In 2017, shortly after the unthinkable happened, a different unthinkable happened. As a former resident of Charlottesville, it confounded me the place of love and inclusion that I love could be turned into a symbol for hatred and racism. It seems one can import evil into anywhere.

Shortly after those horrific events, and the completely senseless death of Heather Heyer, a concert was staged to raise money for local charities, and to try to fill Charlottesville with love again. This concert was called A Concert for Charlottesville.

It featured a slew of artists, all of which put on phenomenal performances. For my money, I think The Roots and Justin Timberlake were the highlights, but I enjoyed almost every artist that participated.

The concert was simulcast/livestreamed to several websites, and thanks to the magic of youtube-dl, I was able to capture it in its entirety.

Though I doubt that I am in posession of the only copy of this concert, I have yet to stumble across another copy of the entire concert in the wild.

I brought this up on a recent ATP as one of my most prized media posesssions. I noted that I had been considering putting it on archive.org, but I feared the legal repercussions. I don’t want to put it on YouTube, because I’m not looking to make money off of my recording; I simply want to share what I think was a very special concert that was borne of a very shitty time.

In thinking about this some more, I’ve decided to upload my file to archive.org. I haven’t a clue if it’ll last more than a week, especially after I call attention to it with this blog post. But this concert is too good to be sitting only on my Plex.

Last I tried it, streaming it off archive.org didn’t work too well, so I’d strongly recommend completing the ~13GB (!) download, and playing it locally. Assuming they weren’t stripped, I also added chapter marks for each artist’s set, and in some cases, each song in each artist’s set.

Regardless, if you want to give it a shot, you can find A Concert for Charlottesville on archive.org.

If you’re interested in donating as a thanks to these artists, the official website is still up, and accepting donations.