Curatorialist

Sometimes you can hit a bullseye and still miss.

The We Are The World remake for Haiti, 25 years after Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie rocked the world for USA for Africa, is sort of its own disaster in and of itself. My emotional preference would be to just go down the list of artists then and now and discuss the vast difference in artistic quality. Not that there aren’t some real deals in this video: Jennifer Hudson, Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Tony Bennet, Beyonce, Wyclef Jean, Usher, even Pink. There were some heavy hitters in there, to be sure. But the lows were so much lower as to bring down the overall quality quotient too dramatically. Popularity was never the casting spec in the ‘85 version. Jonas Brothers? Justin Bieber? Will i Am? Enrique Iglesias? Josh Groban? Miley Cyrus? I don’t need to discuss the differences between those artists and Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers or any single person who was invited into that studio in 1985. This isn’t an old guy’s “times were better when” speech, either. It’s a pure, one-to-one look at artistic integrity. Not about album sales, but about having undeniable expressive art in your soul. The kind that lasts. If you play the ‘85 video right this second (I just did), every one of those artists is undeniable. One look at the Haiti video and you just know that 25 years from now, nobody is going to want to open that time capsule. That’s a miss. Should have been part of the consideration process for something important, like disaster relief. It detracts from the integrity of the message and this message deserves it. The Jonas Brothers should have bowed out. T-Pain should have said, you know what, I’m honored to have been asked but the message is too important to make this about the trend I represent. Same with Miley Cyrus. But that’s not what goes through their minds. Not that they don’t care about the cause, I’m certain they do, but it’s the lack of soul-searching about the true meaning of something, obscured by the false rationale that popularity, in and of itself, is also a contribution to the cause, that disappoints. And nothing could sum that up better than the difference between Lionel Ritchie introducing the video in ‘85 and Jamie Foxx introducing the video in’10.

But there’s deeper issues at play here. On the surface, 2010 WATW seems to have the same premise as 1985 WATW – bring artists together for a cause. Did artists come together in 2010? In the 1985 WATW, disparate musicians stood shoulder to shoulder and finished each others’ sentences. You could barely tell where Lionel became Lionel and Stevie. Where Paul became Kenny. Where Warwick became Willie. And wasn’t that sort of the point? Quincy’s magic was in the pairings and the way the individual gave way to the duet, the duet gave way to the song and the song gave way to the message. Can we say the same about 2010 WATW? I hear the overlaps in the mix, but from the video, it appears that all of them were recorded separately. We open on Justin Bieber, HEAR Jennifer Hudson and Nicole Scherzinger come in and then hard cut to them by themselves. Where’s the sharing of the mic? Where’s two artists working it out? Where’s the “Check your ego at the door” sign? Seems to me, this is one big ego enabler: separate recordings, close-ups and a who’s who of most-Tweeted-about flavors of the month. What, Jennifer and Nicole don’t want to bend down to Justin’s height? Too good for that, are we? What a missed opportunity. And if you think that none of that matters as long as it gets people to watch and donate to Haiti, I’d beg to differ. I’d like to ask how much more money might be raised, how many more relief workers might be enlisted, how many more concerned and helpful people might come out of the woodwork with a better product? If you set out to make something of value, make it great – or you underachieved. This version drafts off the success of a predecessor, lazily substitutes artistic effort with buzz metrics and propels an already suffering industry of music into further chaos by continuing to confuse popularity for genius. Haiti and Music deserved better.

And I can applaud the intention of the people who put this together while still disliking how they went about it.

Group rapping is terrible. It should have just been Snoop, Wyclef, Kanye or maybe Lil Wayne. Diverging into a group rap segment belittles rap and misses the point of the whole get together. Let’s mix it up. It’s okay to blend Mary J. Blige in with Tony Bennet (sort of) but rappers need their own interlude? So much for creativity. Speaking of which, auto tune? Why why why would you employ a technique like this to a song with such a heartfelt message? Auto tune corrects tone at the expense of humanity, that’s why the more it’s used, the more robotic it sounds. Conceptually, where does that help in a situation where you’re asking people to have empathy for a cause?

The irony of all of this is that the ‘85 WATW starts with a slate of the USA for AFRICA logo with all the artist’s signatures on it, but all you remember is their voices. The ‘10 WATW video is a lot of voices, but all you remember are their signatures.