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The Greatest Night in Pop Is a Huge Blast of Gen-X Nostalgia
Netflix’s new documentary about the making of “We Are the World” will be hard to resist for a lot of us.
It was never meant to be great art, but rather a piece of mainstream activism by some of the most famous people on the planet, a charity single to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Later, we’re told that even though the song’s soloists would only sing one small portion of a verse — a few words, basically — they each had to do it in their own way: “Your style, your key, in half a line.” Producer Quincy Jones’s friend and collaborator Tom Bahler arranged the vocals to contrast with one another, so that Springsteen’s rougher voice was followed by Kenny Loggins’s higher, cleaner one, Tina Turner’s low warmth by Steve Perry’s operatic bellow. This makes for a very strange listening experience, but it’s also part of the song’s novelty act: Those of us who owned LPs by just about every single one of those singers had a grand old time identifying their voices.
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