jack Black and Marisa Tomei doing here? (unless perhaps Marisa did a spot of stripping as in “The Wrestler”!) – and a fair bit of muzak – Garth Brooks et al – but a historic document nonetheless.

Great to hear folk stalwart Pete Seeger perform the classic This Land with Bruce Springsteen, and the Boss perform the best song of the day in “The Rising”.

Where’s Bob Dylan though? We thought Obama was a big fan!

We never knew Boner and ‘Shakira the Screama’ were Americans!! They say you learn something new every day. With us, it’s once every year!

Man, it sure looked cold there! We hope ‘Shakira the Screama’ wore her thermal g-string!

Bey: “Are you grabbing my tit there, Brucie?”

Tracklisting

01. Various – Concert Intruducion.mp3″
02. Various – The Star Spangled Banner.mp3″
03. Denzel Washington – Speech.mp3″
04. Bruce Springsteen – The Rising.mp3″
05. Laura Linney & Martin Luther King III – Speech.mp3″
06. Mary J. Blige – Lean On Me.mp3″
07. Steve Carell & Jamie Foxx – Speech.mp3″
08. Bettye Lavette And Jon Bon Jovi – Long Time Coming.mp3″
09. Tom Hanks – Speech.mp3″
10. Marisa Tomei – Speech.mp3″
11. James Taylor, John Legend & Jennifer Nettles – Shower The People.mp3″
12. Joe Biden – Speech.mp3″
13. John Mellencamp – Pink Houses.mp3″
14. Queen Latifah – Speech.mp3″
15. Josh Groban & Heather Headley – Freedom Ring.mp3″
16. Kal Penn & George Lopez – Speech.mp3″
17. Herbie Hancock, Will.I.Am & Sheryl Crow – One Love.mp3″
18. Tiger Woods – Speech.mp3″
19. Renee Fleming – Medley.mp3″
20. Jack Black & Rosario Dawson – Speech.mp3″
21. Garth Brooks – American Pie-Shout-We Shall Be Free.mp3″
22. Ashley Judd & Forest Whitaker – Speech.mp3″
23. Usher, Stevie Wonder, & Shakira – Higher Ground.mp3″
24. Samuel L. Jackson – Speech.mp3″
25. U2 – Pride (In The Name Of Love)-City Of Blinding Lights.mp3″
26. Various – Bald Eagles Presentation.mp3″
27. Barack Obama – Speech.mp3″
28. Pete Seeger With Bruce Springsteen – This Land.mp3″
29. Beyonce & Cast – America The Beautiful.mp3″
30. Various – Concert Credits.mp3″

Beyoncé – America The Beautiful
“We Are One Concert”

Beyoncé [LIVE] America The Beautiful (Obama Inaugural)
Uploaded by mims_06

We found a link for this historic bootleg … that means it’s not our link, Internet Nazis!

http://rapidshare.com/files/186346215/O … .18.09.zip

Thanks GG

Note: The poster adds;
My version of Winrar does not like the ” in the directory name. To extract it, I manually created a target folder, then in Winrar opened the archive & the il-named folder within. The I selected all and told it to extract to the destination folder. Before clicking OK, I clicked on the Advanced tab and told it “do not extract paths”.

NOTE:

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Any content linked to here is only meant as a taster for the original work itself and is posted on the strict understanding that anyone who downloads the taster, deletes said content within 24 hours. We would assume that these fans will then buy the original work and we greatly encourage them to do so.

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Bono – Notes From the Chairman

from
http://www.anjindesign.com

Are we really saying this? Guess we are! Anyway, a very nice piece below from Bono in the NY Times.

He speaks about the duality of great songs, of great singers, interpretive skills, and New Years Eve, all in the context of the timeless Frank Sinatra and the timeless “My Way”.

Here’s a 1968 recording of the Chairman rattling off this classic, accompanied by loads of great Sinatra snapshots, including loads of Sinatra babes!

Sinatra. My way
Uploaded by Corsica1968

Christian Marclay, untitled collage, 1984. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery

http://www.nytimes.com

Once upon a couple of weeks ago …

I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Interesting mood. The new Irish money has been gambled and lost; the Celtic Tiger’s tail is between its legs as builders and bankers laugh uneasy and hard at the last year, and swallow uneasy and hard at the new. There’s a voice on the speakers that wakes everyone out of the moment: it’s Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” His ode to defiance is four decades old this year and everyone sings along for a lifetime of reasons. I am struck by the one quality his voice lacks: Sentimentality.

Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability.

A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.”

That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.”

Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.

