Global Citizen 2020: A Social-Service Mega-Concert for the SARS-CoV-2 Age

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!

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