The Weirdest Night in Pop

If you’ve heard “We Are the World,” the 1985 charity single by the American super-duper group U.S.A. for Africa, you might be forgiven for wondering why a documentary about it, recently released on Netflix, is called “The Greatest Night in Pop.” Musically, “We Are the World,” written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson and sung by forty-seven of America’s biggest stars for the benefit of famine relief in Ethiopia and beyond, has a sensibility so bland and inoffensive—like an advertising jingle, or “Barney”—it’s almost galling. Listening to its mild wash of melody and sentiment (“We are the ones who make a brighter day,” and so on) can produce an odd mix of grudging respect and self-flagellation; it feels bad to disdain a charity single. But, as the participant and interviewee Bruce Springsteen says, “People can look at the song and judge it aesthetically, but, at the end of the day, I looked at it like it was a tool. . . . And, as such, it did a pretty good job.” As a tool for capturing a surreal night of work, “The Greatest Night in Pop” does a pretty good job, too. Where else can you see Smokey Robinson critiquing Michael Jackson’s songwriting, or Springsteen comparing Steve Perry’s voice to Sam Cooke’s, or hear about Diana Ross asking Daryl Hall for an autograph? In its best moments, the film is a fever dream of some three dozen geniuses in their prime. Beyond that, it suggests some questions that bear further consideration: What were the ultimate effects of this project, and the pop-charity projects that followed? What if they’d accepted Prince’s offer of a guitar solo? And why is the British song that inspired it, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” both cringingly worse and infinitely better?