Tony McGuinness:"Please don

[Johnny]

By Tony McGuinness (1/3 of Above and Beyond)

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea ... =375568382

Tuesday, April 08, 2008


"Please don’t go to Beirut, are you mad????"

Now I don’t know about you, but that kind of comment (posted publicly on MySpace) is usually all the incentive I need to do something. Its typical of a knee jerk, binary, black and white view of the world that really irritates me.
Sure, you can get blown up in Beirut.
As you can in London and New York and just about anywhere these days.
But are we to live our lives defined by that fear?
If we did I’d never leave the house.
So we played in Beirut last Friday and, 1 million people in Rio on NYE notwithstanding, it was one of the best gigs we’ve done anywhere. More than 5,000 people in a big modern venue with state of the art production, state of the art sound and, believe it or not, state of the art people. Which when you’ve spent any time in Beirut, or New York or London, is preceisely what you’d expect.
What you might not expect was the topic of conversation during the dinner we enjoyed before the gig high in the mountains above Beirut, a beautiful, sold out restaurant with uniformed valet parking for the huge number of luxury vehicles driven up the winding road past exclusive summer homes and boutiques. A group of eight friends, representatives of all three holy land religions and more, united by music. One of the Christians there told me his best friend and he had been clubbing for four years before they realised one was a muslim and one a Catholic. They’d had too much else to talk about. I’m not trying to say that music is important and religion unimportant: clearly that is not the case. What I’m trying to say is that we need to develop a world view that is more colourful than the black and white, simple-soundbite, scrolling headline view you get sold by the media. What’s important is that you take the news with a pinch of salt.
I remember watching "Munich" with an American friend of mine a year or so ago and at one point she said "I don’t get it; who are the bad guys and who are the good guys??"
We are all the good guys. We are also all the bad guys.
Life is thankfully much more complicated than that.
So thanks to Johnny and co. for reminding me of which way the world really spins.

Thank you Tony for this impressive post on your blog. Once again we prove to the world that we are not the country the worldwide media gives the image of. I cannot add or comment more on what Tony has said about us and Lebanon. Thank you again for giving the world the true and wonderful picture of Beirut!

*speechless*

[Raneem]

full respect

[Qulture]

[crow]

[OBie]

[DJ_TRACID]

[Icepick]

[A-Cube]

[lebanese_raver]

[Fawzi]

[TranceFusion]

[Tala]

[Nicoco]

[TNT]

[mzy]