[Forty
years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded
their single “We are the
World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]
Three individuals
who together embody the serious and silly sides of musical activism.
1)
Harry
Belafonte: By the mid-1980s, Harry
Belafonte had been an iconic presence on both the cultural and political
landscape for decades; indeed, as I discovered in researching this
column on Vietnam Veterans Against the War, it’s hard to find a social
movement and cause from the second half of the 20th century that didn’t
feature Belafonte’s activism in a significant way. So it shouldn’t be a
surprise (even though I didn’t realize it until researching this post) that the
original idea for USA for Africa came from Belafonte—inspired by the British
supergroup Band Aid and their single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984),
in early 1985
Belafonte reached out to a number of prominent American musical artists to
create a fundraising single for African famine relief. With its superstar
lineup it’s easy to see “We Are the World” as more musical than activist, but
Belafonte’s role certainly reminds us that it was fundamentally the latter.
2)
Michael Jackson:
One of the first musicians that Belafonte enlisted to create the single was
also the biggest superstar in the world at that moment. Michael Jackson wasn’t
Belafonte’s first call, partly due to industry connections—Belafonte’s manager Ken
Kragen reached out to a pair of his clients, Lionel Ritchie and Kenny
Rogers; and Ritchie then contacted Stevie Wonder, whom he knew well. But when the
legendary
Quincy Jones was brought in to produce the song, he suggested Jackson, and
as you might expect once the King of Pop was involved it more or less became
his show. He offered to co-write the song with Ritchie, and the songwriting and
initial recordings ended up happening in
Jackson’s bedroom at the family home in Encino. Obviously the song’s
activist goals remained throughout these stages, but I would say the involvement
and then the prominence of Jackson did reflect a definite shift toward the
musical side of the equation.
3)
Dan
Ackroyd: When it came time to record the song that musical side ended up
including a veritable who’s who of mid-1980s musical royalty, from Ray Charles
to Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper to Bruce Springsteen, Waylon Jennings to five of
Michael Jackson’s siblings. But eagle-eyed observers of the resulting music
video noticed a very different kind of mid-80s star in the background, the comedian
and actor (and, yes, musical
performer) Dan Ackroyd (fresh off the blockbusting success of 1984’s Ghostbusters).
As the first hyperlinked story above notes, Ackroyd’s participation in “We Are
the World” was entirely random, the result of the actor and his father walking
into a management office for utterly different reasons but at precisely the right
time. Again Ackroyd did have a musical career which I’m not trying to downplay,
but I would nonetheless argue that his presence in the recording session
reflects how an earnest activist effort can gradually morph into something a
bit more celebrity-driven and, as a result, something somewhat sillier.
Next
musical activism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?
