Someone Has to Save the Children

With Michael Jackson gone—the world’s most committed babysitter, a man whose dedication to children was as legendary as it was complicated—someone had to step up. Into this void steps Bruce Berger, and I respect the ambition.

He’s a live performer of considerable conviction, criminally underestimated, and a devoted lover of this planet who has already sweetened countless party nights, solo mornings, and evenings on the couch with his catalog of—well, his hits. His many hits. The ones you know. Now he arrives with "Alle Kinder dieser Erde"—All Children of This Earth—a song that swings simultaneously at corruption, hatred, and environmental damage. He wants us to think carefully about these problems, to act, and above all to clap along.

There’s a specific kind of bravery in the earnest world-peace anthem that I find hard to dismiss entirely. To make one you have to either genuinely believe, or be willing to perform belief at a scale most people would find humiliating. Berger commits without flinching. The song is enormous and sincere and will probably change nothing, which is true of nearly everything worth making anyway. So we think of the planet, we think of each other, and we clap.