The Night the World Sang Together: Remembering "We Are the World"

For someone like me who left China over a decade ago, watching the Spring Festival Gala, China’s annual televised New Year’s Eve spectacular that draws nearly a billion viewers, has long ceased to be an essential part of celebrating the Chinese New Year. Yet this year, one moment pierced through my indifference: 72-year-old Jackie Chan and 77-year-old Lionel Richie singing that unforgettable melody together, “We Are the World.”

To understand “We Are the World,” you have to go back to October 1984, when most of us were going about our ordinary lives: eating dinner, watching TV, complaining about small things. Then BBC journalist Michael Buerk’s report from Ethiopia appeared on screens across the world, and everything stopped.

The footage was unbearable. Skeletal children. Mothers too weak to cry. Bodies everywhere. Buerk called it “the closest thing to hell on Earth”, a biblical famine happening right now, in the twentieth century, while we sat in our living rooms. Within days, every major network was broadcasting the same images. There was no looking away anymore.

In Ireland, a rock musician named Bob Geldof watched the report and something inside him broke. Geldof wasn’t a household name; he fronted a band called the Boomtown Rats, respectable but hardly legendary. But he couldn’t shake what he’d seen. He called his friend Midge Ure, a Scottish singer, and said something like, “We have to do something.”

Within days, they’d written “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Within weeks, they’d corralled every major British and Irish music star they could find. They called themselves Band Aid. The song became one of the biggest hits in British history and raised tens of millions of pounds.

When news reached America, singer Harry Belafonte couldn’t sit still. This towering figure in Black American cultural history had spent his life intertwining music with social responsibility. He reached out to music manager Ken Kragen, whose client roster included Lionel Richie and Kenn…