by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday I wanted to watch the big “Global Citizen”
telethon MS-NBC has been regularly promoting (and which I was startled to find
out has been going on since 2013 — I haven’t heard of it before probably
because I wasn’t a regular MS-NBC viewer until Donald Trump got elected
President and, as much as they harp on the Trump-Russia investigation, they’ve
still been an island of sanity in the spiraling madness this country is going
through under the rule of Führer
Drumpf!) even though I wasn’t absolutely sure when it would start (the promos
announced the start time as “3 p.m. Eastern” and I didn’t know whether they were
going to start it in real time, which would mean noon our time, or have we West
Coast viewers suck hind tit with a tape delay again) or how long it would be. I suspect Charles was
disappointed that the show lasted so long (seven hours) that we didn’t have a
chance to go out together until we took a short walk through the neighborhood
later in the evening, but I was glad I watched it because, despite some hideous
glitches, for the most part it erased the foul taste left in my mouth by the
“Hand in Hand” mini-telethon from September 12 that was supposed to raise money
to clean up the damage and repair things after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma
(which of course have now been joined by a third, equally destructive one,
Maria, that hit Puerto Rico and took out its entire electrical power system —
the current estimates are it’s going to take months to restore electrical service to the entire island,
a reminder of just how much on the fringes of nature our whole modern lifestyle
is and one disaster can literally
plunge us back into the Dark Ages).
The “Global Citizen” show lasted seven
hours — an hour-long “pre-show” from noon to 1 p.m. (featuring interviews with
a few musical celebrities who weren’t performing — including one, John Cougar Mellencamp, who probably should
have; he was shown performing a song called “Easy Target” about the ability of
police officers to shoot down African-Americans with impunity, a powerful piece
that would have been even more powerful except that in one of the most
boneheaded production decisions of all time, the powers that be at MS-NBC
decided to show a chorus of it, then cut to an interview between Mellencamp and
Joe Scarborough, then another chorus, then another bit of interview, and so on
— when it was introduced as a performance between Mellencamp and Scarborough I
had actually hoped they would play the song together, since Scarborough is a
pretty capable rock guitarist and singer who’s recently released a CD of his
own which he promoted on Stephen Colbert’s show the night he was interviewed
about his kerfuffle with
President Trump) and a concert that lasted just shy of six hours. The musical
guest list was quite impressive — Stevie Wonder (the only performer here who
also appeared on “Hand in Hand”), Pharrell Williams (whom I usually can’t stand
but who, largely because he was performing here as a guest artist with Wonder
and his band, came off beautifully), Green Day, The Chainsmokers, Andra Day,
The Lumineers, The Killers, rapper Big Sean and teen diva Alessia Cara
(actually, according to her Wikipedia page, she’s 21), who opened the show and
turned out to be one of the best performers on it.
She isn’t anywhere near as zaftig as Adele but she obviously has a figure and isn’t
starving herself to concentration-camp-survivor dimensions the way so many
other young women singers do. She performed three songs, “Here,” “Stay” and her
star-making hit “Scars to Your Beautiful,” a slashing attack on the whole cult
of thin = beautiful and a plea to her audience to accept themselves no matter what their bodies look like. (I love the message, but it
also happens to be a great song!) She was also dressed unassumingly — a white
T-shirt with the word “EMPATHY” on it in letters formed by lines in various
rainbow colors, and a loose-fitting pair of camouflage pants — and, like Adele,
Maren Morris and other singers of today I particularly like, she relied on the
power of her singing and her songwriting to make her effect instead of drowning
herself in gargantuan production numbers à la Beyoncé. Musically she’s yet another one of Melanie’s
children — though Melanie herself has been pigeonholed as the hippie girl who
sang “Beautiful People,” “Lay Down” and “Brand New Key,” she was actually a far
more wide-ranging artist than that and her example seems to have filtered down
through plenty of other women singer-songwriters since — Cyndi Lauper, Tori
Amos, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Lorde — who like Melanie have sung in high-lying
voices with fast vibrato and written songs that alternate between the deeply
philosophical and the childlike. I was very impressed with Alessia Cara even though I’d never
heard of her before, and I put up a tweet to that effect. There was one big
problem with this show: not only did MS-NBC run all their usual commercials
during it, they did not bother to
time the commercial interruptions to what was going on on stage — with the
result that a lot of songs were heard only in excerpt form and items we were promised appeared either not at all or only as fragments. The
first artist on the bill to be so afflicted was the second performer up,
Detroit rapper Big Sean — whom I actually rather liked: despite my general
loathing for rap as a form, he came off as better than most of the breed
because his rapping was slower and more lyrical than usual, his musical backing
reached back to the classic soul styles of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and lyrically
his songs hearken back to the early, socially conscious rappers like
Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy (and The Last Poets before them!) rather
than the awful pro-capitalist, pro-conspicuous consumption, anti-woman,
anti-Queer and anti non-Black people of color crap we’ve heard from most
rappers, especially the “gangstas,” ever since.
