by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The TV show I particularly
wanted to watch yesterday was the 2020 edition of the Global Citizen telecast — which has been an annual event for
several years now, sponsored by a foundation underwritten by several large
corporations (including Microsoft, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson and Procter
& Gamble) and designed to encourage young people to become “global citizen”
activists to, among other things, expand the rights of women, access to
education and health care in Third World countries and combat racism and sexism
in the developed world. The way the concert usually works is that young people
working on these various causes submit reports on what they’re doing and a
group of judges goes over their applications and awards the most deserving
entrants tickets to an all-star mega-concert featuring the major pop-music
artists of today. Obviously the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic changed that; the projects
that were being honored and supported by Global Citizen were almost all focused
on controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and expanding health-care opportunities
for people at risk of getting it (I’m using the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control nomenclature here: SARS-CoV-2 is the official scientific name for the
virus and COVID-19 is the disease associated with it), and of course there
wasn’t one big mega-concert in one locale with a huge audience either. Instead,
not only did the performers sing without an audience, most of them performed
outdoors (where there’s presumably less chance of catching the viruses from
those pesky “aerosols” and “droplets” that come out of people’s mouths).
There
also seemed to be a higher talk-to-music ratio than on previous Global Citizen
concerts, with the result that the musical acts seemed to be more of an
afterthought to a documentary on what the world — or at least some particularly
dedicated, committed and courageous people in it — is doing to answer the
challenge of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. Among the speakers
giving video statements or doing interviews were Bill Gates of Microsoft — who,
since President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in
the middle of the world’s worst pandemic in over 100 years, actually became its
biggest funder, giving it more than any of the world’s governments! — and no fewer than eight heads of state:
Erna Solberg of Norway, Emmanuel Macron of France, Lee Halen Loong of
Singapore, Justin Trudeau of Canada, Angela Merkel of Germany, Boris Johnson of
Great Britain, Giuseppe Conte of Italy and Pedro Sánchez of Spain. (Notice
anyone missing?) The musical portions of the concert began with Jennifer Hudson
singing a song called “Where Peaceful Waters Flow,” and while I still find it hard to reconcile the post-Weight Watchers
version of Hudson with the Big Soul Mama who took the world by storm in her tour
de force in the film Dreamgirls, the voice is still largely intact and the song
was the first of quite a few numbers in the program to emphasize strength, determination,
perseverance and the hope that someday relatively soon we can put behind us all
the things we’ve been forced to do (and not do) during the pandemic.
The next song was called
“Freedom” by the For Love Choir, and then Miley Cyrus appeared in an otherwise
empty stadium singing, of all things, the Beatles’ song “Help!” I was taken
aback by her excellent phrasing of the opening, which she sang slowly and
movingly. Alas, then she sped up the tempo to that of the Beatles’ original —
and the arrangement was even similar, except she added a pedal steel guitar —
and she sang from a circular platform that served as the bottom dot of the
exclamation point in the title. The title was spelled out on the stadium floor
in giant letters, evoking both the logo of the Beatles’ film for which the song
was originally written and a literal cry for help similar to the ones that appeared on the rooftops of
flooded New Orleans homes during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Though Cyrus’s
performance would have been even more powerful had she stuck to the slow tempo
of her opening, it was still a wrenching performance of a song that’s been
almost criminally underrated and misunderstood: in one of his last interviews
John Lennon explained that he had meant the song as a literal cry for help, and people hadn’t
believed that an internationally famous 25-year-old could need help about
anything. I’m not sure if this was deliberate on the part of Global Citizen’s
producers — though I suspect it was —but they followed “Help!” with a song
called “Helpless” performed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musical Hamilton (whose film version was supposed to have a major
theatrical release July 4 but will be streaming on the “Disney+” channel
instead. The next musical selection was an excellent song called “I Cry” by
Usher, whom I’d just seen channeling James Brown on the ABC special Taking
the Stage (a rerun of an all-star
show originally broadcast January12, 2017 celebrating the opening of the
Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture) but who was far
better doing a song of his own and showing a raw, naked emotionalism
appropriate to the occasion and a far cry from the swaggering, boastful soul
boasts James Brown specialized in.
The next artist was Shakira, who blessedly
sang in Spanish (a lot of
foreign divas who try to sing in English simply can’t bring the same level of
passion and commitment they can when they sing in their native tongues) and did
a quite good song called “Sale el Sol.” It was the title song of a 2010 album
and the Wikipedia page on it says, “Its lyrics encourage one to be optimistic
during difficult times” — not surprisingly since a lot of the artists on this Global Citizen telecast
picked songs about being optimistic during difficult times! The next song was
totally unidentified — it consisted of four different singers in what have
become the all too familiar boxes of a Zoom screen coming together for a song
that seemed to be called either “We Will Fall Together” or “We Will Rise
Together,” yet another anthem about holding people together in difficult times
and resolving the bizarre irony of having to create and build unity between
people during a crisis in which the kind of physical bonding people usually do
to confront crises is one of the things we are most specifically and solemnly
told we must not do. (The many variations
on the phrase “we’re together though we’re apart” have become among the most
annoying clichés of the SARS-CoV-2 era.) After that Justin Bieber and a Black
singer-rapper named Queyo teamed up for a quite good song called “Intentions” —
and once again, as with Miley Cyrus, I was quite impressed by the power and
sincerity of a performer I’d largely written off as a manufactured pop
entertainer. Then Coldplay came on with an ironically titled song called
“Paradise,” complete with a stunning animated video that evoked 1960’s
psychedelica (hey, that’s when I was a teenager, so I have a special affection for anything that draws
on that era).
Then the show presented a song I’d previously seen and heard
performed on Stephen Colbert’s show by its creator, Christine and the Queens —
one of those identities, like Bon Iver, St.Vincent and The Weeknd, that’s made
to sound like a group even though it denotes just one person. Her (or should I
say “their”?) real name is Héloïse Adelaïde Letissier, she identifies as
“pansexual” and “genderqueer,” and she wrote “La Vita Nova.” the song she
performed in the Global Citizen telecast, in 2015 as a response to the death of
her mother — and, since she’s said she “does not want to choose between French
music and English pop music,” its lyrics alternate between English and French.
Then there was a number that was billed as a celebration of Nigerian pop
culture and the so-called “high life” music that emerged there in the early
1970’s but never seemed to catch on in the West even though it’s just as
infectious and danceable as the South African “township jive” that reached the
rest of the world through Paul Simon’s 1986 Grammy Award-winning album
Graceland. (Maybe if Paul Simon had
recorded an album in Nigeria … ). The basis for the song came from an
interesting source: an African ensemble of singers and dancers called the
Dreamcatchers Academy whose members are recruited from schoolchildren and whose
purpose is to get kids to stay in school by offering them the chance to sing and dance as an
inducement. Alas, what we actually heard was Latino rapper J. Balvin and
members of the Dreamcatchers Academy doing an O.K. song called “Quel Color es
Mi Gente?” (the title, in case you couldn’t guess, means “What Color Are My
People?”). The sentiments were impeccable but the song itself was the lamest
piece on the program.
After a hot duet called “Rest of Your Life” by Chloe x
Halle (an African-American R&B duo comprised of sisters Chloe and Halle
Bailey, who performed in skin-tight outfits and brought a lot of energy to an
O.K. but not especially memorable song) we fortunately got a taste of real Nigerian high-life music in the song “Shakere” by
a singer I’d noted as “Yoma Alade” but who I think is a well-known Nigerian
talent named Aramide, a tall, heavy-set woman physically reminiscent of
modern-day African-American singers Fantasia and Lizzo (and before them of the
1950’s R&B queens Big Maybelle and Annie Laurie, as well as Bessie Smith
and many of her contemporaries even
earlier!) whose shattering, high-energy performance was one of the best things
on the program. It’s true she’s “contemporized” the high-life sound by adding
electric guitars, synthesizers and drum machines, but she’s so sincere and her
voice is so overwhelming, who cares? The show’s finale was an unusual
combination — singer J’Nai Bridges with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, or at least a handful of musicians therefrom so that,
even on the broad expanse of the stage of the (empty) Hollywood Bowl, they
could be properly “socially distanced” at least six feet apart from each other,
singing a medley of a song called “Heaven” (not the “Heav’n, Heav’n” Marian Anderson recorded so
beautifully for Musicraft’s classical label, Masterpiece, in the 1940’s but
what sounded like modern-day gospel-pop) and “He’s Got the Whole World in His
Hand,” which is an authentic spiritual.
Bridges alternated pronouns between “He’s got the whole world in his hands” and
“She’s got the whole world in her hands,” which I liked even though my all-time
favorite version of the song is Mahalia Jackson’s from the 1950’s (mainly
because not only did she do the song as rockin’ gospel but she added a release:
“If religion were a thing that money could buy/Then the rich would live and the
poor would die:”).
I’ve read in The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times that some European orchestras and opera houses
have gingerly dipped their toes back into live performances, masking off some
of the seats so the audience can be properly “socially distant” (I hate the phrase “social distancing” and hope it will
fade out of use once the current emergency is over, but I fear it won’t) and
doing what Dudamel was doing at the Bowl: using only a handful of musicians so
he can space them out across the stage. It’s a compliment to their
professionalism that, despite their being so fewer of them, the musicians still
stayed together and didn’t seem fazed by those yawning expanses of space
between them. After the show MS-NBC went to their usual news coverage,
announcing that the European Union is banning travelers from the United States
(take that, Mr. Wall-Builder Trump!)
and that day four U.S. states — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Nevada —
reported their all-time highest one-day totals of COVID-19 cases. As much as I
miss public life, it does seem like the U.S. reopened way too soon, and as much as we (especially President “Kung Flu” Trump)
wants to blame it on outsiders in general and the Chinese in particular, the
United States has become the world’s epicenter of the pandemic. There are a lot of people in this country doing their best to
fight the pandemic and keep people alive and healthy, but they’re not getting
support from this ass-backwards government we’ve stuck ourselves with thanks
to, among other things, our creaky way of running a republic!
