Dark Was the Night – Red Hot Compilation
Good grief this is like a gigantic great indie-kid wet dream. The short story: this has been put together by Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National and released on 4AD to benefit the Red Hot Organisation, an AIDS/HIV project.
From a musical point of view, you really couldn’t ask for a better snapshot of this particular moment in independent music. It’s phenomenal, from the amazing Feist and Ben Gibbard collaboration, to the gorgeous Iron & Wine, to all the other curiosities and unreleased gems they have managed to pull together. Compilations like this are usually either done by labels, hence limiting their scope, or by marketeers, hence polluting their musical potential with populsim.
This one appears to be largely free of that – or at least, it has the confidence to target the indie audience with genuine flair. Rather than just slapping on songs by all the box-ticked big sellers on Amazon, they seem happy to assume that we either all know who Dave Sitek, Kevin Drew and Stewart Murdoch are, or at least that we are capable of finding out, and hence is able to absolutely pepper the playlist with genuine jewels of curiosity for those of us with indie inclinations.
So, really, there’s no excuse not to buy one. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t buy one then you’re a fucking idiot, because there’s just so much on here to love. Get ten indie kids round a table, and I bet they’d all have different hits and different misses from this, and that is a very, very good thing.
Oh, and have you heard of HIV denialists? There are people who deny that HIV causes AIDS, and insist that the whole thing is one Big Pharma conspiracy to sell more drugs. This was even the official position of the South African government for some time, which basically led the Mbeki administration to allow the deaths of over three hundred thousand of its own citizens by refusing to participate in emergency medical relief programs.
As if African AIDS patients didn’t have enough on their plate with Western homeopaths exploiting their conditions for money. Homeopathy is basically the administration of either water or a sugar pill, entirely devoid of active ingredients, accompanied by hilarious claims of medical efficacy. It works, according to Jack Killen, the Acting Deputy Director of the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine “beyond current understanding of chemistry and physics”. This is a claim which would be ludicrous enough, were it not for the fact that actually it doesn’t work at all, never mind by what mechanism. As the same fellow states: “There is, to my knowledge, no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment”.
In the Western world homeopathy is generally just a tax on ignorance, or the self-indulgence of the worried well, and easy to ignore. In Africa it is basically exploiting the suffering of people, who do not count in the West, in order to profit from their illness. And then letting them die.
Just in case you didn’t think it was important to make a contribution in this particular case.
Feist w. Ben Gibbard – Train Song
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The Books w. Jose Gonzalez – Cello Song
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Stuart Murdoch – Another Saturday
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