Netflix documentary film “The Greatest Night in Pop” does not disappoint us at all as looking closely into a major event of American Pop music in the 1980s. On January 25th, 1985, a bunch of renowned American musicians were somehow assembled together in a recording studio in LA for a charity single for African famine relief, and the documentary vividly shows us how things were both messy and exciting for everyone in the recording studio before their work was finally and successfully done.

At first, this ambitious event was relatively modest as Lionel Richie and his manager Ken Kragen planned for a little special recording session among Richie and several other African American musicians including Michael Jackson. After watching how much Bob Geldof did in UK via his Live Aid project for African famine relief, Richie and Kragen decided to give a shot to a similar but more modest project under the guidance of Harry Belafonte, and Jackson was willing to compose the song for that project along with Richie, though their collaboration at Jackson’s residence in Las Vegas was not exactly smooth to say the least.

The song was eventually ready around the end of 1984, but there was one big problem. Not only Richie but also Jackson and several other musicians supposed to work along with them were usually pretty busy in their respective schedule, and it turned out that they could work together only on that one day in January 1985. To make matters worse, Richie had to host a major industry award ceremony right before the recording, and that certainly made him all the more pressured than before.

Meanwhile, the project kept growing much more than expected. While it was initially just for African American musicians such as Ray Charles and Tina Turner, Richie and Kragen came to approach to many other popular musicians ranging from Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper to Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, and they even contacted with Dan Ackroyd (!). While a few of them such as David Byrne could not come due to being busy with their ongoing concert tours, many of them gladly agreed to spend some time in a certain recording studio in LA, and that surely made another big headache for Quincy Jones, who served as the producer/arranger of the project. For example, Jones and several other technicians had to work a lot on how to arrange the vocals of all these musicians within that one single song, and they also had to pay lots of attention on the placement of each of these musicians in the recording studio for getting the most ideal outcome from the following recording session.

Anyway, Richie, Jones, and their assistants were quite nervous as the day finally came. While they kept preparing along with Jackson, all these musicians came to the recording studio one by one, and I must say that their gathering is much more impressive than whatever I saw from those Avengers flicks of Marvel Cinematic Universe. Although notified that they should set their egos aside for a while at least, they could help but show their talent and presence at times, and that is certainly something we do not see everyday.

For this very special moment, a number of cameramen including Ken Woo were there for capturing everything from all those luminaries of American Pop music, and recording engineer Humberto Gatica had to be all the more careful about the recording environment. Because the time allowed for the recording session was only several hours at most, any kind of problem could be quite disastrous if they did not quickly prevent or fix it, and that frequently made everyone in the studio on the edge.

Of course, things did not go that well right from when they tried to record the chorus part of the song, which is titled, yes, “We Are the World”. As their recording session got delayed for one reason after another, all these musicians in the recording studio often got quite frustrated, and we are not so surprised by when one of them eventually walked out from the studio and never returned.

Nevertheless, the musicians in the recording studios patiently kept sticking together because 1) they all felt the social/cultural importance of the project and 2) they simply enjoyed being around each other as Richie and several other notable interviewees tell us in the documentary. While Jones kept things under control as much as possible, Richie provided some air of fun and camaraderie along with Stevie Wonder, and there was an amusing moment when Wonder willingly led Charles to the bathroom for himself (You know why). Although he looked as awkward and detached as I usually am in many big ceremonies, Dylan patiently stayed around others before his turn finally came around the end of the recording session, and Springsteen really tried his best even though he was quite exhausted as he arrived in LA right after the end of his concert tour.

Overall, “The Greatest Night in Pop”, which is directed by Bao Nguyen, is fun and engaging for showing a lot of things behind “We Are the World”, which is still one of the notable songs from the American Pop music of the 1980s besides being quite successful in achieving its noble goal. It was surely something special which may never be surpassed even during our lifetime despite many following similar efforts (Do you remember how grossly misguided and truly unspeakable that infamous online live performance of “Imagine” by a bunch of big celebrities was during the COVID-19 pandemic?), and the documentary did a good job of presenting it with care and respect.