“Take the Intimate and Make it Epic”

“We Are the World,” the 1985 charity single by the mega-supergroup USA for Africa, is by this point such an obelisk of the U.S. pop cultural fabric that one can’t be blamed for not knowing its depth. Even when it was released, the fact of the 20x platinum single was so huge that it could be hard to get your head around it. I was a child of the MTV Generation, eight when it came out. I remember being excited to see my favorite pop stars—Michael Jackson, Cindi Lauper, Tina Turner—all in one video. But the reality of its massiveness didn’t fully register until I saw The Greatest Night in Pop, director Bao Nguyen’s remarkable 2024 documentary about the making of the song.

“We Are the World,” conceived by Harry Belfonte and produced by Quincy Jones, raised over $63 million for humanitarian aid in the war-created famine in Ethiopia. The Greatest Night in Pop deftly complicates its incredible trove of documentary footage with its focus on this singular purpose, capturing what was probably the greatest music-charity moment ever. It’s inspiring and unfortunately relevant, a look at how musicians can effect change if they really want to. 

Earlier this summer, our partners at BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn screened The Greatest Night in Pop in Prospect Park, as part of programming honoring Quincy Jones (which also included The Wiz). On a balmy June evening under the Lena Horne Bandshell, I moderated a pre-movie panel with Nguyen and New Yorker critic Doreen St. Felix about both the film and the song. An excerpt of our conversation follows. For the full effect, I recommend watching The Greatest Night in Pop on Netflix after reading. (I’m also eager to watch Nguyen’s next documentary, The Stringer, about the authorship of the most famous photograph from the Vietnam War—of a young Phan Thi Kim Phúc running from a napalm strike.) Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Bao, did you have a relationship to “We Are the World” when it came out?

Bao Nguyen: I was only two years old when the song came out—and every time I say that in front of Lionel Richie, he’s always shaking his head. He’s like, You’re making me feel old, man. But I knew of the song as I grew older, and looking back at it now, the song was very much a bridge. My parents were Vietnamese refugees, and so they spoke very little English when they first came over. But they would always play Lionel Richie records, they would always play Kenny Rogers records, and they would play “We Are The World.” It was a song that was always playing in the background at my home. But it wasn’t until much later, and even through the process of making this film, that I realized how important the song was, and how it meant so much to so many people around the world. 

Doreen, what’s your relationship to “We Are the World”?

Doreen St. Felix: My association with that song is a kind of confusion that anything like that could be possible, because the ’80s are a decade that I only learned about, not a decade that I’ve experienced. And so it’s always seemed a little bit out of reach, like this really gargantuan moment in culture that literally could not be reproduced again, as many times as people have tried to. So I don’t really think of it so much as a song, as an event that’s kind of like in the ether that we're always trying to understand—and that your film, Bao, does such a good job of analyzing.

Bao, as you were culling the footage, was there a moment when it really hit you how massive it was that Quincy pulled all these people together? And could you also give us a little background about how you pulled your film together?

Nguyen: One of the things that I like to do with all my films is to try to take the intimate and make it epic in a way. I knew the song itself was epic, but combing through hours of footage, there are moments with Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, where you see people who are obviously iconic, but through a very human lens. I wanted to take those moments and immerse the audience in them as much as possible, without thinking so much about the impact of the song, and really trying to think of it in a very granular way. 

There are different approaches that I was thinking about taking, like, Okay, maybe we’ll interview BTS or Ariana Grande and ask them what they thought about the song.. How can I relate it to a modern audience that might not have the same relationship to the song? But by looking through the footage and just seeing people being human, anxious, vulnerable—people like, again, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson—that would be the connection that everyone would have through the story, that we’ve all been at that point in our lives. One of the comments I got in the film is when Bob Dylan is sort of looking lost, and someone said that it feels like the first day of school for them, or being in a group with school assignments, right? I just tried to emphasize those moments a bit more in the filmmaking. And then you can see that from these little moments, something really big happened afterwards.

Doreen, could you tell us a bit of context about “We Are the World” from a critical perspective?

St. Felix: The British pop cultural industry developed a song that they thought would be able to raise a lot of money for the issue of famine and strife that was happening in Ethiopia at the time. There was a BBC news hit that ran and just completely shocked the English population. They could not believe that in this day and age—this decade of increasing quality of life—that people were suffering in the way that they were in Ethiopia. And so Bob Geldof, this Irish singer, decides, “We’re going to make this song. It’s going to be a charity single. We’re going to raise money and we’re going to save the people of Africa.” So it’s in one way a very naive, paternalistic effort, but on the other hand, there’s something kind of beautiful about it—people who still saw themselves as artists saw a kind of power that they could marshal in order to help people. That song is “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

So having Black American artists do their own charity single for Africa was initially Harry Belafonte’s idea, as a response to that?

And now the pronoun is “we” as opposed to “they.” As you see in this documentary, this is very much a Black artist-driven effort, although we see Cindi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. The aura around this song is very much, This is American pop culture, which is Black culture. So not only was there a desire to continue the precedent of the ’60s, where artists and celebrities are very much using their cultural power to push radical change in the Civil Rights Movement, but I think underneath that there was also a desire to say “We run culture now.” 

Bao, how does Quincy factor here? It seems like it could never have happened with any other producer.

Quincy commanded the respect of everyone in that room. I think one of the reasons that this moment would be very, very hard to replicate today is like, who commands that same respect that Quincy Jones commanded when he was around? And you just see it in these little moments in the film where he’s yelling at Stevie Wonder. Like, who can yell at Stevie Wonder? Quincy Jones can yell at Stevie Wonder, and it’s okay.