SEPTEMBER 11, A DAY MARKED BY GREAT HATRED, has provoked a whole lot of money and love from a gushing music industry. The television fund-raiser “America: A Tribute to Heroes” may have been sick-making to watch, but it raised upwards of $150 million for the United Way’s survivor fund. Individual musicians ponied up as well. West Coast Dr. Dre, the producer behind NWA, Eminem, and Snoop Doggy Dogg, promised a cool one million dollars to one relief fund. Brooklyn-born rapper Jay-Z. pledged one dollar from every ticket sold on his fall tour. Which is also what Britney Spears did. “P. Diddy,” aka Sean “Puffy” Combs (the infamous hip hop impresario who no longer dates Jennifer Lopez but continues to steal his best musical riffs from ’70s funk and rock bands,) is giving $100,000 to a fund organized by the New York Daily News. Mr. Diddy, according to the New York Daily News, has also made a gift of clothing from his “Sean John” label to rescue workers at Ground Zero. (In case you are keeping track, “Sean John” is the name his parents gave him.) His decision to give the gift of fashion is particularly touching. But still, the mind balks at imagining these middle-class firemen, cops, and EMTs, so many of whom come from the outer boroughs and beyond, strutting around in duds for which the phrase “ghetto fabulous” was coined. And the love keeps coming, with new tribute recordings of Marvin Gaye’s pleading classic “What’s Going On.” This project, which involves five different “mixes” of the song (a rock mix, an R&B mix, an “adult” mix, and so on), predated the hijackings that crashed four planes and killed over 6,000 people. The idea was originally conceived as a charity single along the lines of “We Are the World” to benefit a global coalition of AIDS organizations. But after the terrorist attacks, the organizers, led by Bono, the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, adeptly changed gears. They released the song for radio play as soon as possible and moved up the sales date by almost a month and a half. Oh, and they decided to divide the proceeds with the United Way’s September 11 survivor fund. Such is the market logic of charitable giving that the victims of terrorism have a temporary monopoly on sympathy. Had Bono and friends not decided to split the proceeds, they could have ended up with nothing instead of half a loaf. And as to the song, well, ever since Elton John decided to use his tribute to Marilyn Monroe to mourn the death of Princess Di, there has been no taboo against such double dipping. There are few songs less relevant to the events of September 11 than Marvin Gaye’s antiwar classic. Consider the following lines: “Father, father, father, we don’t need to escalate, / You see, war is not the answer / For only love can conquer hate.” The same holds true for the rest of the album. Ripe with warm references to family and children, its social gospel is one of Christian forgiveness and pathetic loony-left cause-mongering. When Gaye wasn’t complaining “war is hell, when will it end / when will people start getting together again,” he was preaching class warfare and worrying about “radiation underground” and “fish full of mercury.” Written in a mood of uncertain brooding brought on by the Vietnam war and the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., “the whole album basically came out of the newspaper,” as one of the album’s songwriters put it. A time piece, an interesting bit of history, damn good music–the album What’s Going On” is all of these. Same for its title song. But music for all seasons the album and song are not. Luckily, the aforementioned rapper and producer Dr. Dre is also hard at work on a September 11-related tribute song, the title of which has a charming simplicity. Called “Kill Osama bin Laden,” the song’s lyrics reportedly focus on “preparing a pine box for his body.” David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
