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Global Citizen unveiled line-ups for three of the international venues for its 24-hour program “Global Citizen Live” on September 25th. Billie Eilish, Jennifer Lopez and Lizzo are among the headliners in New York’s Central Park; Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat and HER will be among the toppers in front of the Paris Eiffel Tower; and Femi Kuti will lead responsibility in Lagos, Nigeria.
The line-up in other cities where the concerts will take place around the world has yet to be announced, although Global Citizen CEO Hugh Evans says the one-day show will culminate in Los Angeles at the Inglewood Forum The acts that will be held at this venue will be announced on August 25th.
The bill for Central Park’s Great Lawn also includes Coldplay, Meek Mill, Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes as co-headliners, with Cyndi Lauper, Lang Lang, Burna Boy and Alessia Cara being promoted as special guests.
In Paris, Black Eyed Peas, DJ Snake and Christine and the Queens are among the other headliners, with Angelique Kidjo as a special guest. The Lagos show also features Davido, Tiwa Savage and Made Kuti.
Further performances are expected to be announced in all three cities. “When you hear a few announcements that we (still) have for Paris, it will be damn spectacular,” promises Evans – “like a breathtaking spectacle.”
That still leaves a significant portion of the artists who are already officially homeless for now, including Weeknd, Metallica, Green Day, Keith Urban, Duran Duran, Usher, Andrea Bocelli, and BTS – although the final act is a pretty surefire thing whenever the Seoul occupation is announced. Rio de Janeiro, London and Sydney are also “Global Citizen Live” locations whose headliners have not yet been announced.
Global Citizen Live Central Park lineup
Courtesy of Global Citizen
Evans says Central Park should be used to full capacity with a vaccination certificate required at all locations and a masking requirement. “We are allowed to have the full audience of 60,000 people on the Great Lawn of Central Park because we are very conservative with our approach,” he says. “The same in Paris – we can have over 20,000 people there.”
The Lagos event will have a much smaller audience and will also be pre-recorded to reflect the higher COVID rates there. “It actually depends on the size of the venue,” says Evans. “But we wanted to live up to the fact that we needed to highlight the heroic healthcare workers across the continent who are on the front lines as Africa has had 6 million COVID cases in the past eight weeks.”
In all cases, Global Citizen is confident that the eligibility requirements set for recording “Vax Live” at LA’s SoFi stadium in May – the first major event of its kind in the US since the pandemic began – were good test run to have a vaccinated audience in these other places and, in his opinion, set a standard that others in the industry who are now doing vaxxed shows want to follow. “I don’t want to blow the trumpet because there is always a lesson to be learned in this area,” says Evans, “but I see some of the biggest promoters now adopting guidelines that we already implemented back then. And that’s why I think our team is incredibly experienced when it comes to: What does it take to deduce this from a test protocol? From a vaccination record? We want to make sure we not only adhere to the latest COVID-19 health and safety guidelines, but go beyond them. ”
Global Citizen Live Paris line-up
Courtesy of Global Citizen
September 25th was not a date chosen arbitrarily or even just chosen with a view to logistics. Although the concerts take place on six continents, New York is the actual target audience – or rather the leaders from all over the world who gather there.
“It is literally during the UN General Assembly meeting on the eve of the COP26 meeting,” says Evans. “This is the first time in a whole year that all these Heads of State are concentrated together for a month. That is an enormous battle cry. We want this rally to be heard around the world asking philanthropists, CEOs, and governments to get involved in the social solutions that billions of dollars can be brought about by people with billions of dollars. “
The army of producers and executive producers may not be as prestigious as the artists, but they are just as mobilized to enable broadcast and webcast on six continents.
“Probably the story that matters most to me is the story where everyone comes together to make this happen,” says Evans. “I spoke to Universal’s Michele Anthony earlier on the phone; she worked so hard. Rob Light from CAA came into the office yesterday and he was here for hours just working on it. I see this courage and this determination. Last week we had a production summit, Chris, where we had producers from Jane Mun to Ken Ehrlich to Done and Dusted Productions to Livewire … really great people bringing that skin into play. (Live Nation’s) Michael Rapino is walking an amazing path. Guy Oseary is working on it harder than anything we’ve ever worked on before. Sal (Wassim “Sal” Slaiby), the manager of Weeknd, has worked so hard on it, it’s exceptional. Tina Kennedy who works with Irving Azoff. was just an all-time champion and worked so hard on the event in Sydney and Los Angeles.
“I don’t deserve any credit compared to the army behind it. You work around the clock and don’t get much sleep. because they all want to change the world. I think everyone is feeling both a sense of hope and pressure right now because the Delta variant is having a terrible impact on the planet. People die. and climate change is getting worse. We see that with the floods all over Europe and the fires in Northern California, and then we see right now that the conflict in Ethiopia is fueling an enormous hunger crisis. So wherever you turn, there are glimmers of hope, but also extraordinary challenges. “
Global Citizen Live Lineup
Courtesy of Global Citizen
Global Citizen’s goals are threefold and focus on the pandemic, world hunger and climate change. “The first step is to get at least a billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to developing countries by the end of summer,” says Evans. “Because right now, as we prepare, we are facing a huge increase of 6 million cases in the past eight weeks. And we don’t see failure in this area as just a moral or humanitarian problem. It also doesn’t make sense from a public health perspective as your vaccine will be far less effective given future variants. … You know, when more than 50% of the population of the US and Europe is fully vaccinated and less than 2% of the population of Africa is fully vaccinated, it’s just terrible from a public health planning perspective, let alone the other effects.
“The second focus is on the hunger crisis exacerbated by COVID-19, because crises like hunger do not politely wait until COVID is over. We have now seen 41 million people across Africa on the verge of starvation. So we need to raise $ 6 billion for the welfare program to fight hunger in Ethiopia, Yemen and South Sudan.
“And then there’s the final big push: you’ve probably heard John Kerry say that these climate change negotiations are our last best hope later this year to break the climate negotiations, and that’s a wonderful one Rhetoric, but it will only happen if the Fortune 500 companies commit to net-zero plans to reduce their carbon emissions. So far only a quarter of them have made it. So we need to see the Fortune 500 move forward in ways that it has never done before. We also need to see nature-based solutions to actually pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, which essentially means saving and restoring over a billion trees in 2021, preventing crisis from growing further and addressing the immediate climate crisis. “
Activism is aimed at both governments and corporations. “When the White House received tens of thousands of tweets and congressmen simultaneously receiving phone calls from tens of thousands of world citizens, it is tremendously powerful. When a world leader’s Twitter account is bombarded with messages from world citizens around the world, they react instantly. ”Evans says. “And some of it relates to private use. Last week we were thrilled that Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff joined our core partners and emailed his colleagues in the Fortune 500 CEOs encouraging them to embrace this net-zero promise. When you have leadership at this level that drives it, as well as the action of the world’s citizens, that unstoppable force arises. “
Evans adds, “If we take a step back for just a second, we only have one chance. You know, we have a chance of reaching a groundbreaking climate negotiation, so the energy we need to build doesn’t have to be stoppable. And that’s why we’re working so hard around the clock at every single location, but also on how we can incorporate each genre? It doesn’t matter if it’s Keith Urban with country music or the incredible Latin artists we’re going to announce, or if it’s the greatest pop artists like Billie Eilish or the greatest R&B artists like Usher or the greatest rock artists like Coldplay and Metallica are, we were really trying to cover every single genre. “
Places to see all or part of the September 25 broadcast include ABC, ABC News Live, the BBC, FX, iHeartRadio, Hulu, YouTube and Twitter.
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