If you’re ever invited into a Palestinian home, you’ll never leave without dessert.
“You’re greeted with so many kinds of cookies and teas,” said Bella Hadid, the Palestinian American model, activist and co-host of Saturday night’s Artists For Aid benefit show at the Shrine Auditorium. “But also love, hugs, and compassion. Palestine is one of the most beautiful places in the world. My dad never taught me to hate anybody — it was always about love and understanding that everyone’s history is exactly what it was.”
That embodied the mood that Hadid and a sprawling cast of collaborators and musicians tried to cultivate at the third annual benefit show produced by the Canadian Sudanese artist Mustafa. Joined by co-host Pedro Pascal and a roster of musicians including surprise guest Chappell Roan, along with Shawn Mendes, Omar Apollo, Raphael Saadiq, Clairo and many others, they took a period of profound grief and fury about the intractability of the world’s current crises and tried to refocus on immediate relief for children and medical care in war-ravaged Palestinian territories and Sudan.
“I always knew that an artist’s power did not come from their musical knowledge,” Mustafa said, introducing the night. “I always knew that an artist’s power comes from the expansion of their empathy.” The performers that night tried to use that moral connection to help fix what they could.
Mustafa — the richly baritoned Toronto singer-songwriter whose 2024 LP “Dunya” drew wide praise — has become a significant figure straddling global folk music and activism. His songwriting poignantly speaks to third-culture-kid longing over intimate acoustic guitar work, like on “Name of God.”
Yet he acknowledged onstage Saturday that he’s perhaps more comfortable as an organizer than performer. His humanitarian work with Artists For Aid is similarly precise and broadly accessible — Saturday’s show raised $5.4 million for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the Sudanese American Physicians Assn. In a moment when even humanitarian work around these regions can be wrenched by bad-faith political agendas, Mustafa’s framing of the purpose of Saturday’s show was savvy and measured. I didn’t recall the words “Israel” or “Trump” spoken a single time onstage.
Instead, Mustafa hosted more than four hours of music from a range of artists that spanned pop, folk, rock, R&B and well beyond. Few causes could bring the clamorous noise-rock of Geese onto the same stage as Mendes performing his pop hit “Stitches,” but such was Mustafa’s reach as an artist and magnetism as an activist.
Rather than speak directly to the rage at global humanitarian disasters — or to a recent ICE killing of a young mother and the U.S. invasion and ouster of Venezuela’s president — the music was loose and tender for the breadth of the long night. From the first notes of Cameron Winter’s bleary piano ballad “If You Turn Back Now,” where he sang “The devil will love you to death if you let him,” Saturday‘s show was about harnessing communal feeling rather than incendiary gestures.
Many sets were simply a relief from the daily abattoir of awful news. Omar Apollo endearingly forgot the lyrics to his hit “Evergreen (You Didn’t Deserve Me At All)” and sang them off his phone; Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not” shimmered without a worry in the world. While Shawn Mendes brought out Maggie Rogers for an earnest, resilient duet of “Youth,” Blood Orange and Daniel Caesar each broke down their expansive productions into bedside folk. Raphael Saadiq’s “Sinners Prayer” called back to his decades of immersion in R&B’s moral searching, while Jazmine Sullivan’s take on Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” drank from Simone’s legacy of using music both to speak truth to power, and to articulate depths of pure feeling. The night’s most overt performances addressing the current crises came from Palestinian American and Sudanese American poets Noor Hindi and Safia Elhillo.
The sentiments were more hopeful than one might expect, given how it’s so easy to succumb to despair right now. ICE took a neighbor of mine last week — I came home from errands to find my street pasted with signs saying a man was kidnapped here. Thousands of Angelenos and Americans have absorbed the same and worse losses every day of the last year. Gazans and Sudanese have felt them, at an infinitely more brutal scale, for years.
Yet amidst all that, under Mustafa’s aspirations at the Shrine, there were pearls of hard-fought compassion in the music, like when Lucy Dacus of Boygenius, one of rock music’s great wits today, brought out her friend Chappell Roan to raucous gasps form the crowd.
Roan has caught some grief for her thoughts on the 2024 presidential race, but rather than dive into that fraught terrain here, the two instead covered the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love,” a song about the small gifts and clumsy gestures that make a relationship secure.
They harmonized beautifully over a tightly-apertured standard about reciprocated sweetness — a song performed at the scale of a treat in the home of a refugee.
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