Brownian Commotion
At last a pop star is prepared to tell the blunt truth about third world poverty. And no, his name isn't Bono.
Eamonn McCann, 15 Oct 2007
What a splendid fellow former Stone Roses front-man Ian Brown turns out to be.
Interviewed about his new solo album, The World Is Yours, the charismatic Mancunian has this to say about world poverty: “I get angry about how African kids have to live. I thought the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005 was a real missed opportunity... I didn’t like the way Bono and Geldof hijacked the summit demo with their pop party. The only result was that Pink Floyd sold a few million more albums.”
He continued: “People have to realise you don’t help African children singing along to 60-year-old men playing their tunes from 40 years ago. It was like 1750 all over again: we are the great white do-gooders. If there is another G8 meeting, there should be a court order banning Pink Floyd or Geldof or Bono from leaving their houses until it’s over.”
I don’t see how any sentient being could disagree with that. The World Is Yours is on release right now. Form a queue.
Barbara Ehrenreich (everybody must read her Nickel and Dimed, the best book about America published in the past decade) says she feels uneasy at airports now that she looks like a lesbian.
She took a ride on this train of thought after pondering the case of Senator Larry Craig, who, as noted in the last issue, was caught short of a convincing explanation when apprehended by a cop for making foot and hand movements of an ambiguous nature in the rest-room of Minneapolis airport.
Says Barbara: “For the last six years, between September ‘01 and today, my main airport worry was that I might look or act like a terrorist. No dangling earrings or dark lipstick, was my rule, though I had no hard evidence that female terrorists prefer them. No anxious glances at the uniformed personnel.
No tantrums when security confiscated my eyeliner. But now I see that my efforts to look less like a terrorist might have made me look more like a, heaven forfend, lesbian.”
Now she wonders whether, if she waggled her hands to make the rest-room blow-drier work, a female fuzz-person might leap from a stall and cuff her.
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