This week, as citizens in countries across the world isolate themselves to combat coronavirus, Lionel Richie, who co-wrote the 1985 USA for Africa charity mega-single We Are the World with Michael Jackson, told People magazine that he was revisiting the kitsch anthem that reportedly raised more than $75m (£61.1m) for Ethiopian famine relief. Richie is still proud of the central line of World’s chorus, “There’s a choice we’re making – we’re saving our own lives,” which he says has new relevance in the time of Covid-19. “What happened in China, in Europe, it came here [to America],” he said. “So, if we don’t save our brothers there, it’s going to come home. It’s all of us. All of us are in this together.”
To his credit, Richie is leery of openly celebrating the 35th birthday of the song, released on 7 March 1985. “Two weeks ago, we said we didn’t want to do too much [about the song] because this is not the time to sell an anniversary,” he told People. “But the message is so clear … every time I try and write another message, I write those same words.”
Richie’s heart is in the right place – the world could use more supra-national fellow feeling during a pandemic – and he has not yet begun rounding up stars for a new version presumably spliced together from home recordings. Surely such a reboot couldn’t be worse than the recent, awful, multi-superstar video-selfie singalong to John Lennon’s Imagine? But idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and before the stir-crazy, homebound Richie starts texting the luminaries in his phone book, he might want to remember the last time We Are the World was revived, in 2010. Heck, he might want to remember the suspicion that greeted the song in 1985.
From the start, World’s motives were not entirely pure. It was America’s response to an implied dare. As I chronicled in an episode of my podcast Hit Parade about the history of the charity mega-single, the whole reason artist manager Ken Kragen and musician and social activist Harry Belafonte mounted USA for Africa was to imitate – and better – Band Aid’s 1984 UK benefit record Do They Know It’s Christmas? Bob Geldof, co-writer of Christmas? and instigator of Band Aid, made the dare to America plain, by travelling to Los Angeles the night of the We Are the World recording to lecture the Yanks on the horrors of Ethiopian famine and their obligation to record. Reportedly, Geldof’s sermon so freaked out Michael Jackson that he hid in the toilet.
On release, World was a smashing success – four weeks at No 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, 8m copies sold in the States alone – but even at the time it was not without its detractors. The very line Richie cherishes, “We’re saving our own lives”, was called out as nakedly self-serving, enshrining the idea that Americans could only be moved to help others if the effort helped themselves. That idea was even baked into the song’s title. Of course, Band Aid’s holiday chestnut had earned its own criticism the previous year, particularly for the Geldof-penned line sung by Bono: “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you”.
Speaking as a pop fan, I have affection for both singles, but the truly damning thing about them is their legacy. First, there was the raft of massed-celebrity recordings that followed in their wake, including a bizarre 1986 song-cum–human chain, Hands Across America, that Jordan Peele rightly satirised last year in his movie Us; and culminating in a pair of competing 1991 singles during the first Gulf war that were jumbled and essentially meaningless – so meaningless that The Simpsons parodied the trend in 1992 with the brilliantly savage We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well, which killed off charity mega-singles for the rest of the 90s.
Second, and arguably worse than the wave of imitative recordings, were the limp remakes of the original two songs. Geldof has been the worst repeat offender, rebooting Christmas three times. Each time – in 1989, 2004 and 2014 – the new version has topped the British chart, regardless of whether it’s Bros and Jason Donovan, Chris Martin and Dido, or Bastille and Sam Smith doing the singing. Indeed, three of the four versions have been the UK Christmas No 1 (only the 2014 edition peaked too soon). And, each time, proceeds from the latest Band Aid track have gone to a good cause, but it’s always African charity roulette: benefiting Sudan’s troubled Darfur region in 2004, or the Ebola crisis in 2014. All very worthy, but the timing of each reboot was very obviously motivated by the song’s tidy anniversary, not the cause.
The only time to date that We Are the World was rebooted was perhaps the worst of all. In the run-up to USA for Africa’s 25th anniversary in January 2010, Kragen convinced Richie they should mount a new version of the single. Only after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck 25km west of Port-au-Prince in Haiti did the new version have a point. We Are the World 25 for Haiti, with vocals led by Justin Bieber and the Pussycat Dolls’ Nicole Scherzinger and a ghastly will.i.am–led rap break, made an explosive debut at No 2 on the Hot 100 thanks entirely to 250k digital sales to the kindhearted and civic-minded – or maybe just rabid – Beliebers, as Justin was in his first year of YouTube-abetted Baby fame. But World 25, unlike its 1985 predecessor, generated little radio airplay, and it was off the Hot 100 within a month. Reviews of the song were deservedly savage.
There is little to suggest, 10 years later (there’s another of those nice, round numbers) that a third version of We Are the World would improve on the era of Jamie Foxx and Josh Groban, never mind the logistics of trying to stitch together a recording from soloists recording in place in their mansions and compounds. Richie is absolutely correct that the world needs to come together in spirit at this perilous hour – and I don’t blame him for regarding the timing of Covid-19 and the track’s anniversary as rather cosmic. But he might just want to leave it there, rather than heed a certain call.
