Photo: Getty Images
If it isn't enough that Radiohead consistently create some of the most beautiful, unpredictable music of the last twenty years, or that the band has taken on the record industry (proving that given the chance people actually want to pay for music), now they're out to save the world.
Thursday the band released the video (below) for the song "All I Need" (from 2007's In Rainbows), which tackles the issue of human trafficking. Shot in collaboration with MTV EXIT (End Exploitation and Trafficking), the video was broadcast globally on MTV, MTV2, mtvU, MTV Tr3s, MTV Hits, and MTV.com, and it has the potential to be seen in more than 560 million households worldwide.
Thom Yorke says of the clip, which aims to raise awareness regarding the more than 2.5 million men, women, and children somehow involved in prostitution or various forms of illegal, unsafe, or unethical labor:
They've produced a video of two parallel stories running, one of a little boy in the West and one of a little boy in a sweatshop in the East, and the boy [in the West] ends up buying the shoes from the sweatshop. It's actually quite powerful. It's the sort of images I have in my head anyway. Sometimes when you're walking down High Street and you're looking at the incredibly cheap [sneakers], you sort of think, 'Hmmm, well how did they manage to make that so cheaply?"
The band has also recruited anti-human trafficking activists to distribute information at each stop on their upcoming world tour.
Going to a Radiohead concert this summer? Find a way to reduce your carbon footprint at the same time. The band commissioned the analysts at Best Foot Forward to determine the carbon footprint of two of their 2007 shows. The results revealed that fans traveling to and from the shows make the greatest impact on the CO2 generation of a tour.
In hopes of reducing negative environmental effects, the band is scheduling shows in city centers to increase the likelihood of fans using public transportation. Concert goers can log onto Radiohead.com to learn about travel options to concert venues and use an online calculator to find out which methods of transportation generate the greatest and least amount of CO2. Last, Radiohead's production crew will be blogging about tactics they are employing to reduce their own carbon footprint without compromising the quality of the shows.
--NOAH MICHELSON
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