LIVE EARTH - Where was the dance music??

You know, I was expecting that I was going to get a juicy blog entry out of the LIVE EARTH concerts that took place this weekend. Seven continents, a bunch of concerts, dozens of headline acts, all working to promote environmental awareness. Surely there would be somebody worth talking about, right??

WRONG!!



Well, not entirely wrong. There were certainly some awesome performances, but none from dance artists. What gives?!?! I mean, okay... I understand that dance music doesn't provide a lot of marquee names in the USA, so it made sense that the New York concert focused on rock and R&B acts like Bon Jovi, Akon, Ludacris, Dave Matthews Band... but in overseas countries, where dance music is undeniably HUGE (quite possibly one of the MOST popular genres), there was still no dance music representation.

Okay, I admit that I'm not 100% familiar with all of the acts... it's entirely possible that some of the performers - in China or Japan, for example - are dance artists I've simply never heard of. But it doesn't seem that way! Look at Germany, the country that basically birthed trance music... you'd think the organizers would have one of their high-profile DJs out there! Yeah, yeah... I know that here most people find DJ sets to be "boring" to watch, but in Europe they eat up festivals like that!

I don't know, I just found it rather odd. Given how huge dance music is overseas, you would have thought that there would be some divas and divos performing. Ironic, too: the premise of the Live Earth concerts was to show a cross-cultural sense of unity... but the organizers seemed to select acts based around strictly Americanized ideas of "popular music."

Oh well... at least Madonna closed the UK show with "Hung Up." You can always rely on the Queen of the Dance Floor to get the crowd moving... even when she's an exception!

She also performed "Hey You," the charity single written specifically for the concert... check out the link:




What do you guys think? Why did dance fans get the short end of the stick during the Live Earth shows? Or can any of you identify dance acts that I might have missed??

Love,
JADE