Television The greatest night in pop (on Netflix)

[crabmeat]

Stevie Wonder is kind of a dick. They called him every day for 3 weeks trying to get him to help write the song with Lionel and Michael Jackson. He never returned their calls so they wrote it without him.

But when he shows up the night to record, he tries to make a bunch of changes to the song. Motherfucker you had your chance! It's too late to rewrite the song now.

He was trying to lead a mutiny and get all the artists to add a section where they sing in Swahili. And of course nobody knew Swahili so they'd just have to take Stevie's word for it that the lines didn't mean anything bad. Stevie claimed to know some Swahili but there was no Internet so you couldn't verify his translation.

This caused Waylon Jennings to walk out on the project. He wasn't comfortable singing words when he can't verify the meaning. They could accidentally sing "let's kill babies" or something.

Bob Geldof finally talked some sense into Stevie, telling him that the children are starving in Somalia, and most of that country doesn't even speak Swahili. And someone else, Springsteen I think, said "we're not singing to the starving kids anyway, we singing to the people that can give money."

But he wasted a bunch of time with this bullshit and they only had a few hours left to record everyone. This was at like 3am and everyone was tired and just wanted to be done.

It was for Ethiopia. All that money went to both sides during a civil war, which had drawn out fighting.

 

[Ezekiel 25:17]

Madonna was not a much of a singer either. Good performer and legendary songs but her voice?

This is true. Her backup singers were much better.

She did have an ear for good songs and a nack for performing though. She was certainly more creative and ambitious than most of her peers from that incredible era. A ton of people who came up in her prime years said her tours were legendary.