Monday, October 1, 2012

MUSIC TO STOP GLOBAL POVERTY

Global Citizen Festival, With Neil Young, to Combat Poverty

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
Global Citizen Festival Neil Young and Crazy Horse played in Central Park on Saturday as part of this event organized to combat poverty around the world. More Photos »

By
Published: September 30, 2012

  Cranked-up guitars and sobering statistics shared a Central Park audience of more than 60,000 people on Saturday at the Global Citizen Festival, a five-hour concert on the Great Lawn devoted to ending extreme poverty worldwide. The concert was also webcast internationally.

The headliner was Neil Young with Crazy Horse, the band that has perfected rock as a primordial stomp. Sharing the lineup were guitar-driven bands that have obviously listened closely to Mr. Young through the years: Foo Fighters, the Black Keys and Band of Horses. It was a narrow, old-school, all-male slice of rock, with a hint of internationalism for starters: the rapper and singer K’Naan, who was born in Somalia and now lives in Canada (and whose band included a female keyboardist). An unannounced guest, John Legend, sang John Lennon’s vision of global citizenship, “Imagine.”
Mr. Young’s set was molten and unkempt, yet it had his own kind of finesse. He and Crazy Horse, on their first tour since 2004, often huddled near the center of the stage, bobbing back and forth until their heads nearly touched, and their songs sometimes welled up out of a caldron of drone and distortion. 



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