Remember this video from 1985? We Are the World

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1985? We Are the World

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Fun fact: each of the participants was given a commemorative plaque by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. It has all of their names printed on it...

Hanging on my office wall, I have the one that was given to Waylon Jennings!

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Hanging on my office wall, I have the one that was given to Waylon Jennings!

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Cool. How did you come to acquire that?

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`REDNECK` NEWSPAPER COLUMN HAS DALLAS HOT UNDER COLLAR

Apr 28, 1985

DALLAS — Joe Bob Briggs, the redneck newspaper columnist people loved to hate, for years referred to women as ''bimbos,'' Mexican Americans as ''Meskins'' and blacks as ''stupid Negroes.''

But when Joe Bob, a fictitious Archie Bunker-type character, used his weekly column in the Dallas Times Herald to lampoon starving children in Africa and the hit song ''We Are the World,'' which was recorded to raise money for famine relief, it triggered such an uproar in the minority community that the newspaper knuckled under.

''Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In,'' a satirical column that critiqued films in direct proportion to their content of ''blood, breasts and beasts,'' was ordered to hit the road by the paper`s editor. It also was canceled by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, which had distributed Joe Bob to 57 other newspapers.

But the obituary was premature. Universal Press Syndicate immediately picked up the column and 55 of those 57 newspapers, primarily in the South and West, will continue to receive it.

Its cancellation touched off another debate over the 1st Amendment and whether the paper and the Times syndicate had acted too hastily in abandoning Joe Bob, whom they once showcased.

''Poking fun at all people, all causes, that`s the bottom line,'' said John Bloom, who wrote the Joe Bob feature for three years along with other Times Herald columns under his own name.

''It was very literally a place where nothing was sacred--literally nothing,'' he explained after his resignation from the paper and the editor`s decision to kill a new sports column he had been writing titled ''Jock Talk with Joe Bob.''

''One woman once wrote in and said, `Of all people, how could you make fun of handicapped people?` And Joe Bob wrote back, `We`re all handicapped, honey, ever` last one of us,` '' said Bloom, who denies he is Joe Bob and describes himself instead as a friend and spokesman of the fictitious columnist.

Though Bloom frequently champions liberal causes when writing under his own name, Joe Bob is a bigoted reactionary who denounces communists, wimps and just about any ethnic group.

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What touched off the whole brouhaha was a column April 12 in which Joe Bob said he had written a song ''for the benefit of minority groups in Africa and the United Negro College Fund in the United States, cause I think we should be sending as many Negroes to college as we can, specially the stupid Negroes.''

His lyrics began: ''We are the weird, We are the starvin, We are the scum of the filthy Earth, So let`s start scarfin. . . . There`s a goat-head bakin, We`re callin it their food, If the Meskins can eat it, They can eat it too.''

Among black leaders angered by the column was Dallas attorney Eric Moye, who called it ''probably the most offensive column that I have seen written under that nom de plume. . . . People decided, not just the minority community, that he just went too far.''

Moye said a newspaper has its own responsibilities ''not to pander'' to bigotry, ignorance and the ''worst impulses of people.''

Moreover, Moye said, since the column was syndicated, for a city that is "image-conscious to the point of being paranoid about it, to permit somebody like this to be associated with Dallas on a nationwide scale is abominable.''

Editor Jarrett said the famine column ''clearly went over the line'' from the usual bad taste to unacceptable ethnic insult. He admitted that the feature should have been killed ''a long time ago'' because it had strayed from its original concept of a self-effacing redneck movie critic.

Many of Joe Bob`s fans wrote in to protest his demise. Howard Feldman of Dallas said he was ''flabbergasted'' the editors would ''kowtow to a group of angry citizens.''

Said Fred Lusk of Duncanville, Tex.: ''Anyone who took the column seriously was worthy of its attention.''/quote][quote]Bloom termed the decision to kill the column not a 1st Amendment issue,''just a coward issue.''

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, Bloom said, ''I know what Joe Bob would say. As usual, he would say that if anybody could find any redeeming social value in anything he writes, please write in so he can get rid of it.''

Joe Bob`s motto is that ''life is too important to be taken seriously,''

Bloom mused. The first column written for his new syndicate was characteristically irreverent, comparing Joe Bob`s death to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and various conspiracy theories.

''First the National Organization of Bimbos tries to wipe Joe Bob off the face of the Earth for saying I`m opposed to slapping women around like dead mackerels unless it`s necessary to the plot,'' Joe Bob complained.

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Willie too - but some controversy.

Remember it well.

I will always appreciate this song solely because Sam Kinison would have never came up with his World Hunger stand up routine without it. Sometimes there is a reason for cliched, unlistenable, pretentious, claptrap to exist.

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That's when Jennings left the session, reportedly saying, "No good old boy sings in Swahili."

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Of course I remember it. I also remember watching Live Aid. I have it on DVD.

Stevie Wonder, Springsteen, and Dylan can't sing.