Sounds of 1985’s “We Are The World” benefit single and images of its music video are burned into the minds of anyone who listened or watched. The dichotomy of The Boss’s signature snarl and Stevie Wonder’s soulful timbre, of Cyndi Lauper’s screech and Tina Turner’s howl were surprisingly complementary and perfectly representative of the aim of Michael Jackson’s and Lionel Richie’s creation &-&- to emphasize that any person of any size, color or shape should remain conscious of Africa’s then-famine crisis and keep a universal sense of hope close. The performance was sincere and the message was enduring.
A reproduction of the song 25 years later, first released as part of last Friday’s Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Vancouver, was anything but. It was a contrived, insincere demonstration of self-gratification, the irreverence of which went down about as easily as glass soup. Beyond the fact that it was an audio nightmare, it was a painful mockery of one of the most outstanding and genuinely good efforts American pop culture has seen. The fact that the most lasting image is universally considered to be Vince Vaughn’s “gotcha” sneak into the chorus line is proof of the total moral irrelevance of the entire project.
While the social insignificance of most of the featured artists is bizarre &-&- what successes make Justin Bieber worthy of the track’s opening verse? Is Enrique Iglesias really a modern pop staple, and who exactly is Jennifer Nettles? &-&- the video’s patronizing force-feeding of drivel that immediately follows Jamie Foxx’s aimless urging to help Haiti in no particular fashion is nauseating. Broken up by a disturbing dead/alive duet of Michael and Janet Jackson and the auto-tuned tornado of a probably under-the-influence Lil Wayne and a still-useless Miley Cyrus, the performance seemed more a platform for desperate fame-seekers to rematerialize into something significant alongside the efforts of a handful of nobodies to rise to the ranks of the less-but-still-obsolete. The only concern the presentation addressed was how untalented modern pop artists are, and the aim to help victims of the earthquake disaster was totally lost in translation.
According to a Feb. 12 article in USA Today, Richie lamented our country’s ignoring of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and said ,”If we are not a socially aware culture, we’re going to fail.”
If this is the stuff of social awareness, there are troubling times to come.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
