The Simon Cowell reaction to the Haiti disaster of releasing a version of everybody hurts has to be a low moment in music and it kinda makes me sick. Simon Cowell is already destroying (destroyed) music and this is just awful.
What the problem with it is, is summed up perfectly by Jude Rogers whose article says
” A humanitarian disaster of unimaginable proportions has hit a country long buckling from centuries of corruption and poverty. And what is pop’s response? Everybody hurts. It’s not just you, poor, things. We poor creatures hurt too. “When the day is long” – hey, we sympathise, those aftershocks must be a right bitch, especially when you don’t know when they’re going to bury your family home deeper in debris – and “the night is yours alone” – especially when your wife and children are dead, and you haven’t got any food or water, that must be a right bummer – well, “hang on”. That’s what pop says: “hang on”.
The temerity of that lyrical twist, its jaw-dropping tastelessness, telling people that have had to hang on already, forever, to just bolster their spirits in the face of devastation – a state unknown to pop stars who wouldn’t piss in a bottle for less than ten grand – makes it pop’s grimmest moment of all time. Not only does it rip the soul out of a song that had something to say, but in the warbly throats of Cowell’s Cabal, it turns ‘Everybody Hurts’ into a surreal, empty ode to positive thinking, performed by people who’d have a tantrum if their tea wasn’t served in bone china……..
There are many other grim things about Everybody Hurts being the song for Haiti, There’s the idea that it doesn’t matter what the song is, that people should just shut up and buy it, as if that’s the only way we can help. Why not just donate as many people like I have? Then comes the relentless parade of melismatic vocals, bereft of humility or subtlety or any true soul, that show how the sport of singing has nothing to do with its art.
But the worst thing is this: ‘Everybody Hurts’ is a song that doesn’t offer any answers. It offers sympathy and empathy in the tiniest doses, delivered in this case by musicians that will retire to their manors, and carry on, without blinking, with their extravagant lives. It is a song that used to say, this is the way the world is, deal with it, move on, and it worked because it understood both its audience and its oddness. It stills says this, but now it understands nothing. Now all it says to the people of Haiti, to whom everything is wrong, is that “it’s time to sing along”.
So there’s another reason to add to my list of why I hate Simon Cowell and everything he stands for
