Red Hot and Clued In

Feature by John Carlin | 10 Feb 2009

Prior to the release of Dark Was the Night, Red Hot founder John Carlin explains the ever-present need to be vigilant about HIV and the ways that the creative industry can help bring it to the fore

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David Byrne is someone I will be eternally indebted to. I was an art critic in the 1980s at a time when most of the creative people in NY were incredibly affected by the issue of Aids. Many people I was friends with either died or were dying by the end of the decade, it was really quite traumatic. I came up with what, at the time, was a novel concept of doing a tribute album and asking contemporary musicians to cover the songs of Cole Porter, who was a closeted gay American songwriter. Prince was the first asked to participate, but his people told me he 'didn't do covers'. So I started thinking about other potential artists. David Byrne said ‘yes’ because the sister of his wife at the time had Aids and eventually died of it. That gave us the kudos we needed to push on.

The primary mission of Red Hot is Aids awareness. This is important because whilst HIV infection is not necessarily a death sentence, infection rates in the US and UK are actually rising. We focus on awareness because the scale of money required for research and real social care is so vast that a music industry project can’t really make a tremendous difference there. The unique thing about Aids is that compared to other diseases that have affected the planet to the same scale, Aids is entirely preventable. You can do things to lower your risk of getting cancer, or heart disease; but Aids can be 100 per cent prevented by various behavioural precautions such as practising safe sex. The people who are most at risk are essentially young people. Young people take their cues from popular musicians, so Red Hot tries to deal with this in cultural rather than institutional language.

My biggest critique of American approaches (and I can't comment on other states in this regard) is the mixing of so-called morality and health education. Fortunately, now the Bush administration has expired, things might improve. Bush tried to introduce his compassionate conservatism and one of the main areas in which he played that out was dedicating money to the issue of Aids in developing nations, with the caveat that they wouldn’t give money to organisations that were handing out condoms or promoting safe sex. He wanted to promote the idea of abstinence, but in a world of teenagers and raging hormones, that’s just not going to happen. We’re wired so it doesn’t happen.

Worldwide there are so many layers to the issue; safe sex awareness and distribution of low-cost condoms are essential. So are social programmes for people who are already infected so we can get low-cost or no-cost drugs to them. Beyond that, there’s a dimension to this problem at an economic and social level that has filled me with fear from the beginning of doing these projects. Potentially you have a generation of people who are sick and infirm. You have to treat them as individuals and try to prevent more people from being ill. But, really what you have is a kind of umbrella that opens out wider than just those infected. You’ve got elderly not being cared for because a generation of younger people are sick themselves. People who are sick can’t farm their land, can’t produce food. Also, in Africa there are other problems going on right now which are not conducive to improving the situation. Aids, poverty, hunger are all entwined conditions which have to do with our own monetary wellbeing. People don’t look at the big picture. I’m raising the issue now because I think things are going to get worse in the next few years, because we’re in a global economic crisis. The West will be focused primarily on maintaining its own standard of living and not so much with helping people outside. The long- and mid-term effect of that could be devastating.

I don’t delude myself into thinking that what Red Hot does in itself is going to change anything; it’s a voice in a chorus striving to make incremental change. There’s a vacuum of leadership in our society from an economic, political and social perspective. People in positions of authority in those spheres haven’t been enlightened in doing so over the past twenty or thirty years, it really has been creative people who have particularly given youth culture something a little bit more substantive to think about. I’ve been incredibly proud that I am fortunate to have had an idea which made sense at a given time and has become a lightning rod for other creative people and an audience to rally around. People remember the projects we’ve done years later, and that does make me proud. It’s a nice remembrance of my friends who have died from the disease but I also like to think I’ve contributed positively to music culture.

 

Dark Was the Night is released via 4AD on 16 Feb.

http://www.redhot.org