I swear to god, this insane performance goes viral on Twitter bimonthly.
Oh yeah, hey, hi, how are you doing, oh wonderful, back to the plot.
Anyway, like clockwork, the 2008 live performance of the star studded, female focused celebrity ballad Just Stand Up! On the Stand Up to Cancer special has gone viral again. Billed as “Artists Stand Up to Cancer”, the track is a Babyface produced charity single in the vein of We Are The World, with all that implies. Some are better than others.
This one is my favourite, but mostly because it feels so chaotic. While I’m sure there was effort put into the production behind the scenes, it simply doesn’t sound…finished. Maybe it’s the wildly disparate voices forced to sit together. The lyrics are banal, but there’s something particularly dated about hearing a pubescent Miley Cyrus layered to all hell, at her most nasal, brightly sing “whatever”. Magic.
But it’s the performance, not the track itself, that remains relevant. So we’re going to rank the performers, not from worst to best, but from who impacts me the most every time I take the three minutes and twenty one seconds to watch it in full. Maybe I’ll surprise you!
Runners up: Sheryl Crow, LeAnn Rimes, Melissa Etheridge
Simple to explain here – they aren’t in the performance. In fact, Rimes and Etheridge’s parts are cut entirely, despite being on the official track. For the better, as I cannot see what they might have added to the insanity.
Ashanti
Who did this to you?
That is the main question I have while watching the performance, as Ashanti clearly sings her heart out while the microphone remains off, a problem nobody else deals with here. Her one line sounds fine, but the majority of the song she is a non-presence. So, she sits at the bottom, blocked by God. Or a vindictive sound man.
Maybe it was Irv Gotti.
Mariah Carey
She doesn’t sound great. The second line is an improvement, but there’s something extremely subdued and sad about her energy. Knowing she was trying to get pregnant during this time, I don’t want to criticise too much, which is why she’s so low, but there’s also just nothing particularly compelling about her presence. Even the funniness of the Mariah Carey stiff posing doesn’t give me a giggle. I just hope she’s ok every time she shows up on screen.
Or maybe she was just bored.
Carrie Underwood
She sounds lovely, I’ll give her that. Pure American Idol energy. That’s probably why she’s the only country girl allowed to perform the song live. That and her amazing wig. But there’s never a good way to follow Beyonce on a track, and she just doesn’t hit me in the soul the way many of the other girls do.
Ciara
I love her lack of real energy. She doesn’t really attract attention. But the bangs are beautiful.
The Like A Surgeon chanteuse doesn’t even get a line.
Keyshia Cole
I think what gets me about her small moments is that she is clearly selling it to the crowd. But she’s stuck next to Fergie, who seems to be the star of the night (I have questions). There’s a moment where the camera literally dollies forward to cut her out.
It’s so cinematic.
Nicole Scherzinger
Her visible shock at Natasha Bedingfield belting and her closed off throat make me giggle.
Natasha Bedingfield
She sounds good. Top 3 performances on that stage actually. But I want to ask which stylist allowed her to wear those white pants? They’re incredibly distracting in the wide shot at the end.
Leona Lewis
I’ve got a bit of a wild take here, and that’s that Leona Lewis sounds the best here. Just for this performance! Maybe it’s helped by her standing next to Fergie, who actively sounds bad, and Ciara, who doesn’t get to sound at all. But she has some nice runs and sings in her accent, which is a cool contrast.
Mary J Blige
There’s nothing particularly notable here, except Blige has more charisma in her little finger than the majority of the people on that stage have in their whole bodies. She’s literally glowing too, and Mary is the only one I could see actually selling the track as a solo performer. That being said, she does too well to sit at the top of this list. It’s too professional, too clean, which gets overshadowed.
Rihanna & Miley Cyrus
These two have to be a pair.
Firstly, you have Rihanna, in her Disturbia/Rehab hair, bopping along while she sings. She’s honestly not doing a significant amount to land this high, but there’s an element that shoots her up. Her name is Miley Cyrus.
This is a vocal performance so jarring that I want to burst out laughing every time I even think of “things get better” coming out of her mouth. Still in full Disney force, Cyrus is a vision of brown beach wives and apple cheeks, and her hyper enthusiasm is visibly annoying Rihanna as she leans between her and Beyonce at various points. There’s something so artificial about her bubbliness, which turns immediately to comedic gold.
In a performance of a song about staying strong during cancer treatments, her smile reminds me of that SNL sketch where Kenan Thompson rides past a grieving man on a scooter shouting “the funeral’s Monday!”.
Beyonce
She’s in the Etta wig.
That’s all you can think about when Beyonce opens this track. The first time I saw this, in the opening wide shot, I thought she was P!NK. So imagine my surprise when a smiling and professional Beyonce Giselle Knowles-Carter is in close up, pretending like she doesn’t look like that.
Her voice is, as always, amazing. She’s giving it the old college try. But she’s also inexplicably in a short blonde cut that looks like a “Karen”, to be very annoying about it. You cannot look away. You shouldn’t.
Until SHE steps to the mic.
Fergie
She opens to a standing ovation.
On a stage with Mariah Carey, Beyonce, Mary J Blige and countless other legends, stars, and available singers, the Duchess of York Pop gets the crowd going. Some twitter users have claimed it was just because a sign lit up to tell them to do it, but I hope not. It would just feel right that in 2008, as the Black Eyed Peas had fully become a vehicle for both her and will.i.am to dominate the late 2000s charts with minimal group support, that she was who people came to see.
The best part is how bad she sounds. Fergie was, is and in future will be a bad live performer. Her recent showing at the VMAs with Jack Harlow was bland. Her Fergilicious performances when the song was being promoted were laughable. At her best she sounds like a Rihanna doing a Gwen Stefani impression.
There are genuinely great moments on that stage (hey Mary!), but nothing makes me smile more that Fergie Ferg getting the outro to the song. The confident smile. A zoom in, cutting away Keyshia and Leona. There would be only one way to make her more the focal point, and that would be to place her between Mary J Blige and Beyonce in the centre.
I want to end this in two ways.
On one hand, this was clearly a good thing. These stars, getting together to raise money for charity, using their voices for good. It’s nice to see so many names doing something that, in many ways, is extremely selfless. Outside of annoyance, they clearly had enough respect for the cause and each other to be happy and enthusiastic about the venture. Jokes aside, it’s nice and I don’t hate charity singles on the face of it.
The other side is basically that this is clearly a PR stunt for everyone. Nobody walked away from this with bad publicity, they all got a small boost and maybe a few new fans. There are selfless acts of charity that someone can do, and there are public displays of it. That doesn’t mean it’s insincere, but more that it’s subtly transactional. It always crosses my mind that, particularly for things like this, it would probably be more directly helpful for the performers, producers and everyone involved to donate themselves. Particularly since these songs have rarely had the impact to warrant the effort and cost.
But in the end, this is for the laughs.
There are certain artefacts of the 2000s that remain fun in retrospect. Fergie bungling the words to Fergilicious, Melody Thorton crashing the AMAs performance of Buttons, that other performance of Buttons too. This is one of those moments, something that brings us together in collective giggle. And unlike many other nostalgic memories, I have hope it won’t spark a tragic biopic.
PLEASE GOD NO.
It’d be a dick move to not acknowledge the actual cancer research charity at the centre of this, so please go check out their page for more information on their mission.