The cause this song is attached to, Tony Robbins’ 100 Billion Meals, is real, and this article isn’t about that. This is about the lack of attention given to the song itself. As of this article’s publishing, the song has just over 100,000 plays on Spotify and the same on YouTube. It’s no wonder the song went nowhere. It has no home of its own and it doesn’t stack up against legacy efforts or contemporary execution.
The Song and The Recording
The Arrangement
The piano starts ballad-esque. Then a snare and kick come in and try to make it a four-on-the-floor dance song. Then the “100 billion meals” line starts, with repetitive adlibs following, trying to pull the song into hip hop. Then the “groove” breaks and the child rapper starts what I assume is the bridge. Then main vocals come back in on a conveyor belt with atmospheric, aimless oohs and ahs not far behind.
Then the obvious attempt at recreating BAND AID’s gang vocals with “let’s feed the world” but the music bed itself isn’t strong enough to evoke the emotion they aimed for, not to mention the vocal runs hitting the right and left channels during this build up. It becomes a chaotic amalgam of singers coming in and out, one after another, following little creative or intentional arrangement, just a bunch of emotive layering that ends up confusing the mind instead of drawing to a poignant climax or close.
The Production
Since this record was produced and rubber stamped by multiple, legendary producers, I was expecting legendary production. Nope. I am not sure what happened here, but the people that produced Rhythm Nation 1814 and Chronic 2001 were not in the room when it happened.
The piano sounds like it was made on a ‘98 Casio. The drum samples sound like they’re from Splice. The compression and tuning on all vocals after Stevie make them sound like a cereal box prize. The repetitive melody did not come across as the writers likely intended. It’s boring, not hypnotic.
What remains of the vocals are buried under the instrumentation throughout the record anyway, competing with the cheap snare and cymbal samples whacking away at the same MIDI velocity over and over.
The record never fully settles into a style, which can work, but it doesn’t work here. We Are The World worked because it was about the message and the vocals. The instrumentation was complementary, not competitive. The words and the voice were the stars of the song and recording. Not the beat, not the effects, not the names on the credits, not the production—the words—and the vocal performance of those words.
The Lyrics
My main gripe with the lyrics is obviously not the message, but that they are built on nursery rhyming schemes like “time / mind / behind / shine” and cliche platitudes like “I can change the world.”
Every line is an instruction to feel, not to act or actually change. “Be the change” is so played out, it makes me want to turn off the song.
It doesn’t say once, how to change yourself, how you can change the world, or how to come together. It just says “I can change the world. You can change the world.” Okay, but if we all knew how, we would have done it by now. Feeding the world, even if we do that, isn’t necessarily changing it. You can only feed the world by changing it.
“I still see the cloud / pieces of a soul / if you need me close / try and let me know” is the only passage addressed to an actual person in an actual state. It lasts ten lines and then the commercialized, cliche slogans come back.
Also, what is a number like “100 billion” doing in a song lyric? It immediately breaks the fourth wall and turns the song into a commercial, ousting the abstract, personal image of change the listener might be conjuring in their mind. The idea of 100 Billion Meals is immense and “good,” but working a clinical number like that into a creative work meant to stimulate the mind and soul is working against the ethereal composition of a song like this.
The Song’s Home
The song doesn’t have a home. It isn’t visually attached to an existing prominent brand. It doesn’t have its own website. It barely has a home on the 100 Billion Meals website. The song is portrayed in fragments in a promotional video alongside CTAs for donations, but is never a highlight anywhere. The campaign’s own site never names its own song outright or in full.
This all points to the song being a momentary spark that turned into a neglected child. It was never any one single artist’s “baby” and therefore didn’t receive the treatment that a release like that would. The 100 Billion Meals campaign relied on the song, the song relied on the artists, and the artists relied on the fans, but the song didn’t resonate with them. Every party involved relied on the one beneath it, and it all fell through.
Despite visual detachment and siloing, the song is, however, attached to Stevie Wonder, Dr. Dre and H.E.R. on DSPs, but due to the algorithmic and enshittified technology culture runs on, it is effectively invisible.
The directors of the project invented an entirely stand-alone brand, with what was—my guess—a hope that the brand would become a thing and “The Next Verse” would find its way into the collective vernacular. It didn’t.
Instead of focusing on generating money or attention from the record itself, the record became a backing track to a promo video on a CTA for donations. No one is finding the song first, which I thought was how these kinds of initiatives were supposed to work.
Why Didn’t The Song Stack Up?
