"We Are the World" is a 1985 song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, produced and conducted by Quincy Jones and recorded by a supergroup of 45 popular musicians billed as USA for Africa (United Support of Artists for Africa). The charity single was intended to raise funds to help famine-relief efforts in Ethiopia, which had experienced unusual drought and political instability in 1984/1985.

Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie wrote the song for the group, knowing there were people dying in Africa.

Jones worked out which singers would perform which lyrics, studying recordings of each of the selected singers to decide which would work well with each other. He paired Billy Joel with Tina Turner and Willie Nelson with Dionne Warwick. Michael Jackson was paired with Diana Ross.

During the performance, the solo portions allowed the distinctive voices of the well-known lead singers to be heard individually, or in pairs, before the entire ensemble sang the third repetition of the chorus. Later into the song, the climax is intensified by a modulation from E to F.

The arrangement created a dramatic effect by having the entire group sing together, but only after many of the celebrity singers were each revealed in solo/duet parts, with two repetitions of the chorus as solos/duets. The bridge was also sung as solos and duets by Michael Jackson, Huey Lewis, Kim Carnes, and Cyndi Lauper, building the crescendo into the entire group singing "We are the world, we are the children...."

The audio effect of the various reveals, by their famous solo voices, was also repeated in the video version, with closeup views of each singing artist before the entire singing group was shown (the video is a composite of multiple filmings). That sequence of reveals was a result of the pairings made by Quincy Jones.

The January 1985 recording session was held during and after the American Music Awards at the A&M Studios in Hollywood, California. Michael Jackson skipped the American Music Awards ceremony, that night, to record the chorus of the song as a guide to the other artists.

When released as a single, "We Are The World" rose the charts rapidly in the U.S., "one of the fastest-selling singles of the modern pop era," reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 17, 1985 and remaining there for four weeks. It immediately sold out its initial shipment of 800,000 copies, and sales reached 1.5 million shortly afterwards. It also reached #1 in the UK, and made the top spot in almost every country throughout the world. In the UK, it was the 33rd best-selling single of 1985.

The song was performed as the finale of Michael Jackson's July 7, 2009 memorial service.

Source: We Are the World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia