All-star charity albums
Michael Jackson finally released his star-studded charity record "What more can I give" in November - more than two years after it was originally recorded after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - featuring performances by Celine Dion, 'N Sync, Mariah Carey, Carlos Santana, Tom Petty, Destiny's Child, Reba McEntire and many more.
The track was made available on an Internet site with the $2 download fee said to be earmarked for a handful of children's charities and then quickly disappeared (although the recording will live forever in online file-sharing circles). Could this be the last all-star charity record? Jackson himself had no small part in starting the long-fallow pop fund-raising exercise almost 20 years ago with "We Are the World".
Did you somehow miss the new version of "We are family", redone by the original members of Chic with a stellar cast including Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, Patti Labelle, Jackson Browne, the Pointer Sisters, Joel Grey and others on behalf of the victims of Sept. 11? And who remembers that 2001 all-star version of Marvin Gaye's "What's goin' on"? Executive producer Bono of U2 put together the sessions a week before the attacks, recording on behalf of African AIDS with an A-list set of performers in New York for the MTV Music Awards ('N Sync, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez, the Backstreet Boys, Gwen Stefani, Michael Stipe, among others)? Anybody hear that one?
Despite these - and other - periodic efforts to revive the concept, the all-star charity record would appear to be road kill on the pop culture highway. "We are the world" is now largely relegated to off-key versions by elementary school choruses and Band Aid's "Do they know it's Christmas", the 1984 fund-raiser for Ethiopian famine relief that started it all, and was once the biggest-selling British single ever, is consigned to the rubbish heap of pop. (SFGate)
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