What I believe has happened is that major label songwriters don’t know how (or don’t have the courage) to write authentically poignant songs about anything other than love and romance. I venture that writing songs like We Are The World, or BAND AID’s Do They Know It’s Christmas is an intimidating task to most. Possibly because they haven’t flexed those muscles in so long, or possibly because they are afraid of flexing them.
The groups that really control popular music and media—the “powers that be”—have engineered culture so that it won’t reward “doing good” the same way that it did in the era of We Are The World. “Doing good” with vulnerable sincerity via “entertainment” mediums like music is currently seen as cringe, so most pop-culture-facing audiences won’t sincerely engage with it.
Why would the songwriters that rely on income from the industry write something the industry’s customers won’t reward? I don’t blame them. Their livelihood is based on following the structure of the industry and what it dictates. Still, it is my opinion that the clarity and creativity of the lyrics of Someday Has Begun, Pt. 1 do not stack up to the lyrics of We Are The World.
So authority won’t allow it (meaningful “do gooding” in music) and the population won’t engage with it. Sheesh. Our cultural engineers really have managed to muscle “do gooding” into the vast expanse between freedom of speech and obscurity. More on that another time.
My bet is that the only reason this “doing good” song made it through the gatekeepers is because it has no teeth. If it had teeth, if it could have actually moved culture the way We Are The World did, it may have never been released.
The Message Within Someday Has Begun, Pt. 1
Despite my harsh critique, the message within cannot be dismissed as easily as the production and attention on the recording itself. The Rising Compass put Someday Has Begun, Pt. 1 at Ascended +76. I can’t argue with that. The message contained in the lyrics is positive and that is what the Rising Compass grades on. But the Illus Caden is here to say what the Rising Compass cannot.
Did the songwriting and production do justice to the message contained within? It seems like Tony Robbins just wanted a theme song as a piece of his much larger 100 Billion Meals campaign, and because the industry has lost reverence for the atomic unit of the song itself over the years, the song itself became a sidepiece. An accessory. An attachment. It was not a main consideration, but rather a means to an end. It was not the end, which is what We Are The World was. We Are The World wasn’t a soundtrack, backing track or theme song to a greater entity—it was the entity.
My Entry for The Next Verse
Here is the song I would have written, intentionally keeping some aspects that keep it “on brand” for the parent campaign.
Someday Has Begun, Redux
By Chad Lewine
Haven’t you had enough?
Have you seen the emptiness
In the eyes of all of us?
If you wanna make a change
Spare no cost, yeah, no expense
Put it on your name
Hunger hits the heart
Like it hits the gut
They said we’ll be fed someday
Well someday has begun
Today we move as one (someday has begun)
The day we change has come (yeah someday has come)
World on fire, up in arms
Ooh why ain’t everybody fed and warm?
Today we feed so tomorrow brings
Peace for everyone
Can you feel it shake?
That’s the feeling of a giant
A global hunger pain
A billion need a hand
A billion more need someone
We all need help to stand
Hunger hits the heart
But it won’t end there
Someday we’ll go all for one
Well, someday has begun
Today we move as one (someday has begun)
The day we change has come (yeah someday has come)
World on fire, up in arms
Do you feel the blessing if you’re fed and warm?
Today we feed so tomorrow brings
Peace for everyone
Today we feed so tomorrow brings
Peace for everyone, everyone
Just look deep inside, leave your past mistakes
Oh this is the moment, you have what it takes
Let’s all look inside, own all that we’ve done
This is change, finally, someday has begun
Today we move as one (someday has begun)
The day we change has come (someday has begun)
World on fire, up in arms
Do you feel the blessing if you’re fed and warm?
Today we feed so tomorrow brings
Peace for everyone
A unified front, a unified change has come
A unified love is what we’re standing on
A unified front, a unified change is done
A unified love, that’s what we’re standing on
What To Do With Someday Has Begun, Pt. 2
If the Next Verse Collective does a Someday Has Begun, Part 2, I hope that they:
- Call me to help
- Align marketing and branding to give the song its own proper home on the web, which I can also help with.
I have spent my entire life writing songs just like this. My specialty is songs like this.
I also have spent that same period of time building digital homes where music, art and commerce coincide, giving proper attention to all aspects. My critique of Someday Has Begun, Pt. 1 is sharp and cutting, but so in an effort to expose a swing-and-a-miss during a trauma-laden era that could have used a swing-and-a-hit.
For Someday Has Begun, Pt. 2, I hope the directors:
- Give the record production and the lyrics the attention the message deserves.
- Do a proper music video of the recording session.
- Encourage participants to post more than once about it on social media.
- Spend on actual PR instead of PR Newswire
- Have someone perform it live in front of an audience.
- Do the message justice and give it the reverence it deserves.
Photo by Matthew Jungling on Unsplash