Addressing the Pandemic, Honoring the Past

Two-Hour Multi-Network Global Citizen telethon repurposes classic songs for insights into today’s health emergency.

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Yesterday, April 18, 2020, a number of major networks collaborated on a two-hour semi-telethon called “One World Together at Home” co-hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert that, interestingly, was not designed to raise money for SARS-CoV-2 and its victims but to build awareness and hopefully shake loose some donations for groups that are helping mobilize the response. (According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the virus causing the current pandemic is called “SARS-CoV-2,” indicating it’s not an entirely new organism but a relative of the original SARS-CoV that caused a medical scare in 2003, and COVID-19 is the name of the disease it causes.)

It was sponsored by a number of organizations, including one called Global Citizen that has been hosting TV events since 2015 and also organizing young people to do their own support actions for charities around the world, many of them raising money for food or medical supplies for African countries and others in the Third World (or whatever it’s called these days). The centerpiece of Global Citizen’s activism is a big concert held somewhere in the developed world to which the young people who sign up for these causes have a chance to win tickets.

Well, with big concerts a thing of the past (at least for now and however long SARS-CoV-2 remains a worldwide threat), Global Citizen, inspired by the activist organizing efforts of Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin (who did a 30-minute at-home concert on his smartphone as a sort of preliminary event and posted it online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMBK9OfsKO4; a clip of this was shown during the telethon but Ellen De Generes talked over a good deal of it) and Lady Gaga, got the idea of doing a telethon with each musician beaming in from their own home or other private location, thus bringing the performers together while keeping them appropriately “socially distant.”

Lady Gaga kicked off the proceedings with a beautiful and heartfelt version of the song “Smile.” This is a song with a socially conscious history because it was based on the main theme of the score for Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times — the last time he played the “Little Tramp,” the last silent film made in the U.S. by a major star for theatrical release, and an audacious movie whose critiques of capitalism and automation still ring all too vividly true. Though the song’s lyrics aren’t by Chaplin — they were added in 1954 by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons — they strongly reflect his philosophy of dogged and ultimately rewarded persistence in the face of adversity: “Smile, though your heart is aching; smile, even though it’s breaking; When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by if you smile.”

Lady Gaga sang it beautifully, at home alone and accompanied only by herself on piano; unlike some of the other performers (including Billie Eilish and Kacey Musgraves), she projected powerfully and didn’t let the accompaniment drown her out. The show was full of old songs of either explicitly or vaguely expressed social content being repurposed to honor the front-line workers against SARS-CoV-2 — especially the doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, who in addition to their accustomed tasks now also have the burden of literally hugging and comforting COVID-19 victims in their last moments since their family members are forbidden to be in the same room as them lest they spread the contagion.

The second performer was someone with an even more exalted reputation than Lady Gaga: Stevie Wonder, who talked about his friendship with the late Bill Withers and played (on piano, not organ or synthesizer) a medley of Withers’ hit “Lean on Me” and Wonder’s own “Love’s in Need of Love Today.” The third performer was, if anything, an even bigger legend than Stevie Wonder: Paul McCartney, who began by talking about his own loss of his mother to cancer when he was still a teenager. (Paul lost his mother to cancer around the same time John Lennon’s mom was killed in a traffic accident, and the shared grief bonded them together a lot more tightly than was usual for two teenage boys playing in an amateur band.)

Paul mentioned that his mom had worked as a nurse before her own bout with fatal illness, and that made me think he was going to play “Let It Be” — he’s said in interviews that the line “When I find myself in trouble/Mother Mary comes to me” was a reference to his own mother, whose name actually was Mary McCartney, not the Virgin Mary as a lot of people have assumed.) Instead he played a slowed-down version of “Lady Madonna” and put a whole different meaning to the song than it had had as a Fats Domino-esque rocker when the Beatles recorded it in 1968.

