Assorted thoughts on the celebrity anthems of 1985 and flipping off Cybertrucks

Two pieces of music, and the circumstances of their making, have been bouncing around in my head, and I just want to put some thoughts out there as we consider the present times and what our responses might look like.

This week I was reminded, probably for the first time in decades, of the 1985 charity song "We Are the World." "We Are the World" was, of course, a massive cultural phenomenon, spending four weeks at number one on Billboard and selling millions of copies. In my grade-school music class, we learned what was ostensibly (I really don't know if it was) the sign language for the chorus of the song.

It is so weird! "We Are the World" is the blandest possible quasi-anthemic pop song – catchy as hell, don't get me wrong, but bland. It shoehorns in a line from each of 21 different soloists in addition to having an all-star choir of backup singers, all under the umbrella of USA for Africa. We are talking Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, James Ingram, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, Willie Nelson, Al Jarreau, Bruce Springsteen, Kenny Loggins, Steve Perry, Darryl Hall, Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper, Kim Carnes, Bob Dylan, and Ray Charles. Perhaps the weirdest moment comes courtesy of Dylan, doing the full Bob Dylan whine-drone thing. What is this vocal delivery doing in the same song as Michael Jackson or Kim Carnes? The same, though, could be said of Springsteen or Nelson, each of whom sounds like the purest, unfiltered essence of himself, both of them coming from genres distinctly different from that of the song they're singing. It's an astonishing pastiche of vocal styles in that one bland pop song. Check it out:

"We Are the World" raised a lot of money to fight famine in Ethiopia – notably without reference to the political causes of that famine.

But from "We Are the World," my mind went to another celebrity ensemble fundraising and consciousness-raising song from 1985. "Sun City" came out later in the year and peaked at 38 on Billboard, though it rose higher on the charts in several other countries.

"Sun City" was released by Artists United Against Apartheid, a name that tells you something about the difference between the two songs – one about hunger in a very nonpolitical vein, one directly confronting a white supremacist political system. The song's lyrics repeat a pledge: "I ain't gonna play Sun City" (a segregated resort that had paid large amounts of money to get a series of musicians to break a United Nations cultural boycott of South Africa), and are explicit about apartheid, with lines like "Relocations to phony homelands/Separation of families, I can't understand/23 million can't vote cause they're Black/We're stabbing our brothers and our sisters in the back" (sung by David Ruffin, Pat Benatar, Eddie Kendricks, and Bruce Springsteen, respectively). One line directly calls out then-President Ronald Reagan.

There was some overlap between the musicians involved: In addition to Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Darryl Hall and John Oates appear on both "We Are the World" and "Sun City." But Artists United Against Apartheid took the racial and genre diversity of USA for Africa and went to the next level, and then the one beyond that: Run-DMC, DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Duke Bootee, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Big Youth, Ruffin, Benatar, Kendricks, Joey Ramone, Jimmy Cliff, Darlene Love, Bonnie Raitt, Ruben Blades, Lou Reed, Bobby Womack, Jackson Browne, Peter Garrett, Nona Hendryx, Kashif, Bono, and more. Miles Davis is on trumpet. Ringo Starr and his son are on the drums. Clarence Clemons is on saxophone.

(There's a moment in the video when a classic 80s hair metal guy appears as if teleported in from some other event – that was Michael Monroe of Hanoi Rocks, and a few years later I listened to his solo album enough to remember quite a few of the lyrics to "Man With No Eyes" to this day, I have just learned.)

In the video, images of white people lounging by the pool at Sun City are interspersed with ones of protest and the violent suppression of protest. The deaths in police custody of Steve Biko and Dr. Neil Aggett are noted.

The difference between the songs is the difference between charity and protest. Both worthwhile, but they envision different types of change and embrace different means to reach it.

But in addition to the dramatically more political approach of Artists United Against Apartheid vs. that of USA for Africa, something else stands out. Or is it something else, actually? "We Are the World" is framed as serious business. It is self-reverent, pious. Smiles are cracked here and there, but it is the pop song as church service – a somber church service, not a joyful, roof-raising one. "Sun City" is a protest song, and it's also kind of a party. The life-and-death seriousness of the topic is very much there, but there is dancing and what looks like genuine and enthusiastic fist-raising during the chorus sections. (And I was raised around enough protest to know a half-hearted fist raise when I see one.)

I guess where I'm going with this, aside from the significant historical interest of the two songs, is we can be joyful in the fight. "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution" may be a wild paraphrase of what Emma Goldman actually wrote, but her actual words "I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, .should demand the denial of life and joy. . . If it meant that, I did not want it" – apply as well. Even if you're not an anarchist. Any cause that stands for a beautiful ideal should not demand the denial of life and joy.

Yet it is still a fight. In 1985, the reference to Reagan in "Sun City" and the way Artists United Against Apartheid called out the musicians who had violated the boycott and played Sun City were too much for some. The song wasn't just banned in South Africa – some US radio stations refused to play it. Now we're being told in a hundred different ways to behave with decorum no matter what. But go ahead. Protest at a Tesla showroom. If there's no Tesla showroom near you, flip off a Cybertruck and then spend the next 10 minutes laughing about how much they suck. Not because flipping off a Cybertruck is itself all that meaningful of a protest, but because it may provide the kind of joy that sustains us in the harder parts of the fight.

We're human, and a robust fight for justice encompasses the full range of human emotion.