Live Off

A big thank you to Holy Moly's Cunts Corner for perfectly expressing my feelings about Bob Geldof, and Live 8 in general:

As if listening to your piss-poor proto-punk wasn't punishing enough.

Now we have to see your smug, hedge-haired head popping up all over the place telling us we don't care quite as much as you do about the world's ills and people's freedoms - how about people's freedom to legally sell things on Ebay? Eh? Not so happy then are you?

What you've actually done is turn a serious issue into something which dog-shit thick plebs can pretend they care about by watching Keane and Joss Stone with a hundred thousand other wristband-wearing irretrievable cunts before going home to do fuck all about it except bang on about how they were "part of shitting history."

We knew they were poor already, and we were ignoring it. We will know they are poor after the concert, and we still won't do anything about it. The whole concert and those fucking awful wristbands are just a huge sop to the guilty consciences of the affulent British public. People are going to have a great day out, see a great concert, spend a fortune on bottled water and t-shirts and commemorative bloody photo books, and somehow feel that just by being there they are making life somehow less wretched for millions of people who are starving to death or dying of HIV and other entirely preventable diseases.

Well you're not. Live 8 is just Bob bloody Geldoff lapping up the attention he craves and justifying it by telling people he's using channelling their attention to a good cause. He's not doing that, he's just channelling it into building up his own reputation and the hype for his meaningless concert.

By all means, feel free to make poverty history. But don't think that buying a smug little wrist band is going to achieve that.