Prick Your Heart With a Bit of "We Are the World"

Driving mom to her senior care center this morning, I pulled up some Luciano Pavarotti on Spotify. After Turandot and O Sole Mio, I was surprised that the next track was the very contemporary, very American amalgam of artists singing We are the World. (For those who know it, yes you’re right, Pavarotti was not on the original soundtrack - he was on one of many subsequent recordings.)

Hearing the opening bars to We are the World took me all the way back to being seventeen and in high school. To 1985. Oh, 1985. What a seemingly simpler time you were.

We are the World was recorded forty years ago in January 1985, in response to a horrific famine in Ethiopia which would kill a million people. American recording artists came together under the name “USA for Africa” to raise funds, as a coda to Bob Geldof’s group “Band Aid” which had come together in the UK two months earlier to record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” for famine relief.

The leaders of the U.S. effort were Michael Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, and Quincy Jones. Featured singers included artists as diverse as Diana Ross, Kenny Rogers, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, The Pointer Sisters, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Ray Charles, The Jacksons, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, and so many others. But for me at least, there was something about the surprise of Cyndi Lauper blasting the mic with her wailing punk and flaming hair that told you Ok, wow, folks of all kinds are indeed coming together as one. For me, she’s what made the song bigger than any one person or genre or perspective. (Maybe because Cyndi Lauper was the last person I was listening to in those years, so with her involved yes, this WAS the world.)

And what a frickin miracle that this song traveled and far and as fast as it did. I mean, God, I sound like I’m from the 19th century as I feel the need to recount the obvious to you… yet I will….

You see, entertainment in those days came from the movies, theater, radio, records and cassettes, and TV with the new-ish ability to record things on videotape(!). No one had a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone. There was no internet. So we flocked to the airwaves to catch this unique, captivating, motivating song. (Wanna re-live how the opening crescendo to We are the World quickened your heart? Here it is:)

When my friends and I heard these opening bars on the radio, we hoped to have a cassette at the ready in our boombox. That way we could hit “record” quickly enough to capture the singing from the very beginning. (This is what passed for an almost perfect recording in those years.) Of course, many of us would go out and buy a proper record or tape. The song would go on to sell 20 million copies and raise over $225 million in today’s dollars.

If, like me, you remember the era of We are the World, and want to also remember how you felt at the time, then just let the music take you back there. Take seven minutes and eleven seconds out of your day today, and watch the original video here. It’s grainy. There’s no auto-tune. It’s just famous artists coming together, one voice overlapping with the next then the next, in the naive, innocent, determination that if they could sing their damn hearts out, in an unbroken ribbon of song, they could maybe stitch up one of the world’s biggest wounds. (Watch the Netflix documentary on the making of this song, “The Greatest Night in Pop,” here. And if you’re a fan of the entire famine-relief oeuvre, and want to also hear Geldof’s Band Aid song “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” it’s here.)

Well beyond famous artists went on to sing We are the World. Hell, my high school choir did it for our graduation concert, and I got to sing one of the solos. My pals and I were eager to be those naive, innocent, determined people, too.

And maybe that’s why I’m tearing up a bit in the car as I drive my sick and frail eighty-give year old mom around, and, despite her cognitive decline, 1985 is alive and well in her and she’s belting the tune out, too. Meanwhile my fifty-seven-year-old heart wonders, frankly, if we humans, if we Americans, still are capable of being those naive, innocent, determined people from yesteryear who as it turned out COULD and DID make a huge difference in bettering our broken world.

I sure as hell want us to be those people who can come together as one.

You?

xo

🤗 Here’s a hug for anyone who yearns for a unifying moment that will bring us all back together again despite our differences.

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