Review: We Are The World

By Chiagoziem Onyekwena

Our world is in love… and the apple of our eye is Haiti!

When she couldn’t stand on her own feet, the world offered her a shoulder to lean on. When she cried we gave her dollar bills to wipe her tears with and as her soul grows wearier by the day, we sing sweet music to soothe and reassure her; everything will be alright.

There is no one panacea for Haiti’s problems and if you thought that was the aim of this remake, then you certainly didn’t read the fine print beneath the memo. To be honest, an overwhelming majority of Haitians would never even get the chance to hear this song on their local radio, but they don’t necessarily have to hear it in order to feel the impact. Legendary duo Quincy Jones and Lionel Ritchie relive an unforgettable moment in music history, at a critical time in man’s existence and just like they did for Africa in 1985, hopefully they’ll be able to raise a few millions along the way.

The Artistes for Haiti are a pretty diverse bunch; it’s a studio full of convicted felons, starry-eyed teenagers, dreadlocked autotune geniuses, virtual nobodies and even big actors (big in structure, as well as stature), it’s a free-for-all really. But amidst all the pomp and pageantry, we couldn’t help but notice the overabundance of Hip Hop artistes, even those plucked from obscurity (I’m looking at you Nipsey Hussle), at the expense of genuine country, reggae  and rock stars. It seems to me like there’s a new crowd that they are trying so desperately to appease. Unfortunately, that crowd is far too savvy to fall for all this, Jordin Sparks and the Jonas Brothers are just cheap bait to get their attention and they know that already.

Save for the new rap verses, the inclusion of a duet by the late great Michael Jackson and his sister Janet, Wyclef wailing in Creole and a dash of the vocoder, the original song structure handed down from the pen MJ and Lionel Ritchie shared 25 years ago, is pretty much retained.

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The video debuted on American television during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The video was directed by Academy-award winning director Paul Haggis but to be honest, he really didn’t have that much to redirect, as it were; the original template was largely retained. However, there were some innovations. The new video includes archive footage of Michael Jackson performing his part of the song. The video was intercut with clips of the death and destruction that the earthquake left in its wake, it almost moved yours truly to tears.

I don’t know what the rest of the world was expecting this remake to look and sound like; hell I can’t even tell you what exactly it is I was expecting to be the final outcome. But in my wildest nightmares, I certainly couldn’t have imagined the almost-forgotten fad of ’08/’09, autotune to resurface here, and there are those rap verses so poorly done that they sounded like something a person  a quarter of Miler Cyrus’ age would have written.

But hey, it’s for a good cause and while I’ll easily pick the original song over this one any day, We Are the World 25 is more than a noteworthy reminder.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glny4jSciVI&feature=video_response[/youtube]