As the year rolls over (and with it many carousers), the emotion in the room tussles between hope and fear, expectation and trepidation. Wherever you end up, his voice takes you by the hand.

•

Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.

We had spent some time in his house in Palm Springs, which was a thrill — looking out onto the desert and hills, no gingham for miles. Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis. And plenty of talk of jazz. That’s when he showed me the painting. I was thinking the circles were like the diameter of a horn, the bell of a trumpet, so I said so.

“The painting is called ‘Jazz’ and you can have it.”

I said I had heard he was one of Miles Davis’s biggest influences.

Little pithy replies:

“I don’t usually hang with men who wear earrings.”

“Miles Davis never wasted a note, kid — or a word on a fool.”

“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.

If.

•

If you want to hear the least sentimental voice in the history of pop music finally crack, though — shhhh — find the version of Frank’s ode to insomnia, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” hidden on “Duets.” Listen through to the end and you will hear the great man break as he truly sobs on the line, “It’s a long, long, long road.” I kid you not.

Like Bob Dylan’s, Nina Simone’s, Pavarotti’s, Sinatra’s voice is improved by age, by years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels. As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story, of course.

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.

Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.

In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Don Costa arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

This is our moment. What do we hear?

In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.

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Bono Reads ‘Notes From the Chairman’

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Bono, lead singer of the band U2 and co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

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Larry Mullen claims ‘Bono’s friendship with war criminals makes me cringe’

Who’d have thunk it! The smartest person in U2 (though that of course is damning with very faint praise indeed!) turns out to be stickman Larry Mullen!

He talks about Bono cavorting with jug-eared war-monger Tony “I don’t care” Blair and numbskulled war-monger GW “this’ll make daddy happy” Bush!

Man, this guy finds Bono as annoying as we do! Nice work stickman!

There’s a rather interesting reference in the article below too to a writer we like, Paul Theroux, who has described Bono, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as “mythomaniacs“! So, Angelina’s a nymphomaniac? Wow, there’s a real shocker!!

What about Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage? Are they “mythomaniacs” too? Or nymphomaniacs?

http://www.independent.ie

By Anne-Marie Walsh
December 29 2008

U2 drummer Larry Mullen has admitted he “cringes” when he sees Bono associating with “war criminals” George W Bush and Tony Blair.

The normally reserved musician has launched a stinging attack on his frontman for his involvement with the two world leaders in an interview with music magazine Q.

It is not the first time Mullen has criticised Bono for his campaign work, but this is his most scathing criticism to date. From his appearance at Live Aid and Band Aid in the 1980s, Bono has been involved in numerous charities to raise awareness of crises in Africa, including AIDs.

He praised Mr Bush for increasing aid to Africa and most recently appeared with him during the G8 summit last year. In 2007, he also saluted outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair for “doing the things he believed in”, despite the “accusations of a slick PR machine, spin doctoring and the like”.

But his work outside the band has caused a deep rift between Bono and at least one other fellow band member.

In his interview, Mullen suggests the singer’s campaigns have taken their toll on his family life. He admitted that Bono is “prepared to use his weight as a celebrity at great cost to himself and his family, to help other people”, adding: “but, as an outsider looking in, I cringe.”

He brands Mr Blair and Mr Bush “war criminals”.

“Tony Blair is a war criminal and I think he should be tried as a war criminal.

“Then I see Bono and him as pals and I’m going, ‘I don’t like that’. Do I think George Bush is a war criminal? Probably — but the difference between him and Tony Blair is that Blair is intelligent. So, he has no excuse.”

Six years ago, in an interview on American TV, Mullen said he believed Bono’s political crusades were unsettling the band. He told the ’60 Minutes’ programme that the lead singer’s absence was felt each time he took a break to campaign on issues.

“It does interfere with the band,” he said. “It’s a four-legged table, and with one leg missing, even for short periods of time, the thing becomes a little unstable.”

Bono has also come under attack from critics less close to home, including writer Paul Theroux.

Mr Theroux described Bono, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as “mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth”.

He said he was not complaining about humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs.

“Instead, I am speaking of the ‘more money’ platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labour and debt relief.”

The U2 singer responded by calling his critics “cranks carping from the sidelines”.

“A lot of them wouldn’t know what to do if they were on the field,” he said.

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Hallelujah: Why your version is the best

Another piece on Lenny’s sublime Hallelujah, which surreally, thanks to the effects of dilution (the process started with the saccharine Jeff Buckley version on the Grace LP and has never let up, as the song has become – and still becomes – ever more and more diluted!) and having a slew of awful reality show contestants and other muzak mongers recently abuse the song, scooped the Christmas No 1 and 2 slots in UK via X Factor winner, Alexandra Burke, and the late Jeff Buckley.