While, somewhat to my surprise, no one sang the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg classic “Over the Rainbow,” made famous by Judy Garland (herself a political liberal who would certainly have approved of this event and its significance) and brilliantly repurposed by Ariana Grande when she returned to Manchester, England on June 4, 2017, two weeks after a terrorist had shot up her previous concert and killed 22 of her fans; Grande headlined an all-star memorial concert to raise money for the survivors and the families of the victims, and vividly closed with “Over the Rainbow” — Kacey Musgraves trotted out her own similar song, “Rainbow,” and played it over some images of kids painting rainbows as symbols of hope in the midst of the pandemic.

Most of the songs were presented in slow, dirge-like tempi — that’s the way people tend to use music to eulogize people who’ve gone before their time and/or in horrifically tragic ways — but the performer who followed Musgraves, Elton John, did an uptempo version of his song “I’m Still Standing.” Though years of throat surgery have made it impossible for him to sing high notes and thus he’s had to rewrite the songs to duck them, he threw himself into the song with appropriate fervor and showed that a tribute concert in the face of a medical disaster can still have moments of energy and fun.

The next song was called “Safety Dance” by a group called The Roots, whom I’ve never heard of before, though their Wikipedia page lists them as “an American hip-hop band” and state that they’ve existed since 1987 and are currently the band on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show on NBC. I was wondering if they’d written the song especially for this performance, but it was yet another repurposing of someone else’s song — a 1980’s hit for the band Men Without Hats — and apparently on the Fallon show the Roots also turned Sting’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (originally written as the lament of a male teacher whose hot, sexy female student is literally standing so close to him he’s having a hard time resisting her charms) into an anthem promoting social distancing.

The Roots did “Safety Dance” safely by having each of their 10 members in a separate room putting in their contribution and getting displayed in separate boxes across the screen: I have a lot of admiration for the program’s technical staff for being able to get them to blend seamlessly and mixing the sound into a coherent performance. (Attempts to combine musicians from various locations in real time have been happening at least since 1945 — the Esquire All-American jazz concert of that year attempted to combine Duke Ellington from New York, Benny Goodman from Los Angeles and Louis Armstrong from New Orleans into one simultaneous performance of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” — but in last night’s telecast the tech people did it several times and were surprisingly good at it.)

Giving Trump the Finger over Defunding WHO

In between the performances there were the usual speeches by various people on the front lines of the battle against SARS-CoV-2 — as well as people who aren’t, like L. L. Cool J. (who pronounced the “t” in the word “often”) and Oprah Winfrey (who didn’t). One of the principal objectives of the program was to raise money and awareness for the World Health Organization (WHO), and while I suspect this was totally unintended when the producers organized this show originally, President Trump recently cut off the $500 million the U.S. gives to WHO annually on the ground that the WHO had been taken in by propaganda from the Chinese government that understated the extent of SARS-CoV-2 cases in China in general and Wuhan province, where the virus was first noticed, in particular.

So every time anybody on the show had a nice thing to say about WHO —including its secretary-general, whom Trump has attacked personally — it was a sort of raised middle finger to Trump. After The Roots, the next performance was also bi-locational: a Brazilian singer named Maluma hung out in that country’s beautiful mountain country while the guitarist who accompanied him stayed indoors and played in a home studio. Their song was called “Carnaval” and from what I could gather it was one of those stay-happy-in-the-face-of-adversity-because-after-all-life-is-a-carnival pieces that tend to get trotted out on occasions like this.

Then there was a brief clip from Chris Martin’s concert-at-home that apparently started the whole trend of performers sharing themselves with their fans virtually via the Internet when they can’t actually perform live — though I wished a) that the producers of “One World Together at Home” had presented at least one complete song from Martin’s performance, and b) that Ellen De Generes had shut up and quit talking over the song so we could have actually heard a full song from this compelling performer. Next up was yet another old song powerfully repurposed for the occasion: “What a Wonderful World,” Louis Armstrong’s last hit (he recorded it twice, in 1967 and 1970) and a testimony to love, hope and humanity from a man who over his long life had dealt with more than his share of adversity.

