2021 Global Citizen Concert: Kidjo, Lauper, Eilish Shine in Worldwide Charity Event

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Saturday, September 25, I spent the entire day at home, watching more than nine hours of the 2021 Global Citizen telecast, an annual event designed to build awareness, funding and the political will to deal with human-caused climate change and global poverty. The event was actually scheduled for 24 hours and encompassed concerts in various cities, including Paris (where the opening ceremony was held), New York, Los Angeles, London, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Sydney and Lagos (the capital of Nigeria), with special one-artist presentations from places like Tuscany (Andrea Bocelli), Johannesburg (a South Afrkcan dance troupe) and Seoul, South Korea (so they could accommodate the inexplicably super-popular Koirean boy group BTS, who are still cute but getting older and noticeably heavier, while their music remains a confusing bowl of various ear candies; as I’ve joked about BTS in previous TV appearances, sometimes they sing in English, sometimes in Korean, and sometimes in a gibberish mash-up of the two). I watched the program from 10:45 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific time, and the concert telecast (on YouTube – ABC was supposed to show some of it but they decided college football was way more important, so I was stuck to listening and watching some of today’s leading pop musicians on a tiny fragment of a computer screen and with very faint sound even though I turned my computer up to full volume – I can see why people are buying stereo systems these days not to connect to a turntable or a CD player, but to a computer or smartphone) during those hours featured almost exclusive Paris and New York. Not that it was all that easy to tell which artists were performing at which venues, because the concert organizers ordered that the stages in every city look exactly the same, with a giant red ring enclosing the performers.

The first song I saw and heard was Elton John doing his star-making 1970 hit, “Your Song” (and doing it in a considerably lower key than he did then – he started as a tenor but is now definitely a baritone, and an old, croaking baritone at that), and “Rocket Man” (an ironic choice for this particular event, if only because it’s Donald Trump’s favorite Elton John song and we all know Trump thinks – if he can be said ever to think at all – that human-caused climate change is a hoax perpetrated by China to get the U.S. to destroy its own economy). Elton John has acknowledged that he’s had surgery on his vocal cords to remove nodes, and that on top of the natural effects of age (especially on untrained voices) has left his voice a shell of what it once was. Before I turned on he’d sung “Tiny Dancer,” one of his most beautiful songs – but not the way he sings it now. When he and Miley Cyrus guest-starred on Stephen Colbert’s show, their arrangement was that they would do whatever song she selected from his catalogue – and she picked “Tiny Dancer,” which I thought was gratuitously cruel to him. This time he had no one to blame but himself. He deleted the “oh no no no” falsetto break from “Rocket Man” because those notes are not in his voice anymore, and Elton John never had that great a voice to begin with. What made him a star was the fabulous quality of his songs and a voice that was serviceable enough to do justice to them.

After that came the one singer on the program whose voice was truly revelatory: Angelique Kidjo from Nigeria (though she was performing not in Lagos, but in Paris), who did two songs – one of which I variously guessed the title as “Which One of Us?” and “We Need Each Other,” and the other was her anthemic “Mama Africa.” In a show in which most of the performers were professionally effective but on the bland side (among the artists in today’s music I’d like to have seen there who didn’t perform were Rhiannon Giddens, Brittany Howard, Maren Morris and Tenille Townes, all of whom would have given emotional shots in the arm of these somewhat dull proceedings), Kidjo’s pieces grabbed the heartstrings and wrenched them. She’s someone I’d certainly like to hear more of! (If my husband Charles reads that he’ll think, “Oh, no. He’s going to flood the house with Angelique Kidjo CD’s.”) The next artist was an Egyptian-born opera singer named Fatma Said, who sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” (a song that gets trotted out on these all-star social-conscience concerts even though it also literally got him killed; as Newsweek magazine reported shortly after John Lennon’s murder, his killer was not a “deranged fan,” he was a Fundamentalist Christian who had never forgiven Lennon for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus or for writing a song with the line, “Imagine no religion,” and he’d been part of a prayer group which had prayed, “Imagine, imagine John Lennon dead”). She sang the first two choruses in the usual keys most female singers use for “Imagine,” then went up for the third chorus and started to sound like an opera singer – though of course I can’t judge how good an opera singer she is until I actually hear her in opera. Then they showed a girl group from Buenos Aires doing a song in Spanish whose title I guessed as “Numerán.”

