Songs that Legitimately Changed the World

Sometimes we feel that a person is exaggerating when he says that a 3-minute song changed his life. Well it’s not that quite surprising when there are popular songs out there that can change the course of history. Here are songs that legitimately changed the world.

Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Angel’ Stopped Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC from Committing Suicide

These days, this McLachlan ballad is widely used by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to make you feel bad for not rescuing a stray dog in need of a home. But back in 1997, the song was still in heavy rotation on the radio and it helped save the life of Run-DMC member Darryl McDaniels.

It was a life-changing moment for the legendary MC when he heard Sarah’s angelic voice singing the lines "Spend all your time waiting for that second chance, for a break that would make it okay.” McDaniels was suffering from depression and fighting it with prescription drugs which he would take with alcohol. At that time, Run-DMC was falling apart, and McDaniels lost his creative drive. So one day, he decided he would end it all, despite having things to stick around for -- like lots of money, a huge army of fans, and his family.

But then McDaniels turned on the radio, heard "Angel," and suddenly life seemed amazing. Or as he put it, "That record saved my life. I heard Sarah McLachlan's record and something that day said, 'Life is good. It's good to be alive."

Three years later, everything was better for McDaniels and he discovered he was adopted. So using his fame and money, he set up the Felix Organization to provide "inspiring opportunities and new experiences to enrich the lives of children who are growing up in the foster care system." Each summer, more than 300 kids head to Camp Felix for days of swimming, rock climbing, and music lessons.

Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ Encouraged the Serbian People to Do Exactly That

;

The public was fed up with the rule of Slobodan Milosevic, president of the Serbian part of Yugoslavia, and his control over the state-run media. A huge protest was planned for March 9, 1991 in Belgrade. The president figured his police could just kick some protester butt, everyone would go home, and that would be it. But far more people turned up than expected. With an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 Serbians dissatisfied with their leader. Police efforts to disperse the crowd escalated until tanks were rolling onto the streets, and in the end, two people died, 203 were injured, and 636 were arrested.

Independent radio stations like B92 were ordered to stop broadcasting any news so that the public heard only the official, state-sanctioned version of events. So B92 did the only thing a radio station could in that situation: play music. But what B92 did was look for the angriest ‘damn the man’ song they could find and play it while the regime was ignorant to understand the message. The radio station played the hip-hop track Fight the Power. The regime just thought the radio station was doing its job of playing popular music, but anti-regime listeners, according to the founder of B92, “understood the code”.

The protests continued for five more days. Protesters grew more and more in the streets, and their emotions got angrier by the day. So it wasn’t a surprise that in a few days, Milosevic finally gave in to some of the demands the protesters were asking. All thanks to some motivation from Public Enemy.

Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ Helped Find 26 Missing Kids

{youtube}NRtvqT_wMeY{/youtube}

Runaway Train is a 1993 power ballad song about depression, but that didn’t stop it becoming a mega-hit charting in 15 countries, including hitting number 2 on the US Charts. Just like any mega-hit, a music video was produced. The band decided to do something good out of it, so they got a director who took the “runaway” part literally and made a music video highlighting children who ran away and went missing.

The video was tailored for each country in which it ran. For example, the U.K. version opened by saying there were "100,000 youths lost on the streets of Britain," while in the U.S., that number was one million. In order to have maximum impact, the children included were also from the areas in which each video was being played, so only missing Australian kids were shown in Australia, etc. While MTV cut it short because they worried that the appeal at the end made the video look like a public service announcement, the director figured it might make some kids return home because they had seen themselves in a cool music video.

Within the next few years, 26 of the kids in the videos either returned home or were located because of Soul Asylum. People started coming up to the band at gigs and talking about how that video had changed their lives.

Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Made the World a Little More Generous

{youtube}bjQzJAKxTrE{/youtube}

"Do They Know It's Christmas?" is a song written in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in reaction to television reports of the 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia. It was first recorded in a single day on 25 November 1984 by Band Aid, a supergroup put together by Geldof and Ure and consisting mainly of the biggest British and Irish musical acts at the time that include Bono, Sting, Boy George, Paul McCartney, and Phil Collins and more.

The Band Aid project was the first major musical collaborative effort for charity that inspired other charity records around the world like America’s We Are the World by USA for Africa and Canada’s Tears are Not Enough by Northern Lights. The project was such a huge success that it’s hard to imagine that initially Harvey Goldsmith, Band Aid promoter, thought it was nothing special.

‘What did I think of the single? It was okay. Nothing special. But getting all those people to perform together on a collective song with a message to it was something. What really made it successful, of course, were the pictures from Africa on the news, which are repeating again as we speak.

‘Did we have any idea that Live Aid would be that huge? None. None whatsoever. We were just getting the job done in the shortest possible space of time. We ended up with a fantastic list of artists, and our target was to raise a million quid. We had no idea we were going to raise £160 million.

‘The single changed the way people gave money. It changed the way people thought about giving. And it showed the world for the first time that pop artists, as crazy as they are, are also the most caring of all and that they understood how to use their powers of attraction for good.

#y101fm #alwaysfirst #rhythmofthecity #entertainment