Miami Herald - October 7, 2009
Jordan Levin, jlevin@MiamiHerald.com

Those feelings sent the towering, lanky rapper and songwriter, best known for rocking concert crowds, dating Katy Perry, and romping through music videos with bootilicious women, on a mind-changing trip to South Africa, India and the Philippines this June. There McCoy met young people struggling with enormous odds in the battle against AIDS: Mandakini Behara, a young Indian woman who, driven to the verge of suicide by AIDS and rejection from her family, found strength in helping other women like herself; and the kids with the BALUTI Project, a Filipino group that brought condoms to people literally living in a Manila graveyard, hoping to keep them from staying there forever.

They were among the valiant recipients of a $12,000 grant from MTV's Staying Alive Foundation, which aids young people helping others prevent or live with AIDS and HIV. McCoy is this year's "special ambassador" for the foundation, its attention-getting celebrity face. His whirlwind tour of these Third World outposts in the global battle against AIDS, documented in a website, theunbeatentrack.com, a Twitter feed, a Huffington Post blog and other online media, is the subject of a documentary film that will air on all 166 MTV channels, reaching 578 million households around the world, on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.

McCoy, 28, spent several days last week at South Beach Studios in Miami Beach, writing and producing a song about his experiences that will also be released Dec. 1, with proceeds benefiting Staying Alive.

"I can't put into words how I felt -- anger, sadness, a sense of wanting to help," McCoy says of his trip, folding his 6-foot-5 frame on a studio couch, his eyes as dark as the tattoos that cover his body. "Kids look up to my band, and if I can get them to buy a video game or particular brand of Nikes, then I hope I can get them to buy a box of condoms. . . . I hope that when people see this documentary, it'll make them realize they can do something, whether in their own home, or their community, or on a bigger scale."

That is exactly the effect that the foundation's leaders hope McCoy and their programs will have. The organization was launched in 1998 when Georgia Arnold, then an assistant at MTV Europe, was asked to come up with a use for the network's charity budget. "I thought it needs to be an issue that affects young people all over the world, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that's sex and HIV," says Arnold, 40. She's now the executive director of Staying Alive, which she has developed into a global HIV prevention campaign, using MTV's pop culture clout and savvy to bring in figures such as Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Alicia Keys and Beyonc for concerts and programming.

Arnold came up with the idea of giving grants in 2004, after filming a young Ugandan AIDS activist named Henry Hudson writing by candlelight for a special on Mandela's 85th birthday. "I was in a pub with the co-producer, and I said, 'Give Henry $100, and imagine how many candles he could buy.' " Arnold says. The foundation has since given out 161 grants in 48 countries, all to young people between ages 18 and 29. Money comes from foundations and corporate partnerships. "People say, 'It must be so depressing,' and I say, 'No, I meet fighters, all young, and all making changes in their community,' " Arnold says.

McCoy's glimpse of those fighters was both overwhelming and inspiring. In Manila, he, Arnold and the film crew saw how the group BALUTI worked to educate people who lived in a cemetery, sleeping on top of stacked concrete graves; in the dank, 4- and-a-half-foot-high space under a bridge; and at the world's largest high school, with 25,000 students. They met Mandakini Behara, an Indian woman who got AIDS at 15 from her husband in an arranged marriage, was thrown out by her family, and went on to start the Utkal Network of People Living with HIV, which fights the discrimination suffered by women like her. In South Africa, where 5.7 million people have HIV and 1,000 people a day die from AIDS, they visited with Bulelani, who makes educational films in the poor townships of Cape Town.

McCoy says he was humbled by people like Behara. "The amount of passion . . . it must have taken for her to be so selfless to want to help someone else after what she went through," he says. "She stole a piece of my heart. I could feel the hurt and hope she had for these girls she was helping."

He was also overcome by the contrast between the life he and other pop artists and their American audience take for granted, and that of the baby sleeping in a hammock under that Manila bridge, or the South African boys playing soccer with a ball made of plastic bags.

"In rock music and hip-hop, people are always exploiting the fact that I got it so bad, my childhood was so bad," McCoy says. " We're a generation of complainers. I wish there was a way to take the younger generation and walk them under that bridge."

He hopes that the blog and the film and the song, tentatively titled One at a Time, will help do that. "My goal is to put people in my shoes," he says, "and through music have them walk along with me."

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