Next up were The Killers,
formed in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2002 (though for some reason Charles thought
they were from Salt Lake City — a big difference culturally even if they’re not that far apart
geographically!), who sounded to me like yet another attempt to be an American
U2 and who rather irked me because, in an event one of whose guiding issues was
women’s equality and access to education and business opportunities, the lead
singer was standing behind a three-foot-tall male symbol. The band included
three women backup singers who stood behind female symbols — and I rather grimly
joked that if someone ever does a documentary on The Killers’ backup singers
they could call it 20 Feet from Sexism. Their four songs — “Mr. Brightside,” “All These Things … ,” an excerpt
of “Read My Mind” (MS-NBC’s commercials struck again!) and “When You Were
Young” — were pleasant enough U2 pastiches. Next up was the Lumineers, who
formed in New Jersey in 2005 (though they now live in Denver) and are described
on Wikipedia as “folk-rock/Americana.” I think that comes off mostly in lead
singer/guitarist Wesley Schultz’ appearance: he came on wearing a big hat with
long, scraggly hair and a long beard under his chin even though his cheeks were
relatively clean-shaven, a physical look that alerted the audience (this member
of it, anyway): “You’re going to be hearing ‘Americana’!” They obliged with
some nice originals — if I had to come up with a capsule description of their
sound it would be The Band meets Coldplay (though maybe I was just thinking of
Coldplay because Chris Martin had done one of the celebrity cameos before the
Lumineers went on) — their songs were called “Sleep on the Floor,” “Ophelia,”
“Stubborn Love” and “Cleopatra,” and the most beautiful moment of their
performance was the quite lovely slow version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s
“Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” they used as an introduction to “Cleopatra” (the
title track of their latest, and according to the MC who introduced them their
most socially conscious, album).
Then, as part of the overall educational
purpose of the show, there was a segment about the history of lynching of
African-Americans in the U.S. which was placed to tie in with the next segment,
gospel-soul singer Andra Day singing — what else — “Strange Fruit,” the 1939
song written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym “Lewis Allen” and introduced
by Billie Holiday (who was inspired to sing it when her father, guitarist
Clarence Holiday, was in a car accident in the South and according to the
inflexible laws of segregation was taken past the emergency room of the whites-only
hospital and died before the ambulance driver could get him to the E.R. of the
Black hospital — this story eventually got conflated with the death of Bessie
Smith the same year, 1937, even though it is not how Bessie died). The segment would have worked the
way the concert organizers intended if Andra Day had sung the song simply and
straightforwardly, the way Billie did on her famous 1939 record (her biggest
hit to that point and the release that established the success of the
independent Commodore label, for whom she recorded it after her usual label,
Columbia, wouldn’t touch it). Billie’s chilling understatement drove every line
of the song home with the force of a thrown dagger penetrating a tree; Andra
Day made the mistake of throwing the full armamentarium of her professionally
trained gospel-soul voice — leaps, screams, “worrying” notes, improvising and
moaning — at “Strange Fruit”; technically she could have sung rings around
Billie but emotionally she almost totally missed the point. Day did considerably
better with her own songs, vehicles designed to take that kind of singing: “Stand Up for
Something,” “Rise Up” (comparable to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” and Yoko
Ono’s “Rising” as an inspiring anthem, even though you can write just a halfway
decent song around that title and concept and still make an uplifting effect) and a slice of “I Want It
All” (yet another of those damnable commercial breaks cut off most of that song
and gave us just the climax).
