Sun City

Sun City is the first and only album by Artists United Against Apartheid, released on October 25, 1985, by EMI Manhattan Records. The Little Steven-led project features contributions from more than 50 artists from the rock, hip hop, soul, funk, jazz, reggae, latin, and world music genres. The album contains two versions of the "Sun City" protest song against apartheid in South Africa as well as other selections in the same vein from that project. History Initially intending to record the song "Sun City" for his third solo album Freedom – No Compromise, Little Steven (real name Steven Van Zandt) instead approached producer Arthur Baker to help record a "We Are the World"-inspired anti-apartheid protest single. In the song, Van Zandt urges artists to boycott the Sun City resort in South Africa, where artists such as Queen, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart have accepted invitations to perform. Van Zandts's mission was to raise awareness of the racial segregation enforced by the white government in South Africa, and to encourage the cultural boycott the United Nations had imposed in the early 1980s. "I had been doing research on American foreign policies," Van Zandt said, "and South Africa was on my list of engagements we were involved with, which I felt our government was on the wrong side of. By then, I had heard Peter Gabriel's "Biko," which was just a terrific inspiration." With assistance from ABC News journalist Danny Schechter, Van Zandt and Baker assembled a wide variety of artists from Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed to Gil Scott-Heron, Miles Davis and Africa Bambaataa. Rock critic Dave Marsh called it "the most diverse line up of popular musicians ever assembled for a single session." However, the recordings quickly became an album-length project of its own, and the Sun City album was recorded in summer 1985 at 15 different recording studios in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Dublin and London. In addition to the title track, other songs were recorded at the time to complete an album's worth of material. Drummer-musician Keith LeBlanc and Danny Schechter came up with "Revolutionary Situation", an audio-collage set to music that took its title from the words of South Africa's then-interior minister Louis Nel condemning the state of the country.