Monday 16 February 2009



Dark Was The Night

Red Hot + Blue, the first charity compilation album that focused attention on AIDS epidemic, was released back in 1990, and featured contemporary artists reinterpreting the songs of Cole Porter.  It was (and still is) a magnificent collection of American music standards, but it also heralded the next wave of music activism after the novelty of massive Live Aid-esque concerts and melodramatic multi-musician sings-a-long singles began to wear thin on the music buying public.  Red Hot + Blue truly let the music speak for itself, and through the accompanying television special that used video from created by a number of renowned directors truly demonstrated how art and activism could interweave without minimizing the impact of the medium or the message.

The Red Hot Organization has been fighting the global spread of HIV through pop culture for 20 years now, and, with the release of Dark Was The Night today (tomorrow in North America), have brought us 20 different compilation albums spanning every genre from samba to soul.  For this 20th installment, The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner produced the album, collecting 31 exclusive tracks from a great number of today’s most prominent indie artists.  What’s great about the Red Hot compilations is the unique pairings and collaborations that come about from working on the music, and Dark Was The Night is no exception:  Fiest and Grizzly Bear, Feist and Ben Gibbard, Conor Oberst and Gillian Welch, and Antony and Bryce Dessner are just some of the highlights.  Also contributing new material are Yo La Tengo, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, Andrew Bird, and Spoon, as well as solo appearances from TV on The Radio’s Dave Sitek and Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch.

The songs have been available on a special Myspace site dedicated to the release since mid-January, with a new track featured every day right up to the release, but I decided not to listen and have tried to consciously avoid any exposure to the music.  Call me sentimental, but I remember back in 1990 when I first heard Red Hot + Blue how green and naive I was about Cole Porter’s contributions to popular music and the AIDS crisis, and how my eyes were opened to both aspects of the project, the music and the message alike.  I’m a little older now, a little wiser, and a little jaded, too, I might add, but I’m still interested in how popular culture interacts with the world around us.  I have a feeling that Dark Was The Night has the possibility of being another one of those watershed moments, this time for another generation.  I’ll be watching what happens next, after today, and hope that for a new generation of socio-conscious music fans, it truly is darkest before the dawn.

MP3: Jimmy Somerville “From This Moment On” (from Red Hot + Blue)
MP3: Grizzly Bear and Feist “Service Bell” (from Dark Was The Night)
Home: Red Hot Organization
Buy: Dark Was The Night





by J. Di Gioia | Comments Off

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under MP3, Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.