“We Are the World” by U.S.A for Africa
Fact: The US population is 325 million, give or take a few hundred thousand.
Fact: the population of California is 39.5 million, which means nearly one in eight Americans is a Californian.
No other country serves as a microcosm for the world than America, no other state serves as a microcosm for America than California, and no other city serves as a microcosm for California than Los Angeles. L.A. is a world-class city, and an evening of karaoke in this town can be like watching the entire planet sing with you.
When you want to connect with your fellow human being, when you want to have the entire room bursting out into song, when simple games and parlor tricks just won’t do, you have to bust out with “We Are the World.”
When “We Are the World” was released to fight famine across Africa, the best and brightest of 80s pop musicians united under Quincy Jones’s leadership. While time has ravaged our perception of more than a few of the singers involved, Michael Jackson chief among them, the song itself takes us back to a simpler period when we believed a power ballad could heal the world.
It’s a flu shot of positivity and remembrance of good times gone by, in the hopes of bettering the world around us. It’s a summoning of good vibes, a secular prayer of humanity for humanity’s sake. It’s a very cheesy song, no doubt, but one written and performed with the greatest of intentions.
Virtually everyone knows what this song is (or was), virtually everyone will join in, and anybody feeling lonely that night will find a friend for at least the length of this one song. It is beautiful, it is epic and it is quite simply, in my humble opinion, the greatest karaoke song of all time.
A close second being “Come On Eileen.”
So remember, break the ice, keep it light, show off a little, bring ‘em together and make ‘em sing their guts out. That’s more or less how to keep your karaoke nights consistently awesome.
Thank you Kevin for contributing this week!