Globalizing Protest in the 1980s: Musicians Collaborate to Change the World

"There something’s happening here," Stephen Stills sang in "For What It’s Worth," a 1966 song about a confrontation between students and police in Los Angeles. And for a time, there was. Radio stations filled the air with protest music, most of it about the escalating war in Vietnam as rock musicians railed against Washington and those European allies who supported the conflict.[1] As the war wound down protest music seemed to vanish too. Idealistic student activists had flocked to the anti-war campaigns, but in the 1970s widespread disillusionment set in, and the next generation of musicians tended to focus on love lost and the failed crusades of the late 1960s. "Doctor my eyes," Jackson Browne lamented in 1972, "Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?" Just five years later, the Eagles mourned the passing of that youthful activism in California, singing that "we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969."[2]

By 1980, the context for politically aware music had changed. The tail end of the Baby Boom generation had developed a consciousness that encompassed a critique of American imperialism beyond Vietnam, while the younger Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1976, came of age questioning the dichotomy of Cold War politics and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Both anger and anxiety fused in protest music against American policies during the Reagan administration.

Just as television had exposed the older generation to world events, so too did it change the ways in which the younger generation received music. Radio continued to play an important role in broadcasting music, but teenagers with cable television (or friends with cable television) demanded, "I want my MTV." The network, Music Television (MTV), which operated like a visual radio station playing music videos introduced by "video jockeys" (VJs), quickly became ubiquitous and was instrumental in the superstardom of such performers as Madonna and Michael Jackson. Yet in its earliest years the station programmers drew upon any available content, from concert films of bands popular in the 1960s and 1970s to British acts as yet unknown in America. The latter, whose LPs were hard to find and rarely heard on the radio, opened up a world for young American audiences both in terms of musical styles and in perspective. U2, Midnight Oil, the Clash, the Police, Simple Minds, and Nina and her "99 Luftballons" exposed American teens to international issues and influences.[3]

American musicians too expanded their gaze beyond North American shores. Reflecting a growing unhappiness with America’s foreign policies, the music served as a reminder of the ever-present link between politics and popular protest. One issue was the Reagan administration’s covert war against the Marxist government in Nicaragua. In 1984 Jackson Browne, a longtime resident of Los Angeles fluent in Spanish, journeyed throughout Central America. The result, two years later, was the album Lives in the Balance, which included the title track of that name as well as "For America" and "Soldier of Plenty." The album was released just before the Iran-Contra scandal broke, giving new meaning to Browne’s lyrics, "I want to know who the men in the shadows are." For a generation of artists who had protested the final years of Vietnam, it appeared that once again "a country [was] drifting to war." For that reason, Bruce Springsteen began to perform the 1969 anti–Vietnam War song "War" as part of his live show and warning audiences that "blind faith in your leaders will get you killed."[4]

Another issue was South Africa’s apartheid policies, President Reagan’s endorsement of Pretoria’s National Party, and American corporate investments in South Africa. Despite rising calls across the nation for sanctions and the liberation of jailed African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela, Reagan announced in 1985 that the "reformist administration" of South Africa had "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country." Musicians responded in various ways.

Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band crafted a protest song entitled "Sun City," named for a tourist resort and casino located in one of the "homeland" apartheid states created by the South African government. A number of western artists had played the venue, despite a 1968 United Nations cultural ban on performances in the country.[5] What began as a single song quickly turned into an album of the same name and a new organization: Artists United Against Apartheid (AUAA). The album, which was banned in South Africa, featured a number of musicians identified with other protest movements, including Bob Dylan, Browne, U2’s Bono, Bonnie Raitt, Miles Davis, Pete Townshend, Ruben Blades, Joey Ramone, and Peter Gabriel. In the refrain of title song, "Sun City," the artists shouted out, "I ain’t gonna play Sun City."

Two years before, in 1983, singer Linda Ronstadt was offered $500,000 to play at the resort. She accepted, but invited Rolling Stone journalist Aaron Latham to come along. Like other American artists she insisted on an integrated audience, although in the end very few blacks attended. While there, Ronstadt engaged both blacks and whites, hoping, she said, "to get a dialogue going." By defying the UN resolution, she argued, she brought like-minded blacks and whites together in an integrated venue.[6]

Even more complicated was Paul Simon’s 1986 album, Graceland. Inspired by African rhythms, Simon wrote and recorded the album in South Africa. It featured African artists and introduced the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo to American audiences. Simon steered clear of politics, and as was the case with Ronstadt (who appeared on the album), nobody believed he was sympathetic to the South African government. Yet both the ANC and AUAA condemned Simon’s violation of the boycott. Twenty-five years later, despite the collapse of apartheid and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela to the South African presidency, the subject remains sensitive. In 2012, Dali Tambo, son of the late ANC president Oliver Tambo, recalled, "At that moment in time, it was not helpful. We were fighting for our land, for our identity. We had a job to do, and it was a serious job." As far as Tambo was concerned, Simon brought fame to a handful of black South African musicians while weakening a global boycott on racial segregation.[7]

The legacy of colonialism in other parts of the African continent also captured the attention of musicians. Harry Belafonte, a Caribbean American singer with a long record of civil rights activism, had become concerned with the poverty, starvation, and violence in sub-Saharan Africa and helped form the non-profit USA for Africa in 1985. The lead singer of the English band Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof, however, was the first to rally pop artists to the cause.

