Ah. The 80’s. What a wonderful time. I don’t remember much of it, and the parts that I do remember revolve almost entirely around toys, cartoons, and elementary school, so I was not really aware that We Are The World had so much that went into it in order to make it happen. Of course, I am familiar with the song, and knew it had a bunch of famous artists that worked on it, but I didn’t know that in 2024 we would get a documentary exploring just what went into the production of this song.
First, this is a Netflix original, and the audio description track is produced by Descriptive Video Works. I heard what sounded like Sarah Mendel as the narrator, and Lori Wilson as the writer.
The structure of this documentary is exactly what I stated. The creation of the song We Are The World, from concept all the way through wrangling dozens of artists together for a music video. This single was made, like most things in the 80’s, to support the children of Africa. i still remember the commercials that would air during shows, where that old white savior guy would walk through some poverty stricken village in Africa, and remind you that for just 10 cents a day, you can feed this kid, and they’ll send you a photo of the kid you are feeding. There’s no documentary I’m aware of about that.
Lionel Richie is all over this. He really does tell Perhaps that is because the other two people mostly involved in this are Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson.It is a pretty interesting story, and several artists do contribute to the narrative as it progresses. The audio description does a fairly good job navigating a talking head music documentary. These are hard, because not only do you have music scenes where there’s the debate over what you can and cannot talk over, but talking heads pop up and often require acknowledgement of who they are. Frequently, a series or feature is edited in such a way that there isn’t much breathing room to give a name of who is speaking, which really affects how you interpret whether or not what they are saying has value. If I can’t figure out why this person is important, how can I be expected to take their information at face value?
Luckily, we are dealing with celebrities as is, so a mention of who someone is should be enough to get you going, because often there isn’t time for anything else. I’m still pretty impressed with everything they managed to describe anyway, and it just helped to round out the experience. For a sighted audience, I’m sure this was a wonder to watch, with all the backstage footage of these icons. for us, if someone isn’t there to tell me who is on screen, then I don’t really know.
This is a smart documentary for Netflix to drop at the front of the year. It is the kind of fluff piece we can enjoy, that stands no chance at getting an Oscar nomination. While structurally, it might resemble Summer Of Soul, which also featured a gathering of artists for a specific cause, but there’s more of a sense of urgency and reminder of why they were doing that in the first place. It is easier for a director to look at something with the gaze of how something was iconic, but not from the perspective of being involved, while The Greatest Night In Pop almost feels like a Making Of that could have been on a documentary.
And what is up with Dan Aykroyd? Like, you couldn’t find a solo for Shiela E, but Dan Aykroyd is there?
Final Grade: A-
