In case you live in a cave, this past Saturday was Live Earth, Al Gore’s musical awareness-raiser for his Global Warming banner issue. The concert featured live performances of some of the most famous, and some not so much, bands on all 7 continents: Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Antarctica, Hamburg, London, Johannesburg, Rio de Janiero, Washington DC, and New York. There’s a very tainted Wiki for Live Earth, but it does delve out the criticism that has been flying around about Live Earth in comparison to other concerts in this vein- tickets were sold instead of making it a free event, they weren’t clear money raising goals, and the event purely served to raise awareness, which is hard to measure. That said, they got a huge amount of eyeballs on the issue: a huge live attendance, a decent TV audience, and it set records for online streaming.

Highlights:

Sydney: Wolfmother/White Unicorn. They broke out the dual guitar. This guy has a great voice.

Tokyo: Linkin Park/In The End. The crowd is crazy for LP. They are doing something right. And Chester read a letter to the crowd about the issue at hand in broken Japanese.

Tokyo: Rihanna/Umbrella. I once wrote her off as just another R&B chick, but she is a really great performer. Plus she gets props for really singing.

Tokyo: Rize. Wondering where all of the rock stars went? They’re in Tokyo.

Antarctica: Nunatak/How Many People. Brrrrr. Other good choices might have been Arctic Monkeys, Snow Patrol, Coldplay, Bjork….

Hamburg: Chris Cornell/Black Hole Sun.

London: Metallica/Nothing Else Matters. Check out Kirk Hammet’s ouija board guitar.