Day in early 1981, understanding that such a massive event would help facilitate progress towards MLK’s dream of integration. Stevie Wonders 'Happy Birthday,' which he wrote as part of the effort to make MLK Day a holiday. So I just kept that in my mind till it happened.' Stevie Wonder sang this to Rosa Parks on her 89th birthday when he attended the premiere of her made-for-TV movie Ride to Freedom: The Rosa Parks Story. Wonder started the campaign for Martin Luther King Jr. I wrote about it because I imagined it and I saw it and I believed it. But that’s exactly what the genius of Stevie Wonder accomplished with his Happy Birthday classic. The Legacy of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday’ Reinventing the Happy Birthday song is kind of like reinventing the ABC’s. Creating a message of unity, and similarities between all of us was a key in turning this song into the powerhouse moment it ended up being. Mai 1950 in Saginaw, Michigan eigentlich Stevland Hardaway Judkins Morris) ist ein US-amerikanischer Soul- und Pop-Sänger, Komponist, Multiinstrumentalist sowie Pr mehr erfahren. His ability to conceive that many people did not want to talk about social rights issues or acknowledge the rift in the United States at the time was spot on. The genius of Stevie Wonder is in the method in which he left a powerful note of activism layered beneath a song millions would use on their birthday for decades to come. Helado Negro is undoubtedly on point with his analysis. People get fed up with oppression and I think protest music can be fantastical and lead people to rethink, reposition and organize themselves.” “I think just because it’s a protest song it doesn’t have to have some sort of dogma attached, it can be more useful as a way to give people the energy to get out there and be heard. It’s an amazing way to make a song enlightening and fill you up with a positive feeling.” Perhaps, given long enough, the rest of the world will one day react the way Noah did when he heard “Happy Birthday to You” for the first time - with stunned horror that so many people could be content to sing something so depressing.“There’s a lyric where he asked why can’t we have a day where we just celebrate peace? That’s the biggest protest song you can ever have. I therefore propose that Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” be adopted as the universal norm. “Happy Birthday to You” was in a sense ruined by the craven greed of the music executives who wanted to monetize it at the expense of the people. But by then, the cultural damage, the decades of careful evasion that kept the familiar melody out of movies and TV, had been done. The track was justly inducted into the public domain in 2013, after a clever documentarian filed a class action lawsuit against the record label. In addition to being boring, repetitive and brutally cheerless, “Happy Birthday to You” has the distinction of having been mired in litigious controversy for the better part of a century, dubiously lining the Warner Music coffers by squeezing millions of dollars in bogus royalties out of everyone, from TV networks to the Girl Guides of America. How I learned to ski in my 30s - and discovered the terror and joy of the mountain Nobody really likes “Happy Birthday to You.” And in Wonder’s rendition we have an excellent candidate to replace it entirely. It’s so good, in fact, that it makes you wonder what anyone is doing singing “Happy Birthday to You,” and why so many of us persist in the habit despite compelling reasons to abandon it entirely. It’s joyous and effervescent it has beds of smooth’ 80s synths and is, absurdly, almost six minutes long. Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” is extremely delightful. “Black people (me and my entire family, for instance) have been singing it at birthday parties for decades… It’s infinitely cooler and more soulful than the white thing that may have inspired it.” “Yes, the black ‘Happy Birthday’ is real,” she writes. In 2016, Aisha Harris wrote a paeon for Slate about what she simply calls “the black Happy Birthday song,” which, she discovered when she informally polled them, her white friends had almost uniformly never heard of. Indeed, black families all over America have tended to prefer “Happy Birthday” to the white-favoured “Happy Birthday to You,” defaulting to it in unison each year. Noah’s was not the only family to substitute Wonder’s ballad for the traditional.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |