Dictator Divas: J Lo, Mariah Carey, Beyonce and Co

Don’t be fooled by the rocks that she’s got, pop stars like J Lo don’t owe their money to record sales alone, but are happy to accept millions from corrupt businessmen and dictators

A report by the Human Rights Foundation has estimated that Jennifer Lopez has earned £6.6 million singing for some of the world’s most unpleasant dictators and crooked industrialists — including at Turkmenistan’s Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s birthday party (try saying that after a couple of toasts in his honour) last month.

J Lo’s publicist later said that she would have never performed had she realised there were ‘human rights issues of any kind’ — which strikes me as rather unlikely. Even if the star herself was too busy shopping for her latest diamante leotard, surely someone in her famously sizeable entourage would have time to flick through Human Rights Watch’s reporting on Turkmenistan which describes it as ‘one of the world’s most repressive countries.’

Where did she get those rocks?

She’s not the only pop diva happy to play for thugs, dictators and criminals for cash, however. Beyonce famously earned $1 million playing for Gaddafi’s son Mutassim (which she later said she donated to Haiti). Mariah Carey also accepted money from Libya’s ruling family as did, moving on to pop stars more generally, Usher, Nelly Furtardo, Lionel Ritchie and 50 Cent.

I don’t buy the often used argument that music stars didn’t realise that their presidential patrons abused human rights. Nor do I think that donating these earnings to charity after a public backlash makes everything OK again.

Sting’s defiant response to his £1-£2 million pay cheque from the Uzbek president’s daughter Gulnara Karimova — he argued that he didn’t believe in cultural boycotts as they only make closed regimes more insular — was self-serving and arrogant. The people who benefited from Sting’s generous cultural exchange were the elite guests of the presidents daughter. Does he imagine they will be so inspired by ‘Fields of Gold’ that they will spontaneously lift controls on homegrown artists and journalists?

Given these pop star payrolls, stunts like biting the head off a bat don’t seem so bad after all — except that Black Sabbath (including bat-eating Ozzy Osbourne) performed for South Africa’s apartheid regime, too.