Fighting AIDS Via Music

Seventy-five or so marchers in the Harlem contingent of the July 14 [1992] United for AIDS Action march left their gathering site outside the State Office Building and headed down Seventh Avenue in the broiling morning sun toward the Times Square rally where they would join thousands of others to become, in the words of the reggae-beat song, "Feeding the Flame," "the ones who take to the streets" to demand a radical change in governmental policies toward the AIDS crisis. As they marched under police escort through Harlem, one of the people of color communities hardest hit  by the epidemic, they carried placards and chanted slogans like "We say fight back, they say get back!"

One of the marchers, playwright/director Reginald T. Jackson of the Rainbow Repertory Theatre in Manhattan, saw the march as something very personal, having three brothers in different stages of HIV/AIDS. His dream is to see a cure for the disease so "we can move on to another issue, like racism."

The dream of seeing a cure also belongs to Willie Sordillo, the executive producer of the recording Feeding the Flame: Songs by Men to End AIDS on Chicago's Flying Fish Records. (Flying Fish is the label responsible for bringing us the African-American female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, one the groups that inspired the gay doo-wop quintet the Flirtations, who appear on the recording.)

Sordillo's dream is why the money generated by Feeding the Flame, whose title track is by Sordillo, will be donated to those organizations across the country that provide services to those with HIV/AIDS.

The 16 songs, by as many artists, who include folk singers Josh White, Jr. and Pete Seeger, the techno-pop duo Xotica, and guitarists peter Alsop and Ry Cooder, represent a variety of musical styles (reggae, doo-wop, folk, etc.) and themes, both serious and comic.

Among my favorites on the album are the hauntingly beautiful "All the Time in the World" by Fred Small and Alsop and Cooder's bouncy, down-home-flavored "Gotta Lotta Livin' to Do."

The only hard-rock tune is Xotica's "Forever Gay," which is not for those with sensitive ears. Co-written by the well-known Haitian-born poet Assotto Saint, "Forever Gay," if played at maximum volume, could conceivably crack windowpanes and knock lampshades askew. The song has a defiant, "here to dare" attitude.

Feeding the Flame is an important contribution to the effort toward educating and sensitizing the public about AIDS. A copy of it (in CD or cassette form) should be in everybody's music collection.

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (September 5, 1992).