With Stars at Home, a Coronavirus Pop Benefit Scales Down

Critic’s Notebook Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Billie Eilish, Camila Cabello and Sam Smith performed remotely to raise money for organizations helping with Covid-19 relief. The “iHeart Living Room Concert for America,” broadcast Sunday night on Fox TV and the iHeartRadio network, was a downsized, deglamorized pop gala. With the coronavirus pandemic keeping Americans at home, the night that had originally been scheduled for the iHeartRadio Music Awards, now postponed, instead became a benefit show for the food-bank charity Feeding America and the First Responders Children’s Foundation. Between songs, video clips paid tribute to front-line workers: doctors, nurses, police officers and firefighters, truck drivers, grocery restockers, people frantically working to alleviate shortages of personal protective equipment.

Elton John, the host of the hourlong show, called for donations as he introduced the performers. He also pointedly connected the pandemic to a previous one: H. I. V.

/AIDS. The stars wore hoodies, T-shirts, even pajama bottoms (that would be Brian Littrell of Backstreet Boys). Instead of sharing a big stage, they played on living-room couches or in home studios. Most of the show business and studio embellishments were stripped away for solo performances: songwriters alone with their guitars or keyboards, occasionally joined electronically by bandmates performing from their own isolated spaces.

Whether the performances were actually live was debatable; some visuals were clearly edited. (And somehow, even solo-at-home segments often featured multiple camera angles. ) But rough spots in the music weren’t tweaked. It was understated proof that even as contemporary pop productions are relentlessly computer-processed, there are real singers behind them.

A few of the performers had songs to suit the moment: Alicia Keys sang her new “Underdog” fondly from her piano as she praised “people on the front lines knowing they don’t get to run. ” Dave Grohl earnestly belted “My Hero” with an acoustic guitar, then suggested its chorus as a hand-washing song. Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” performed solo by a gum-chewing Billie Joe Armstrong, had a refrain made for social distancing: “I walk alone.