Celebrities That Care

Hello and welcome to another edition of Celebrities That Care, where we get to show you a well-meaning all-star charity song gone horribly awry. This time, What’s Going On by Artists Against AIDS Worldwide.

In Marvin Gaye’s voice, with the luxury of historical context behind him, What’s Going On was a landmark single - a sombre yet heartfelt plea for common sense in the midst of the Vietnam war. Strangely enough, when Bono cobbled together a gang of singers ranging from Britney Spears to the bloke out of Staind to do an all-star charity cover version, that message got a tiny bit muddled.

That’s partly because What’s Going On was already pretty good without Ja Rule popping up and rapping a little interlude, and partly because - since it was recorded right before 9/11 - its anti-AIDS message got cobbled together with an anti-terrorism message that neatly allowed Fred Durst to bellow “Somebody gotta tell me what’s going on/ We got human beings using humans for a bomb,” right near the end.

And that’s without mentioning the time the song was re-released for the Drop The Debt campaign that featured the line “I miss you B.I.G/ Let’s find a cure for A.I.D.S.”

Fortunately, this song cured AIDS, put a stop to global terrorism and single-handedly abolished poverty sometime after its release, so don’t we look stupid, eh?

Over the last few days, what with Celine Dion ploughing through 6.5 million gallons of water in a year and Sharon Stone blaming the Chinese earthquake on karma, we’ve thought a lot about how much celebrities care.

And they care a lot. Celebrities, because they are celebrities, feel suffering much more strongly than anyone else. And there’s only one outlet for this profound level of caring - the all-star charity song. We all know the big ones - like We Are The World and Do They Know It’s Christmas - but there are plenty of other less well-known ones out there as well.

Like What More Can I Give by Michael Jackson And Friends, a song written about South Africa, recorded after 9/11 and never properly released because its video was apparently shot by a director of gay porn. Anastacia, Nick Carter, Usher, Ricky Martin, ‘N Sync, Hanson - they all appear on What More Can I Give, though we’d expect none of them would want to discuss it if you asked them about it now.

Why? Try and watch What More Can I Give all the way to the end and you’ll see why. It’s hard, we know - you’ll suffer through more fist-pumping oversincerity than you can possibly imagine - but it’s absolutely worth it, just to see the bit where Usher and Celine Dion give heartfelt spoken-word messages. Not about 9/11, you understand. About Michael Jackson. Incredible.