The Greatest Night in Pop

Right smack dab in the middle of the ‘80s, the one-time-only “supergroup” USA for Africa recorded the relief-for-Ethiopia charity single “We Are the World,” the subject of the new Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, and for a good long time you couldn’t escape that song. (I had the album on cassette.) A lot of people had a lot to say about it, but as written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, it lodged like a fish hook in the part of the brain that likes to play earworms. (The chorus seems built to be belted by large, swaying crowds.) As songs like it go, it could have been a lot worse — like, say, the now-cringeworthy “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” which indirectly inspired “We Are the World” when Harry Belafonte observed, “Okay, the white people are trying to save Black people; how about Black people saving Black people?”

The resultant gathering of singers was pretty evenly split between Black and white, though the firepower was more or less all Black. Richie and Jackson got it onto the floor, with input and guidance from others including Stevie Wonder and event ringleader Quincy Jones. At the time, and even more so in today’s era of Zoom, part of the selling point was that all these big artists were indeed in the same room, not doing their bits separately and FedExing them in, and there was the bestselling video to prove it. All these big names committed to be there, and because of the logistical horrors involved in getting and keeping them in one place, the song had to be recorded directly after 1985’s American Music Awards — which Richie was hosting — and it had to be done that night. The final note was sung by 8:00 am on the morning of January 28.

If Richie was the Superman of this Justice League (he appears in the documentary, sharp as ever, reminiscing cogently and humbly), Bob Dylan might have been the Batman, dark and scowling, not really feeling a part of the proceedings. It seems he wanted to want to be there, but he was too much the loner, and besides he had a tough time figuring out what he could do with his solo line given his limitations as a singer. Stevie Wonder to the rescue: Wonder sat at a piano and mimicked Dylan’s voice precisely, showing him exactly what a voice like Dylan’s could do. The Dylan you hear on the single wouldn’t have been possible without Wonder. Then again, Stevie almost derailed the whole thing when he suggested singing a bit in Swahili. After a bunch of objections, including that Swahili isn’t even spoken in Ethiopia, the Swahili idea was dropped. But you get the sense that even in this highly specialized atmosphere, a song will revise and resolve itself as long as artists are willing to get out of its way.

Stevie Wonder ultimately valued the song, not his idea, and all the other artists here seemed to follow suit. (The documentary shows Waylon Jennings walking out of the studio during the Swahili kerfuffle, but doesn’t tell us he later came back; director Bao Nguyen prankishly plays Jennings off with the “Dukes of Hazzard” theme.) Quincy Jones’ famous directive to the artists was “Check your egos at the door,” which Garry Trudeau later copped for the title of his Doonesbury collection wherein his strips about the recording appear (he was admitted to the event as a reporter). If you weren’t around in ’85 it can be hard to imagine how large this single and its concomitant concerns about addressing starvation loomed in the national conversation. Soon after, DC and Marvel each put out an all-star benefit comic featuring superheroes wondering what they can do about the Ethiopian famine. Not much. In real life, tons of food sent to relieve hunger rotted on docks.

So The Greatest Night in Pop celebrates a time when optimism, though weaving and bloodied, could still stand tall, especially with a roomful of massive talents (and Dan Aykroyd — who has admitted he got in that room more or less by accident) getting buzzed off of how charitable they’re being. (The project’s success was not guaranteed; Bob Geldof, kicking the event off with a speech, finished with “Let’s hope it works.”) Some of the participants who are still with us — Springsteen, Lauper (who for my money has the song’s finest moment), Sheila E — are seen here conveying a sort of fannish impostor syndrome as they recall walking among legends. Elsewhere, probably punchy as hell in the wee hours, the singers all start singing Belafonte’s “Day-O,” and its uptempo silliness acts as a jolt of caffeine for the legends who were, it turns out, only flesh and bone. It’s not a great movie — the performance energy is splintered and scattered — but it’s hard to dislike and it’s a decent salute to the impulse of creativity to aim itself at a good cause. 

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