Next up were The Chainsmokers (Charles joked that
probably most people today don’t know what the phrase “chain smoker” means — it
means a smoker who smokes so continually s/he lights each new cigarette from
the dying embers of the previous one), who are listed on Wikipedia as “a
DJ/production duo” consisting of Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall. They were
probably the two sexiest guys on the whole show — before Taggart made his
appearance Pall came on in a white T-shirt and lime-green sweat pants, carrying
a pair of drumsticks and beating on various bits of electronic percussion as a
pre-recorded track of women vocalists and a dreamy pop backing played in the
background. Then Taggart entered, and he was wearing a white T-shirt and
skin-tight blue jeans that showed off an enviable basket (as had Pall’s sweat
pants). They were so far apart on the Central Park, New York stage that it was
difficult at times to tell just how many people there were in the band — I
counted three, a conventional drummer in addition to Taggart and Pall — or how
they related to each other. Perhaps reflecting their DJ origins, they blended
each of the songs they played into a set-long medley: “(I Want to Be) The One,”
“Closer,” “Honest,” “Paris,” “Something Just Like This” and “Don’t Let Me Down”
(the last song I probably would have liked better if they hadn’t ripped off the
title from a much better song by
The Beatles), and once again one of their songs got abysmally truncated by a
commercial interruption. They were considerably more fun to look at than to
listen to — indeed they came off as the closest group on the bill to a boy band
— though their music was appealing and lacked the aggressive ugliness of a lot
of what DJ’s who try to cross over into full-fledged music-making come up with.
Then came Green Day’s fairly extended set of eight songs covering most of their
career, and it was amusing how front man Billie Joe Armstrong changed his
guitar throughout the set to mirror the content of each song and what part of
his band’s history it came from. He started with a guitar painted to look like
an American flag, only in black-and-white — the red stripes were black and so
was the blue field on which the white stars appeared — which I believe was a
design he started using in response to the George W. Bush administration, led
by a President he called an “American idiot.” (Inevitably he played “American
Idiot” as part of his set, changing “Bush” to “Trump.” Maybe he should call it
“American Idiot II”!!) He used that guitar for “Know Your Enemy,” an excerpt of
“Holiday” (once again a song wretchedly truncated by commercials), and
“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (a song that, unlike the Chainsmokers’ “Don’t Let
Me Down,” does hold its own in
comparison with the classic from which its writer ripped off the title), before
switching to one with a motif
from the cover of the band’s star-making 1994 album Dookie (which I heard when it was new and remember
thinking, “This is what Elvis Costello would have sounded like if the Clash
instead of the Attractions had been his backup band”) for “Minority” and a
plain guitar for “American Idiot,” “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” and “Good
Riddance (Time of Your Life).” It’s amazing how Green Day has been able to rise
from the ghetto of punk rock to enough mainstream success that their songs got
turned into a Broadway musical, and despite his travails Armstrong remains a
strong performer, front man and writer.
Then Stevie Wonder held the stage for
nearly an hour and a half, running through mostly his great hits from the
1970’s, and starting his performance by dropping to his knees as a gesture of
support to the National Football League players who are protesting anti-Black
police brutality while the national anthem is played at their games — and whom
President Trump called on the NFL team owners (many of them gave seven-figure
sums to his campaign) to fire immediately. (The ones like Colin Kaepernick, who
were reaching the ends of their careers anyway, probably are in jeopardy from
this; but no team owner is going
to fire someone at the height of his career who’s going to help them win
football games and maybe make it to the Super Bowl. They may be Right-wingers
but they’re also too smart capitalists to launch a career vendetta like that!)
He got up rather uncertainly, helped by his son Kwame (one of a number of grown
children Wonder has fathered over the years, all of whom he seems to have given
African names), and for the first song on his set he did “Jammin’ (Master
Blaster),” his memorial tribute to Bob Marley. Then he did the song he should have done on “Hand in Hand,” “Higher Ground,”
following which there was a song on his set that I missed almost completely
because they cut away for a commercial break while he was still playing the
intro and didn’t return until he was almost done. After that he did “Signed, Sealed,
Delivered” (a 1968 hit and the only song Wonder played last night that came
from before he gained control of his career and started producing himself with
the 1970 album Where I’m Coming From)
and a medley of “Overjoyed” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Then he did
“Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” and the beautiful “Living in the City” (the
socially conscious song Wonder recorded after his Motown label-mate Marvin Gaye
broke Motown president Berry Gordy’s taboo on political material with the What’s
Going On LP), following which he did one of
my least favorite Wonder songs, “Isn’t She Lovely?,” though it sounded a bit
better this time because he said it was dedicated to his oldest child, daughter
Ayesha, and its sappiness is more understandable as a father-daughter song than
as a romantic love song.
