Youtube do dia: Beds Are Burning, the remake

Submitted by Rick Eyre on October 3 2009, 9:09 am

In 1987 Midnight Oil released one of the greatest songs about Australia ever recorded. A song forever associated, through its chorus, with the campaign for indigenous land rights, the official music video a work of art in itself which is, frame by frame, etched into my brain and that of many other Australians of grandchild-bearing age.

It would be very easy to dismiss the remake, released on Thursday, of "Beds Are Burning" as an insipid, superficial desecration of the original, which from an artistic point of view it surely is. But it has been done in the name of a compelling cause - advocating a meaningful agreement of world leaders at December's UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

For that reason alone, I present the video here. Feel free to disagree with me on its artistic merit in the comments field below.