The take-home message was that the man
who wrote “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a greater nuncio for
peace—or at least common ground—than any number of official envoys,
roadmaps or summit meetings. But there was one
item in the story that made me choke up, Beaches style. I played
it again—just to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then I made my
way through the blustery autumnal day to the newsstand to purchase
a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly.
In print, the story hit me with a wallop I usually associate
with passages from great literature (or first-edition comic
books). Richie told GQ that when he visited the Tripoli medina,
a contingent of Libyan children had massed around him, closed
their eyes, made wavy gesticulations with their hands, and
moaned “Hello.” This was not a séance, but rather a passable
rendition of the “Hello” video clip (a staple on MTV in the station’s
early years, and a landmark moment in the history of the
music video), in which a gorgeous blind woman, who knows
Richie only from his mellifluous voice, somehow sculpts a perfectly
representative clay bust of his Jheri-curled visage.
“What’s going on here? How do you know?” begged Lionel
Richie of the Libyan children. “How do you know?”
How did they know? Lionel Richie’s videos are prominent
in the cultural memory of a generation of North Americans; a
friend once described Richie’s “All Night Long” clip as “a profound
piece of eschatological imagination.” Indeed, to a scion of
the 1980s, the Richie oeuvre carries an almost oneiric weight.
Like “All Night Long,” the “Hello” video was an indelible piece
of my childhood, a kiln-fired shard of memory now flung into
the quandary of the Muslim world.