Alas, yet another commercial break at this point
lopped off most of “Sir Duke,” a favorite Wonder song of mine if only because
it’s a tribute to Duke Ellington — the artist who lobbied for (and wrote a song
to promote) the designation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a national
holiday paying tribute to the genius who composed Black, Brown and
Beige — and after that he hinted he was
going to perform “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” (one of those songs, like
Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” I liked at first, then got thoroughly sick
of when it got way overplayed,
then heard again a few years later and thought, “That was really a good song
after all!”). Instead he did “My Cherie Amour” and then went into “We Are the
World,” the song he wrote with Michael Jackson for the 1985 “USA for Africa”
fundraising campaign, for which he was joined by Pharrell Williams essentially
taking Michael’s part. Wonder and Williams continued to perform together for the
rest of his set, doing “Get Lucky,” “Superstition” and Williams’ song “Happy” —
which generally has struck me as one of the most putridly banal songs ever
written (I once joked that I never thought anybody could write a song about
happiness worse than Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but Williams
pulled it off), but in this context — after a show that had been studded with
various officials from the United Nations and its member countries (the “Global
Citizen” concerts are deliberately timed to coincide with the annual meeting of
the United Nations General Assembly) about such evils as famine,
impoverishment, lack of access to clean water and safe toilets (though when an
official from Nigeria discussed the problems his country has in getting everyone
access to safe toilets I grimly muttered, “Hey! We can’t even do that in San
Diego, and we have a hepatitis A outbreak
on our hands because we can’t!”), the oppression of women — including forced
marriages of teen (or pre-teen) girls, rape and denial of education and
business opportunities — and AIDS, a song about happiness, even a silly and
stupid one, was actually a welcome relief. Then Wonder came out again with that
weird little tablet-sized mini-keyboard which seems to be his go-to instrument
whenever he covers the Beatles — he used it for “We Can Work It Out” on the
celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ appearance on
the Ed Sulllivan Show and last
night he used it to cover John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a song almost de
rigueur for a major “Cause Celeb” benefit,
following which the various musical guests all came out for a reprise of
“Happy.”
Despite the infuriating commercial breaks and the spotting of them
with absolutely no cognizance of what was going on on stage, in all other
respects the “Global Citizen” telecast was a model of how this sort of thing
should be done: the artists (even the lesser-known ones like Alessia Cara) were
given enough time on stage to showcase themselves, the show was long enough to
make that possible and the speech-making, though it got interminable at times,
actually had a context. Predictably, the one segment that really rankled me was
the one expressing the mainstream myth of “HIV/AIDS,” especially when the
scientist from Johnson & Johnson announced that his company was about to
start major efficacy trials of a proposed AIDS vaccine in humans — and Whoopi
Goldberg came on to rejoice that the scientist had announced a major step
forward in a cure for AIDS. He hadn’t; he’d announced a major step forward in a
vaccine for AIDS, which is not the same thing even if you believe in an AIDS
vaccine (which pioneering AIDS dissident scientist Peter Duesberg pointed out
is an oxymoron, because you’re defined as having “HIV/AIDS” if you test
positive for antibodies to the virus — and the “AIDS vaccine,” if it works,
will give you antibodies to the virus and thereby make you “HIV positive”!).
The real problem with Global
Citizen as an organization is that it claims to be aimed at ending “extreme
poverty” (indeed, one of the speakers boasted that since 1982 the percentage of
the world’s people in “extreme poverty” has gone down from 52 to 18 percent —
though a) I’m not sure how they came up with those statistics, and b) even 18
percent is 18 percent too many), but at the same time they rely so much on the largesse of major corporate and rich-individual donors like
Sumner Redstone (who came up with a last-minute $1.5 million contribution to
make the first Global Citizen concert in 2013 possible) and Mark Cuban (who was
prominently featured on stage) they can’t — or won’t — mention the basic
class-struggle fact that the reason there are poor people in the world is that
there are rich people in the world, and the rich sustain themselves on the
basis of what Marx called the “surplus value” extracted from the poor by the
rich. Doubtless the programs advocated on Global Citizen are going to get some
of the right money to some of the right people — and I give them major kudos for making one of their demands to preserve the U.S.
foreign aid budget instead of cutting it by 32 percent as President Trump has
called for in his budget — but they’re relying too much on the kindness of the
super-rich to talk about the class structure and the organized machinery of
oppression and exploitation that is making the overall distribution of wealth
and income in the world increasingly less equal. Still, Global Citizen puts on a good show for a good cause, and
if it starts making at least some
of its idealistic participants (you earned admission to the concert by racking
up “points” for various good deeds, including sending texts and tweets to
politicians) think more deeply about why there is poverty, hunger, ill health, oppression of women and
preventable disease epidemics throughout the world, it’ll have done some of the
good its organizers obviously intend it to!
