Cyndi Lauper was a ‘We Are the World’ sceptic, according to Quincy Jones
After the mammoth success of Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ charity mug, heavyweight producer Quincy Jones sought to corral his own benefit single, corralling some of US rock and pop’s biggest names.
In the mid-1980s, Jones was at the peak of his powers. He already counted a glittering CV stretching back decades, boasting sessions with Elvis Presley, touring the Middle-East as Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpeter, and arranging Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ before he shared production duties on Michael Jackson’s first three adult solo LPs.
While Thriller was dominating the charts, Jones wielded his music biz stature to realise actor and activist Harry Belafonte’s dream to pen a single for African famine relief.
Specifically, the Ethiopian Famine. It was devastating, claiming as many as a million lives and sparking a refugee crisis after ten brutal years of civil war. Yet, it’s hard to see where a big pop sing-along solves anything, no matter the millions generated. Structural analysis and liberal saviour discourse aside, Jones felt moved enough to enlist the songwriting chops of Lionel Richie and his pal Jackson to pen the drippy ‘We Are the World’.
Before long, every star of the day was eager to lay down a vocal track, from Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan and much of the Jackson family troupe, all performing under the USA for Africa moniker.
The final night of recording brought in another of the decade’s MTV mainstays. During the January 1985 sessions, ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ singer Cyndi Lauper was just about still on a par with Madonna as the era’s biggest female pop star, and so was naturally roped in to join in on the USA for Africa single. She didn’t think much of Richie and Jackson’s saccharine number, however. In fact, she made her low opinion clear to her manager, who ended up letting slip the fact to Jones before she was scheduled to cut her solo vocal at A&M Recording Studios.
According to Jones, Lauper’s manager had feigned the idea that the “rockers” were all united in thinking ‘We Are the World’ was below par, as a means to convey Lauper’s ‘true colours’ without implicating her directly. Jones saw right through it.
“I know how that shit works,” he stated to Vulture in 2018. “We went to see Springsteen, Hall & Oates, Billy Joel, and all those cats, and they said, ‘We love the song.’ So I said [to Lauper], ‘OK, you can just get your shit over with and leave.’”
To make matters worse, her plentiful bangles and jewellery were all rattling together with a bothersome clank, necessitating further takes.
Still, ‘We Are the World’ topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and in as many as 19 other countries, and made a whopping $60million from the USA for Africa single and its related album and merchandise. Years later, on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Lauper offered a conciliatory reflection on her charity dabble with Jones, “It was catchy though, yeah, and you know I was honoured to freaking sing it.”
