“Lost in Music” is the second instalment of Persona non grata, a bilingual column by Jason Barker exclusively for Communis.
Lost in Music
“We Are the World” is the most diabolical song in the history of popular music. I suppose it’s a compliment of sorts, a remarkable admission that sad passions could ever be so joyous.
Ever since the birth of tragedy (and of democracy) in ancient Athens, public “entertainment” has been defined either by or in spite of pain. Nietzsche is even more extreme. For him, pathos is elemental, and extends further back to the “primordial unity” of bacchic revelry, into the mists of time and “the eternal essence of things”. Back to a “time” before being and becoming.
Cast your minds back, if you can, to January 1985, when Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, in a lethargic gesture of Hollywood celebrity, picked up the White Man’s Burden telephone. Answering their call to the recording studio were music legends Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Willie Nelson and Ray Charles, Michael’s producer Quincy Jones, along with relative newcomers Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis. Prince, who the previous year had enjoyed the top-selling Billboard Hot 100 single with “When Doves Cry”, spurned an invitation to take part, describing the song as “horrible”.
With “We Are the World” we enter a phase when, in Nietzsche’s words referring to the Homeric Greeks, “they consider it ludicrous or shameful that they should be expected to restore order to a chaotic world”. In 1985 it’s no longer about saving the world. This is no longer Hanoi Jane siding with the North Vietnamese. Now it’s about dissolving the other in the primordial soup of pathos. “There’s a choice we’re making,” declares the chorus, “We’re saving our own lives”. Meaning: “no one croaks around here without our say-so”. Not forgetting bathos. I dare anyone to sing the ingredients off the back of a cornflakes packet to the tune of that song and make it sound any less musical, any less profound.
The launch of the USA For Africa anthem is the birth of postmodern tragedy. It marks the beginning of the so-called Disaster Appeal. The musicality of late 20th century disasters—of their excruciating interpellations beyond or beneath reason—will follow suit. South African apartheid enjoyed a brief song and dance routine in October 1985 with Bono and Springsteen; the Yugoslav civil war I seem to recall wound up being courted by prog rock and grunge. Let’s not forget people also died.
Quoting extensively from the lyrics to “We Are the World” isn’t possible here for copyright reasons, but glossing a verse gives us the gist of what the world sounded like back then. Let’s listen to the murmurs of our future lost in music.
The world “must come together as one” (primordial unity) because “There are people dying / Oh, and it’s time to lend a hand to life / The greatest gift of all”.
The strophes of this choral ode to life bypass the formal conventions of dialogue and proceed directly, so to speak, to the catastrophe. What the fuck is this song about? What in god’s name does it all mean? Exactly: now you’re getting the message. Now we’re singing from the same hymn sheet.
Consider the lyrics in their entirety and marvel at the diabolical projections of the banality and meaningless of the American Way of Life. This sure ain’t the sixties anymore. Behold Michael and co.’s “ideal spectator”, the one Nietzsche condemns as the populace whose democratic duty it is to keep the aristocrats (modern celebrities) virtuous and grounded in reality. Suffice to say that if that had ever been the social purpose of this song, then, judging by its entire genre (matter, subject and method), not only did it fail monumentally, it had the exact opposite effect. (I can’t help suspecting that if USA For Africa had never happened, nor would the Trump musical. But that’s another story.)
In truth “We Are the World” wasn’t Michael Jackson’s brainchild. The idea dropped into Harry Belafonte’s lap courtesy of Band Aid’s charity single “Do they Know It’s Christmas?” which had already topped the UK singles chart in December 1984. Composed by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in response to the TV spectacle of famine in Ethiopia, their song was straightforwardly patronising to a degree that never would have occurred to Michael.
Where Michael stared innocently into the barrel of nihilism (in the hope of coming out the other side? Surviving his own simmering demons?) Geldof and Ure’s song endeavoured to tell a story (factually wrong) that was both scintillating and morally edifying—albeit in lyrical terms that today would be unthinkable: “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time”. (In stark contrast to its US counterpart, UK pop music’s “redeeming feature” has always been its vaudevillian aspect.)
But “We Are the World” transcended all that. This after all was the Disaster Appeal. The audience was no longer being enjoined to moral reflection of any kind. There is no time (the title of Lou Reed’s most feeble-minded tautology: in which case there is no time. So what?). Instead, with Michael and co. we embark upon a world of unmediated pain and suffering, the sort of physical and psychic torture one can only sing oneself out of; or at least which only makes sense with a song in your heart. “Sing it!” would become the war cry of mullet-haired Apollos to the assembled masses at the benefit concerts of Live Aid and their yuppie simulacra, which by the tail end of the 1980s had deformed the idea of the music festival forever. At the same time the countercultural dithyramb of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll was ruthlessly being policed to the margins of society (all the world’s a stage) and replaced by the prescription drugs regime of “antidepressants”. What’s love got to do with it?
If Woodstock in 1969 had been Dionysus, Live Aid in 1985 was surely Socrates, wandering “with an air of irreverence and superiority”, dispelling moral and intellectual superficiality (because they were moral and intellectual per se) whatever channel it diffused from like laughing gas. With a schedule that dope, TV had a glittering future before it. TV was the future. A disaster for every channel and every season.
What I’m getting at here, among other things, is this. I don’t think mimesis, the matter of masks and plays, of singers, actors and audiences, conceived in any dialectical relation whatsoever, is sufficient to grasp the nature of the Disaster Appeal. Of course, we are bound to recognise that the tragic spectacle is part and parcel, or coterminous, with the spectacle of democracy itself. If the former’s various representational forms are now busy collapsing (and of course, have been throughout (post)modernity) then it’s because so too are democracy’s. But having said that, it seems doubtful that once “democracy” does indeed “collapse” (or assuming it already has) the theatron, as site of diffusion and spectatorship, will too. This is not England under the Puritans. Shame.
The subject prior to its very being will remain in pain and suffering. We shall not not be moved. No doubt there’s a song about that waiting to be sung.
Jason Barker remains the least overrated writer in his own lunchtime.
Featured image: As Stevie Wonder (seated) plays piano and Quincy Jones (in stripes) coaches, soloists learn their parts around 3:00 A.M. Dionne Warwick, Steve Perry, Willie Nelson, Lionel Richie, Daryl Hall, Kenny Loggins and Paul Simon. Courtesy of Esquire.