Beginning on October 23, 1984, the BBC aired reports by journalist Michael Buerk from Ethiopia where famine had killed over eight million people in the previous two years. Images of families starved to skin-covered skeletons, children with bellies distended and covered with flies while government officials refused to alleviate their suffering horrified viewers. Moved to action, Geldof contacted Ultravox singer Midge Ure, and the two composed the anthem "Do They Know It’s Christmas?" to raise funds for relief. They prodded leading British artists, including Sting, U2, Phil Collins, Boy George, George Michael, and Duran Duran, to record the song as the supergroup Band-Aid in November 1984. Released in early December, the single spent five weeks in the number one spot of Billboard magazine’s charts and sold one million copies in its first week of sales escalating to a total of 3.5 million in the UK and 2.5 million in the US, and returned to the charts the following Christmas.

Inspired by the British efforts, Belafonte contacted American singer Lionel Ritchie to help in a similar effort among American artists. Ritchie collaborated with Michael Jackson, already a pop icon as a result of Thriller, and producer Quincy Jones in writing the song "We Are the World." On January 28, 1985, an eclectic group of artists gathered to record the song, including Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Kenny Rogers, Paul Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross, and Ray Charles. The single was released on March 11, 1985, followed by an album containing previously unrecorded singles by participating artists. Sales reached $10.8 million by May 1986, with 90 percent of the proceeds going toward famine relief in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the Sudan, and 10 percent to organizations providing relief for hunger and homelessness in the United States.[8]

Geldof used the momentum of both Band-Aid and USA for Africa to organize Live Aid, a daylong concert spanning two continents, on July 13, 1985. More than 72,000 people crammed into Wembley Stadium in London, with 100,000 more in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, while an estimated 1.9 million people in 150 nations tuned in to radio or television broadcasts. The roster of bands included Queen, Elton John, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Sting, the Who, Paul McCartney, U2, Madonna, Tom Petty, Tina Turner, a Led Zeppelin reunion, and Eric Clapton. Phil Collins managed to play both venues by taking the supersonic Concorde from London to Philadelphia. The concert raised approximately $283.6 million through ticket and merchandise sales and donations, and inspired other artists to hold similar mega-concerts for charitable causes, such as Amnesty International, in subsequent years.[9]

These efforts to provide relief to Africa were not universally hailed. While no one would dispute the sincerity of Geldof, Belafonte, or other participants, many questioned the naiveté of their goals. Singer Joan Baez praised the youthful American audience at Live Aid by saying, "this is your Woodstock," but few of the millions who tuned in understood either the anti-war impulse of the earlier concert or the problems that resulted in the famine in Africa. Geldof himself explicitly avoided any overtly political statement. "I wanted it to be absolutely, simplistically direct," Geldof said.[10]

Indeed, few African artists or images of Africa appeared in any of these relief efforts, and Africa itself was invoked as a monolithic and exotic place deserving pity. Two Ethiopian activist attended the recording of "We Are the World," but the video did not include them, showing only full-bodied pans of American artists. The lyrics of both the British and American songs did not cry for change so much as extol the euphoria of giving. Many of the artists who appeared at Live Aid had played at Sun City. Despite President Reagan’s interest in being part of the Live Aid event and the attendance of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, no discussion emerged as to the culpability or responsibility of their governments in addressing crises in Africa. Most cynically, just as advertising had co-opted the counterculture of the 1960s, corporations such as Pepsi—which employed both Ray Charles and Michael Jackson as spokesmen at the time of the "We Are the World" recording—discovered the benefits of cause-related marketing.[11]

Simplicity seemed an inherent problem with the conception of the entire enterprise. The charitable desire to "feed the world" stood in sharp contrast to criticism of structural problems. Government corruption and civil war caused 56,000 tons of food to rot in the ports of Ethiopia while the government continued the policies that caused the famine in the first place, and both government and opposition forces used financial aid to purchase arms. Similar problems abounded in other nations that received aid from USA for Africa.[12]

For the artists and fans of politicized music, the world had become both larger and more complicated in the 1980s. Teens and young adults no longer suffered the consequences of US foreign policy themselves, as they had in the 1960s. Expressing outrage through song in order to spur people into action became ever more frustrating. Jackson Browne and Steve Van Zandt explicitly identified their music as protest music. Yet the songs and events that raised the most money specifically avoided political commentary. Rather than provoke anger at injustice, they made emotional appeals for benevolence. The deepest fury, perhaps, emerged from domestic iniquity as hip-hop gained increasing popularity with its infectious beat and rage against endemic poverty and racism persisting in America’s own cities.