As a boy Louis Armstrong had hung out by the train tracks hurling insults at the workers manning the coal that heated the water to produce the steam the trains ran on, so they’d throw rocks of coal at him — and he could pick them up off the ground and take them home to keep himself and his family warm. In 1932 Armstrong was invited to make a triumphant return to his home town, New Orleans (non-coincidentally a place hard-hit by SARS-CoV-2 as well), only he had to play at a whites-only outdoor nightclub called the Suburban Gardens and his own people had to crowd around the fence barring them from the grounds and hear the music as best they could. In 1957 Armstrong told reporters that then-President Dwight Eisenhower could “go to hell” for not doing enough to oppose Southern racism and discrimination.

In 1970, for his final album Louis Armstrong and His Friends, he not only remade “What a Wonderful World” (giving the song a beautiful spoken introduction explaining why he still thought it was a wonderful world despite war and pollution) but recorded “We Shall Overcome” and John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” So he would have felt right at home at a benefit like this! On “One World Together at Home,” “What a Wonderful World” was performed eloquently and beautifully by Camila Cabelo and Shawn Mendes.

It was followed by an equally powerful, though totally different stylistically, song called “River Cross” performed by Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder, singing and playing what looked to be an old church tracker organ in his home. (Vedder remains one of my favorite current singers because, unlike most vocalists who front hard-rock bands, he has a surprisingly flexible voice that’s basically a baritone but can “push up” into a falsetto tenor. Most hard-rock and heavy-metal singers do too little but growl or screech.)

Reaching Back to the Black Church Tradition

Then yet another old song was repurposed for this show and its message; Sam Cooke’s final hit, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” with its roots in Black gospel (Cooke started out as a gospel singer) even though its attitude towards life after death (if any) is quite the opposite of gospel’s: “It’s been too hard living/But I’m afraid to die/’Cause I don’t know what’s up there/Beyond the sky.” (In his days as a gospel singer with the group the Soul Stirrers Cooke wasn’t afraid to die and was sure of exactly what was up there beyond the sky!) The singer was Lizzo, whom I admire a great deal even though I found her album hard going — all that rapping and all that swearing put me off and made me wish that next time out she’ll sing on records the way she sang last night, with a powerful gospel-soul voice (if anyone wants to do a biopic of the 1950’s and 1960’s gospel great Mahalia Jackson, Lizzo would be perfect, physically and vocally, to play her!) and without the rap interjections or the potty mouth.

Afterwards the four “official” remaining members of the Rolling Stones — Mick Jagger not only singing but playing acoustic guitar, Ron Wood also on acoustic guitar, Keith Richards on electric bass and Charlie Watts on drums — plus what may have been bits recycled from their original recording (notably the piano and parts of the chorus) doing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” It was an ironic song choice because it’s one of President Trump’s favorites to play at his rallies (apparently Trump personally chooses every song played over the sound system at his big Nuremberg-style rallies!), while at the same time it was being played at an event exalting the World Health Organization, which Trump in his infinite stupidity and vanity has just chosen not to fund. The Rolling Stones were presented the same way The Roots were — the band members in separate locations, optically combined in little boxes across the screen — though it was easier since there were only four of them.

After the Stones, country singer Keith Urban was brought in to sing Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Love” — frankly, I’d have rather heard him sing “Lean on Me” and have reserved this song for Wonder himself, but that’s O.K. — and then there was one of the most fascinating acts on the program, a Nigerian singer named Burna Boy, accompanied by a guitarist who (once again) was at another location, doing a song called “African Child” (I think he intended it as a medley with another song, but I didn’t catch the name of the second song) that proved quite powerful and indicated how once again Africa is particularly suffering from an epidemic exacerbated by their overall lack of much of a health-care infrastructure.

