| Hello everyone, welcome back from the Holiday craze.
Sing this: "Andy Partridge in a pear tree."
Driving back to Northampton on a late-night Giftmas Eve I found an old XTC cassette tape in my car and listened to English Settlement. Great music to accompany the thinly populated roads.
One present that I received the other day was the DVD of both full Live Aid concerts and the Band Aid / U.S. for Africa videos.
Upon watching a good part of the first disc, two things became apparent to me.
1.) We Are The World is better than I had remembered and all the people who sing on it, are really good singers. Especially Cindy Lauper. Awesome. (Band Aid featured no females).
2.) In recent years, I haven't seen any musicians really kind of put themselves out there in any kind of "real" way. What do I mean?
Well, there is one point, for example in the Live Aid concert, where Phil Collins comes out to play piano and sing Against All Odds. He clearly is kind of nervous about doing so, he even says, before starting, something like, let's see if I can make it through this. He does fine, one little piano missnote - accompanied by a pained grimmace. Then he and Sting do a version of Every Breath You Take that includes some sour notes here and there.
It was great. But, doesn't it seem like you would never see this kind of thing these days? Doesn't it seem like the current stars of music would never allow themselves to be portrayed in any way that would make them seem merely human? Can you imagine anyone from today's hit factories who would step out on a stage in front of all those people and tv cameras and perform anything that wasn't totally worked over and over and choreographed? I can't.
Who ever would have thought that we would be reminiscent of the "human-ness" of the music of the eighties?!?! Sheesh, what has become of us?
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