The next “name” act was the Black-Eyed Peas, which did four songs that were mostly rap – though they have a fine female soul singer in their lineup they used her only as punctuation between the raps, and I’d like to hear more of her. The show then cut to Johannesburg for a South African group named Shi Man Josi and cut back to Paris for a dance by the Lemonade Dance Company. (What is it with lemonade in pop music these days? Beyoncé;s big album, for which she did those ridiculous videos that looked like they were directed by the love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl, was called Lemonade, and Tenille Townes’ glorious debut album was called The Lemonade Stand.) The next act up was Christine and the Queens, an all-female singing group (though Wikipedia lists her as a solo artist, true name Héloïse Adélaïde Letissier, there were certainly more than one of her on stage in Paris yesterday!) doing four songs, one of which I marked as “Bird Song” in my notes if only because it contained the word “oiseau” (French for “bird”) and the other three in English, whose titles I guessed as “Missing Out,” “To Heal,” and “Does It Matter?,” along with an intriguing cover of George Michael’s “Freedom.” (To my mind the best song ever written called “Freedom” was the one Richie Havens largely improvised at Woodstock; because of the traffic jams leading up to the festival site Havens was the only musician able to get there for several hours; because there was no one else the organizers could put on stage Havens played through his entire repertory and then made up “Freedom” on the spot, basing it largely on the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”)

The next band up was an Italian rock group called Mánaskin – it’s an indication of how far rock has fallen from its long-time top of the perch of popular music, replaced by rap and “EDM” (“electronic dance music”) that they were about the only hard-core rock band in the part of the concert I saw – who sang in English and sang mostly about sex, either how excited they are about getting it from their current partners or how angry they are at being denied it by their exes. Both the lead singer and the drummer performed shirtless, which was nice – they are attractive (considerably more so than the pioneer of this sort of thing, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who goes on performing topless even though he no longer has the body for it) and a brief poetry reading from an African-French poet, Kerry-Gladys Ntirampeda. The next set was six songs by yet another nondescript young would-be dance-music diva, Doja Cat, whose titles I recorded as “Millions,” “Piggy Like That,” “I Like It,” “Principal,” “My Twin’s Big Like Tia” (actually the song of hers I liked best, even though “my twins” appeared to refer to her tits). The next song was one of the concert’s highlights: a medley of “Get Up, Stand Up” and “One Love” by Bob Marley, performed in multiplex fashion by various all-stars among the different concert venues, led off by Nile Rodgers in London, someone my notes record as “Marie Kelly” but that’s probably me garbling an African name from Lagos, Angelique Kidjo from Paris, Jon Batiste (Stephen Colbert’s musical director) from New York, Dalita Goodron from Sydney, Adam Lambert from L.A., Anit Kapoor from Mumbai (apparently she’s one of those people who’s a major star in India even if no one in the rest of the world has heard of her), Cyndi Lauper and the Black-Eyed Peas (New York) and Alessia Cara (also probably from New York since that’s where she played her own set later on) and Marley’s son Skip (so many of Marley’s sons have taken up the family business it’s hard to keep track of them all). The idea of an all-star rendition with different singers each singing a small slice of a song started with Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats with “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” – an original song by Geldof that kicked off the whole charity fad of raising money to feed starving people in a Third World country and led to the Live Aid concerts in 1985 and the “We Are the World” phenomenon (more on that later).

