INSTANT KARMA: SAVE DARFUR (album review)

Date: 29 June 2007 11:53:00

Amnesty International have just won my eternal devotion by sending me a review copy of the their new double CD - Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign To Save Darfur – which was released in the UK on Monday. I have recently signed up this blog to Amnesty's blogproject, the "e-Action Task Force", which is intended to get bloggers on-side and writing about Amnesty International and its human rights work. There were 3 copies of the album available for review, and I got lucky! And by extension so did you. Because I'm going to tell you how great it is, and then you're going to go and buy it.

First, though, a word of explanation on the crisis. Amnesty International is a global human rights movement which has released this album both to raise awareness of, and to raise funds towards mitigating, the infernal havoc that has arisen in Darfur in western Sudan. If your browser will let you, you can view the video below to give you more background on the crisis. Rape, terror and killing on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dead. 2.5 million displaced. Yes, 2.5 million. Emergencies don't come much bigger than this.

If you'd like to sign your own blog up to Amnesty or get involved on any other level, do go to their site.

Now to the music. I'd forgotten how good a songwriter John Lennon was. I didn't realise how long it had been since I lost track of my Lennon albums, so stepping back into the material was overwhelming. I was 15 again, all at once.

The finest performance on this album is Green Day's Working Class Hero, which is breathtaking. There isn't much more I can say about that one. If you're going to go to the Amnesty site and buy one track, that should be the one, but it'd be a shame to miss out on the rest. Some - and I realise I'm on thin ice here - actually seem to improve on the originals. Admittedly I'm a Cure fan anyway, but their version of "Love" is so good that it'll be a favourite of mine for some years I think. Some tracks are weaker than others - I'm not sure I'd have let Avril Lavigne anywhere near Imagine, for example. But then neither would I have sent Aerosmith off to perform with Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars, and their version of Give Peace A Chance totally ROCKS, so what the hell do I know?

I wonder who did get to hand out the songs. They either have very good taste or bloody good luck. Jack Johnson's version of Imagine is also, frankly, brilliant - genuinely hopeful, which is after all the song's intention (it's just hard not to sound miserable when you're singing it, that's all). The Jaguares do Gimme Some Truth in Spanish, which rocks; Big & Rich deliver an anthemic Nobody Told Me which will inevitably find its way onto a movie soundtrack somewhere. And on and on: REM, U2, Lenny Kravitz, Snow Patrol, Black Eyed Peas, there are THIRTY TWO tracks on the published album (and an extra ten available through iTunes). It's going to take you ages.

The really telling thing about this album is that there are many moments where you think "John would have loved that." That's how we come to think about iconic figures, it's as though we know them. But you can't blame me for that, this dude wrote amazing songs. You don't get airports named after you for nothing. What I'm trying to tell you is that it feels as though the artists contributing to this album were in touch with that feeling too, genuine fans of Lennon's work, and that swells through the music like a wave.

If all Instant Karma did was introduce a new generation to John Lennon's music, that would be plenty. As things stand, however, it has the potential to do a great deal more. So please do go out and buy it.