Cranked-up guitars and sobering statistics shared a Central Park audience of more than 60,000 people on Saturday at the Global Citizen Festival, a five-hour concert on the Great Lawn devoted to ending extreme poverty worldwide. The concert was also webcast internationally.

JOHN LEGEND – Imagine

The headliner was Neil Young with Crazy Horse, the band that has perfected rock as a primordial stomp. Sharing the lineup were guitar-driven bands that have obviously listened closely to Mr. Young through the years: Foo Fighters, the Black Keys and Band of Horses. It was a narrow, old-school, all-male slice of rock, with a hint of internationalism for starters: the rapper and singer K’Naan, who was born in Somalia and now lives in Canada. An unannounced guest, John Legend, sang John Lennon’s vision of global citizenship, “Imagine.”

NEIL YOUNG complete set

FOO FIGHTERS complete set

The concert was scheduled around the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week. The festival’s organizers used a social media campaign as a means of helping educate concert-goers about global issues including child mortality, polluted drinking water, malaria and other ills that confront the world’s poor.

Concertgoers received free tickets by enrolling an e-mail address with Global Citizen and then performing certain actions through the Web site, including watching videos, spreading information via social media and doing something for a partner organization.

THE BLACK KEYS – Part 1

THE BLACK KEYS – Part 2

THE BLACK KEYS – Part 3

THE BLACK KEYS – Part 4

BAND OF HORSES – The Funeral

K`NAAN – Waving Flag

During equipment changes there were video clips, activists and celebrities — among them Katie Couric, Selena Gomez, Olivia Wilde and Katharine McPhee, as well as the economistJeffrey D. Sachs — detailing poverty-related death tolls and efforts to change them. The concert’s hosts called for actions like sending a poverty-related tweet to the presidential candidates.

Quelle: DS/ Huffington Post, NY Times