The show cut back to Paris at this point for the final act in their portion of the program, Ed Sheeran, who played six songs whose titles I recorded as “Arrow to the Heart,” “We Fell in Love Where We Are,” “Tell Me When It Kicks In,” “You Look Perfect Tonight,” “I’m in Love with Your Body” (which I think was his star-making hit) and “Bad Habits Lead to You.” I may not have transcribed the song titles accurately but you get the idea: Ed Sheeran is one of those cute guys (though, like the BTS members, he’s not as cute as he used to be) who writes obsessively about sex and tries to spread a thin romantic veneer of romance and affection over songs which are mostly about his sex drive. He reminds me of all those self-consciously “sensitive” singer-songwriters who cluttered up the music scene in the 1970’s, and when he’s not getting too raunchy his music is inoffensive but it’s also bland. One gets the impression that if one woman doesn’t yield to his dubious charms (I’m assuming he’s straight, though I can’t remember any lines in his songs that specify a gender for his love objects) there’ll always be another one available. Then came one of the highlights of the show: Cyndi Lauper performing her two trademark songs, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “True Colors.” She did “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” better than she had in 1983, I thought – slower, more soulfully (perhaps making that fascinating Memphis Blues album taught her to sing with a bluesier feeling) and with a depth that has come from the years. “True Colors” is a song I can’t be objective about because I remember hearing the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus perform it at a concert while one of my home-care clients had just been put in a nursing home; she had been a difficult person to get along with, mainly because she had a temper and frequently unleashed it, but I loved her anyway and could tell that she was a wonderful, loving person under her outbursts. So when I heard the lines, “I see your true colors shining through/I see your true colors, and that’s why I love you/So don’t be afraid to let them show/Your true colors, your true colors/Because you’re beautiful, like a rainbow,” I started crying uncontrollably and ever since I’ve identified the song with her. (She died shortly thereafter and I used the song as part of a memorial CD mix I presented to her surviving brother.)

Then the organizers put on Alessia Cara for three songs – which was good programming in a way but also a mistake because following Cyndi Lauper revealed how much Alessia Cara owes to her (and how much both of them owe to the 1960’s singer Melanie, one of the most criminally underrated performers of that era who began the whole style of singing at the top of the female range and using a fast vibrato that’s turned up since in the work of plenty of other singers, including Lauper, Cara, Jewel, Lorde, and most recently Tenille Townes.) Cara did “Scars to Your Beautiful” – a song I fell in love with when I first heard her at another all-star telecast, though later I got disillusioned that she licensed it to a beauty products company for a commercial – along with a song from her newest album, “Best Days,” and a song I couldn’t decide whether the title was “The Clock Is Ticking” or “Stay.” They put on Jon Batiste for two songs, “I Just Need You” and “Freedom” (a different song from Richie Havens’ or George Michael’s) and then brought up Camila Cabello, whose greatest claims to fame are reviving the popularity of Cuban music in the U.S. with her hit “Havana” (which was her first song yesterday) and for being the girlfriend of Shawn Mendes (thereby dashing the hopes of millions of Gay men who were hoping and wishing he were one of us). After opening with “Havana” she did “It’ll Never Be the Same,” then brought on Mendes for a song called “Señorita” that they both referred to as “our song.” Cabello’s set was briefly and blessedly interrupted by the appearance of a Trans poet named Blok – they presented as female (albeit with small breasts) but their voice sounded male, and their reading was the best of the three poems I heard on the telecast. After Blok’s reading Cabello continued with “New York” and “Don’t Go Yet.” The next act up was a Nigerian singer-rapper called Burna Boy whose rap fell victim to the most bizarre mistranslation of the night – through much of the show I had been laughing at some of the really weird translations and transcriptions of the open captions. My husband Charles suggested they were using a talk-to-text program and then, for people singing or speaking in languages other than English, were running them through a computer translator – which would explain why the start of the line from “Rocket Man,” “Mars ain’t a place to raise your kids,” came out as “Marvin, please” – but Burna Boy suffered the worst translation of anyone: “I feel my beloved to be wearing a bomb.” (It made it sound like he and his beloved were going to become joint suicide bombers.) Aside from the translation glitches, Burna Boy came off well but I’ve seen stronger Nigerian performers who’ve “grabbed” me more, including Angelique Kitjo and Yemi Alade.

