Well, I missed Live 8 this weekend; or it went right past me, rather. These days, I seem to be catching up with the world instead of living in it. Visual reminders of the present are all around me; but they flicker in a sphere of some remove, while the sounds of the past, close up and intimate, continue to envelop and move me. The world of today often appears to be a realm apart, not an actuality that envelops me. Even if it calls out to me, I can rarely be reached for comment.
So, the spectacle of Live 8 has passed me by. Of course, mass-mediated fund-raising efforts and public appeals are nothing new; they certainly precede television. There was Kate Smith, for instance, who raised millions for defense on US radio during the war loan drives of the 1940s. US programs like the Treasury Star Parade produced plays and staged musical numbers expressly for that purpose.
Not long after VJ Day, public service announcements encouraged listeners to assist financially in the rebuilding of Europe, to give to civilians who, not too long ago, were to be thought of, if at all, as adversaries and extensions of enemy forces.
War and peace propaganda aside, radio audiences were often urged to contribute to their communities and be socially responsible; they were reminded that careful listening meant responding and interacting, even though the actions to be taken were dictated to them.
Undoubtedly, Live 8 is creating the greatest gathering of individuals being sold on a latter-day Borrioboola Gha—a distant, indistinct mass of people unified in hunger and deserving of charity, provided the image of “Africa,” its local needs and multiple identities can be commodified, packaged and transmitted globally as a relatable tune.
I can recall the Band Aid efforts of 1985. Excited as I was by the idea of becoming part of a transnational musical bloc party, I never thought much about the cause behind it nor made any contribution other than showing up for it at an open-air concert in Cologne, Germany.
Today, making a spontaneous, one-time donation is as easy as pressing a button on your mobile phone; but can the incongruous, televised images of musical entertainers and starving children assist in making complex geopolitical situations, post-colonial legacies and neo-Imperialism more transparent, or even in making millions elsewhere matter at home?
Can an image truly say more than a thousand bytes of sound? Presumably, the fleeting utterances airwaved on live radio appeal to the emotion more than print or visual media, which encourage closer scrutiny and permit re-examination—the remove of reason. Radio, it has been argued by Marshall McLuhan and his followers, is a fascist medium. It is the fabled tribal drum, a sonic leveler—enchanting, reverberating and hammering home.
Indeed, the aural medium strikes me as a more immediate, more readily suggestive propagandistic tool than other mass media. Sure, television or computer screens, too, can reach the multitude-as-individuals with whatever messages they are employed to convey; but the eye, opening up a world, also keeps it at a distance. We look on, stare or gawk at something other than and outside of ourselves; even our own image, once televised or screened, becomes strange to us.
Unlike the eye, my ear brings the world home, making even the infinite seem intimate. Whatever “eager droppings” spill over the “porches of my ear” melt into me, become me. I take sound in, am taken in, and, thus taken, am carried away—by force and by choice—from the image empire of today. I am listening, away.
[Last revised 25 January 2025]
Harry Heuser 