We’re not sure we see any logic in the argument being espoused in the article below though. On numerous occasions, we’ve first heard a song via a cover-version and have in most cases, having later sought out the original, found that to be even better.

As for the rather ridiculous matter of “best version” of Hallelujah, any real music fan will know that the two original versions by Lenny are clearly best!

There’s also a vid here for a 1995 version from Lord Bono, which the article writer hates, but we find interesting and kinda like – well, it’s far better than most of Bono’s output and far better than 90% of the awful covers of this masterpiece.

Hallelujah: Why your version is the best

from timesonline.typepad.com

Whose version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is the best? I think there is a political dimension to this question.

Jeff Buckley? Sheryl Crow? Alexandra Burke? Rufus Wainwright? Leonard Cohen? Each has their own interpretation and each their partisan. So let me put forward a theory about why people prefer a particular artist.

They heard that artist sing the song first. (This isn’t true of absolutely every single person and every song, but true of most people and most songs).

When people hear a song they like and become attached to it, they will never enjoy a cover quite as much. The reason is that they anchor to the original. All other versions are departures from the version they fell in love with.

If I compare Rufus Wainwright to Jeff Buckley, I start with the Wainwright. Buckley seems underpowered. But for those who start with the Buckley version, the Wainwright may seem arch.

As Dan Ariely explains at the beginning of Predictably Irrational, we make choices by making comparisons. To do this we need to establish an anchor point.

The political dimension? Well, why does Gordon Brown appear to be soaring when he is in fact behind in the polls? And why are the Tories being asked where they would cut spending when in fact they plan increases? The answer is the same in both cases, it is that the position is compared to the anchor points – the 20 point Tory lead and the Government’s spending plans.

So that’s how you select your favourite Hallelujah version. That, and the fact that it isn’t this truly terrible version by Bono.

Posted by Daniel Finkelstein

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Bono Simpson

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Greedy Muzak Monsters U2

For U2, Live Nation Deal Rocks

Band’s Stock Sale Will Cost Company Millions

from the Wall Street Journal

DECEMBER 18, 2008, 11:50 A.M. ET

By ETHAN SMITH

The Irish rock band U2 hasn’t toured since 2006, but it stands to make $25 million in a sweetheart stock deal, according to SEC filings Wednesday and people familiar with the matter.

In March, the band struck a 12-year deal with Live Nation Inc., that called for the concert promotion giant to pay U2 partly with stock. Live Nation promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to high-profile artists in exchange for several years’ worth of revenue from a broad range of their work, including concerts, online fan clubs and t-shirt sales. The idea was pitched as a novel way to make money in the ailing music business.

The company had held up the stock component of the U2 deal as evidence of the band’s faith in Live Nation, as well as confidence in its new business model.

But that faith was shaken Wednesday when the band moved to sell the shares, forcing Live Nation to make up an estimated $19 million in losses.

Live Nation had guaranteed that U2 would receive $25 million for 1.6 million shares. But the current market value was just $6.1 million at the close of trading Wednesday. That leaves Live Nation on the hook for the balance, which the company said Wednesday in a SEC filing it would pay with cash on hand or borrowed money.

There could be more bad news coming from another of the company’s marquee acts: Madonna. In April, Madonna is eligible to sell $25 million of stock under the terms of her contract, even though the stock’s market value has plunged 83% since she struck her deal in October 2007.

Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino sought to play down the significance of the stock sales. “Madonna and U2 are the only two deals that did contain this provision,” he said. “The Madonna business is great, and we look forward to monetizing our investment in U2 next year.”

Madonna’s current “Sticky & Sweet” world tour is the pop star’s first outing since she signed her 10-year, $120 million deal with Live Nation.

Live Nation expects to start recouping its investment in U2 when the band begins a planned tour next year and releases its 12th album.

Reached in London, where U2 is wrapping up work on the forthcoming album, band manager Paul McGuinness said: “We’re very much in business with [Live Nation] and we’re planning to tour in 2009.”

Madonna and U2 were the first of six superstar acts whom Live Nation has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars each for several years’ worth of revenues. Jay-Z, Nickelback and Shakira are among the other artists with whom Live Nation has deals.

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Bono McFlasher

McFlasher’s at least better than that dumb McPhisto thing he used to do !

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Leggo Me Ego

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Bow Before MEEE

by Roykeanz

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Missus Macca

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Show of no hands !

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Bono, Macca and Ringo

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