The show then cut to New York for one of its oddest segments: a tribute to previous all-star benefits against global hunger featuring, of all people, Chinese pianist Lang Lang. He’s normally a classical musician but this time around he was basically doing his Liberace impression – at least pianistically; visually he was wearing a white suit rather than the famously flamboyant costuming of his role model. Lang Lang began with a treacly arrangement of parts of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” supposedly in commemoration of Queen’s performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert, which sounded very much like the way Liberace would have played it (and since Liberace still had nearly a decade to live when “Bohemian Rhapsody” was released, he could have played it). I’m really getting tired of the mythologization of Queen’s performance at Live Aid; it wasn’t especially memorable – by far the best performance at Live Aid came from U2, whose music, both on that performance and generally, had everything Queen’s lacked: power, passion, soul. Ironically, Freddie Mercury’s best moment at Live Aid came not with the band, but in a solo performance of a song called “Is This the World We Created?” that not only fit the purpose of the event but he sang with a real sincerity his work with Queen usually lacked. Lang Lang continued for three more songs, a version of “Imagine” with Billy Porter (one of the New York M.C.’s and self-described as a “Black Queer man” – well, thank goodness he called himself that instead of an “African-American LGBTQ+ person”) singing John Lennon’s great (and lethal to him) song less thrillingly but more straightfowardly than Fatma Said had). Then we got more Liberace-eaque treacle from Lang Lang’s fingers on a Whitney Houston medley – “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?” and “The Greatest Love of All” – and a rendition of “We Are the World” that reminded us of what a terrible song it is even though we weren’t hearing the sappy lyrics. (At least the announcers acknowledged that Michael Jackson co-wrote the song instead of “unpersonning” him.)

The next artist was Lizzo, who did three songs – “Cool as Hell,” “Bad Bitch” and :So You Know,” which may also be called “Blame It on My Juice.” I have profoundly mixed feelings about Lizzo: I think she’s got a great gospel-soul voice – when I first heard her I thought she’d be a great person to play Mahalia Jackson in a biopic (though Danielle Brooks played the great Mahalia in a Lifetime biopic and did it superbly), and I also love the fact that not only is she a “woman of size” but so are all her backup singers and dance performers – like Adele and Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo sends a badly needed message to the zaftig women of the world that they too can be attractive and sexy. But oh, her potty mouth! She dropped so many F-bombs and S-bombs on her CD I felt like the latter item was being shot at me. Yesterday she was being a bit less relentless with the swear words (and at least she wasn’t being bleeped, this being YouTube, which would have made it even more bothersome), but still … The next artist up was Shawn Mendes, who came off as a sort of American Ed Sheeran: the same boyish good looks (which, being only 23, he hasn’t started to lose the way Sheeran has), the same self-consciously “sensitive” presentation, and the same obsessive concern with sex and the same thin romanic veneer spread ever so slightly over songs that are clearly about lust masqueradiing as love: “There’s Nothing More,” “By My Side,” “What If I Fell?,” “Better Than He Can,” and “Summer of Love.” (Aside from the last one – which he actually announced – those titles are once again my best guesses, but even if they’re wrong they’ll at least give you a general sense of the material.) Then there was another poetry reading by someone named Fanta Bylo, and Mendes returned for one more song, “It’s in My Blood,” on which he played electric of acoustic guitar and had at least a little more spirit than he did on the rest of his material.

Next up was someone I think was called “Meek Mike” – though I might have the name hideously wrong (one annoying thing about shows like this was they seem to assume the audience already knows who these people are and what songs they’re singing, so they don’t bother with announcements or chyrons) – and my guesses for his three rap numbers are “I’m the Boss,” “Let’s Go” and “Cry Like a Girl.” (There was a text box on the show’s YouTube page to which you could make comments, and while most of them scrolled too fast for me to read them, one I did notice was one questioning whether that last piece of material was really appropriate for the occasion.) The next performer was Jennifer Lopez, ordinarily one of the most repulsive people in celebrity-dom, and she did three songs that epitomized what I don’t like about her – “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” a half-sung and half-rapped number with Ja Rule, and the utterly disgusting, infuriating song “Jenny on the Block” in which this pretentious woman, dressed to the nines in the most lavish costumes and makeup her well-paid courtiers can construct for her, tries to convince us that she’s still an ordinary person. (I’d probably like her more if instead she’d written a song about how she drives through her old neighborhood in a solid gold Cadillac, dripping ultra-expensive jewels, but she does that to inspire them and make them think that someday maybe they, too, can enjoy her level of success.) Then she startled the hell out of me by doing a song called “On My Way to You” from an upcoming movie (scheduled for release on February 14, 2022, which will give you a general idea of its contents) called Marry Me, and she cut out all the celebrity affectations and sang with real power and soul.

