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Thursday, January 30, 2025

January 30, 2025: Musical Activism: Artists United Against Apartheid

[Forty years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded their single “We are the World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]

On two American contexts for another 1985 musical activism.

First things first: South Africa is not the United States, and it’s important to note that the 1985 musical supergroup Artists United Against Apartheid, and their protest song “Sun City,” were explicitly and entirely focused on that African nation and its policies of racial segregation. There are of course additional, complex layers to that focus, including the Sun City resort and casino, located in the semi-autonomous-but-ultimately-still-part-of-South-African-and-thoroughly-tied-to-Apartheid state of Bophuthatswana, that the group and song were overtly protesting and boycotting (a concert venue at which, frustratingly enough, a number of contemporary artists and groups had been and continued to be more than happy to perform). This blog is called AmericanStudies, and so I’m going to focus the rest of this post on a couple American contexts for this musical activism; but there’s plenty more to say about its South African contexts, and if folks want to add to them in the comments below I’d be very appreciative as always.

One particularly striking American context for the supergroup is just how diverse a collection of artists rocker Steve Van Zandt and hip hop producer Arthur Baker assembled for the recording session and the song that they created. In his book on the project critic Dave Marsh called it “the most diverse line up of popular musicians ever assembled for a single session,” and I can’t disagree: you’d be hard-pressed to find another group that included DJ Kool Herc and Ringo Starr, Grandmaster Melle Mel and Hall & Oates, Bob Dylan and Afrika Bambaataa, Bono and Gil Scott-Heron, and literally countless others. And the resulting song reflects that diversity, as it moves back and forth between hip hop and rap verses, rock ones, and a chorus that brings the multiple voices and styles together. A great deal has been made of the groundbreaking 1986 collaboration between Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith, and rightly so—but nearly a year earlier, the “Sun City” sessions and song likewise featured these multiple musical genres, and could be seen as helping pave the way for future such collaborations and cross-overs.

The other American context I want to highlight here is far, far more complex. By his own admission, Steve Van Zandt’s initial interest in opposing Apartheid came when he learned that the policy had been based in part on Native American reservations in the US, and the song’s lyrics reflect that intersection with the repeated lines “Relocation to phony homelands/Separation of families, I can’t understand.” And then there’s this: Sun City had been developed by the South African hotel tycoon Sol Kerzner and his Sun International group; and just over a decade after Van Zandt’s supergroup, Kerzner opened another resort and casino, this time as a joint venture with a Native American tribe: Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. I’m not suggesting for a second that a Native American casino is the same as an Apartheid one; indeed, the two could be seen as polar opposites. But the same South African tycoon was behind both, which at the very least reminds us that, to quote Trip in Glory, “We’re all covered up in it. Ain’t nobody clean.”

Last musical activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?

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