Then there was another old song repurposed for its overall message that all of us in the human race are in this together: Jennifer Lopez singing “People,” the mega-hit from Barbra Streisand’s performance on both stage and screen as Fanny Brice in the bio-musical Funny Girl. Backed by a huge orchestra that was obviously pre-recorded, Lopez poured her heart and soul into this number — a far cry from the lame Motown tributes she performed on two Grammy Awards telecasts and suggesting that Latina Lopez has more of an affinity for white Jewish song and culture than for the music of African-Americans.

Then John Legend and Sam Smith got together for a duet on yet another repurposed oldie, “Stand By Me,” officially written by Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for King’s beautiful soul record from 1961 but actually derived from two previous African-American gospel songs, one written by someone named “Tindley” (a Web search for “Tindley” revealed not a person but a place, a prominent African-American Methodist church in Philadelphia) and recorded powerfully by Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1938 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEuvRhoo_-4), and another recorded by the Soul Stirrers for Sam Cooke’s SAR label in the 1960’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1TXGYtEM0Y) which is listed on the Wikipedia page for the secular “Stand By Me” as the source for it even though it sounds less like the King version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZNL7QVJjE) than Tharpe’s does. (And if you listen closely to the lyrics of King’s version you’ll notice that there’s nothing in them — except maybe the word “darling” — that suggests it’s addressed to a lover instead of the Lord.)

The Real Hero Armstrong — and the Pretender

After that Stephen Colbert irked me big-time by introducing Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day as “the most legendary Armstrong who never walked on the moon” — sorry, Stephen, but that was Louis Armstrong, who’d already been paid tribute to earlier in the evening with Camila Cabelo’s and Shawn Mendes’ cover of “What a Wonderful World.” The “other” Armstrong did a surprisingly appropriate song from his 2005 album American Idiot (the title was a reference to then-President George W. Bush, whom we made fun of then but looks like Lincoln compared to who we’ve got now!) called “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” which Armstrong apparently wrote about the death of his father but which became a symbol of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and Bush’s piss-poor response to it. It worked last night, too, even though the rate of deaths in the U.S. related to COVID-19 has zoomed up so much this month I felt the song should have been called “Wake Me Up When April Ends.”

Next came Billie Eilish, in her usual baggy outfits (she deliberately dresses in loose-fitting clothes so she won’t be seen as a sex object the way so many women singers have been) and that bizarre green patch on top of her head that makes it looks like she got “slimed” by the ghosts from the original Ghostbusters movie, but she and her brother/accompanist/producer Finneas (“Eilish” is actually her middle name, and their family name is “O’Connell”) did one of the weirdest repurposings of an old song all night: Bobby Hebb’s 1960’s hit “Sunny,” mainly because they wanted to do something optimistic to cut through all the doom ’n’ gloom.

The last two songs were something of a letdown — Taylor Swift’s “Soon You’ll Get Better” and what was supposed to be a grand finale featuring Andrea Bocelli, Céline Dion, John Legend, Lady Gaga and classical pianist Lang Lang uniting on Bocelli’s big hit “Our Prayer,” but the kind of chemistry these big all-right-everybody-on-stage numbers are supposed to generate was hard to do when they were all in separate places. Up until then the producers had done a good job blending people in different locations into artificial but still moving ensembles, but they didn’t quite pull it off with “Our Prayer.”
One can’t fault the intentions behind a show like this — indeed, I was a bit disappointed that it was only two hours long and it wasn’t an all-day extravaganza like previous Global Citizen concerts have been when you could have more than two people in the same venue at the same time — and for the most part the intentions were realized, and as an in-home caregiver married to a grocery clerk (which means that we’re both defined as “essential” and therefore we’re still allowed to have jobs while so many people have been let go from theirs) I felt personally thanked as well as proud of the front-line doctors and especially the nurses who not only have had this horrible epidemic dumped on their caseloads but have to reach out and comfort people in ways they generally haven’t had to do — and they’ve had to do this with woefully inadequate supplies, including the personal protective equipment (“PPE,” in the current argot) they need to keep from catching SARS-CoV-2 themselves and giving it to their other patients or their loved ones. One doctor profiled on this show is literally living in his garage because he dares not go into his own home for fear of infecting his family!