The last artist I saw on Global Citizen 2021 was Billie Eilish, whom I have an intriguing relationship with (no, I’m not some crazy under the delusion that I actually know her!). I bought her CD – the one that ended up sweeping the Grammy Awards – in the CD counter at Target (back when they still had a counter selling CD’s and DVD’s) partly because of her first name (given that Billie Holiday is my all-time favorite popular singer, anyone who has the name “Billie” is going to intrigue me) and partly because of the bag-lady outfit she was wearing on the cover. Who, I wondered, is this woman who’s presenting herself as a singer and not dressing in scanty outfits that show off her bod for the delectation of horny teenage straight boys? I picked up her album and I quite liked it even though there are other modern-day singers I like a good deal more. Eilish has gone through a series of visual changes – first she had black hair, then she dyed part of it green and made it look like a bird had crapped on her big-time, and now she’s blonde and pig-tailed. Also her act yesterday was a clash of images: she’s still wearing the baggy clothes but this time it was a white top and shorts, which showed off her legs, and instead of just standing (or sitting) still and singing she was jumping around the stage like Madonna. She was also swearing a lot – not during the songs themselves but during her stage raps, which included one of the few times during the event any of the performers got overtly political. She pointed out that the Congress is currently considering one of the biggest pieces of legislation ever aimed at stopping climate change, and people needed to call their Senators and House members to support it. (Throughout most of this show I was struck by the clash between its attempt to present concern about climate change as a universal issue uniting the human race and former Obama pollster David Shor’s arrogant dismissal of the climate issue, and advice to the Democrats to take it out of the big reconciliation bill, because only “very liberal white people” care about climate change.)

Eilish brought out her brother Finneas, who’s also her co-producer and co-writer of all her material, and formally duetted with him on a song apparently called either “How Could You” or “If You Could Take It All Back,” and her other songs, as far as I could tell, were “I’m the Bad Girl,” “I’m in Love with My Future,” “Look Away,” “All Good Girls Go to Hell,” and “Happier Than Ever.” Though there were plenty of other acts remaining, after nine hours and 15 minutes of watching music acts on my computer in faint sound I was worn down and considered myself lucky I could at least see all of Eilish’s performance (incidentally her real name is Billie Eilish O’Connell and her brother is Finneas O’Connell, though the only reason I know that is I watched the Grammy Awards and that was how they were cited on the awards for songwriting), and she was one of the high points. The other big annoyance about this show is the sheer amount of jabber between the songs, most of it corporate greenwashing by the likes of Citibank, Cisco (Charles laughed at their pledge to become carbon-neutral since they’re a software company rather than a manufacturer or an energy company), and even Delta Airlines, which pledged to make their operations “carbon-neutral” by 2030. No, they don’t mean they’ve figured out a way to fly planes all over the world without leaving a carbon footprint; they’re going to do “offsets,” though that’s going to mean planting an awful lot of trees all over the world at a time when forests are actually shrinking, either by deliberate governmental policy (as in Brazil and much of Africa) or through climate-change caused fires (as in California and the Pacific Northwest).

Once again, the great contradictions governing (and ruining) the climate-change issue are the gaps between the enormity of the problem and the pathetic little steps we’re told we can take to help, and the canyon between what needs to be done and the power of the vested interests that actually run the world and their determination to prevent the sweeping social changes that would be needed even to stop global warming, let alone reduce it. A recent poll showed that 56 percent of young people in America (I’m not sure how they defined “young people,” but I assumed it’s teens and 20’s) believe the Earth is doomed, and quite frankly I do too. Climate change will not be stopped, not because it’s technologically impossible to stop it, but because the world’s ruling classes have too much of a vested interest in how the world currently works economically, technologically and socially to allow the needed changes to be made – and too much global power to prevent the world and its people from making the required transformations.