In our world of plenty

"Do They Know It's Christmas?" kicked of a decade of socially conscious rock music for the children of the 1980s. Despite the awkwardness of the lyrics, it remains a staple of holiday music playlists.

The first time I heard “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was thirty nine years ago, give or take a few weeks. My older sister and I were watching the supper hour newscast and there was a short piece about a song that had been recorded in London by some British musicians to raise money for starving people in Africa. It showed some documentary scenes from a famine in Ethiopia, had some shots of rock stars walking into a studio, and ended with a clip of Phil Collins drumming along to a group-sung chorus that went “Feeed… the… woorrrrld… let them know it’s Christmas time and Feeed…”

I remember my sister saying she had heard the whole song already. “The verses are pretty catchy,” she said. 

We ended up getting a copy of the single that year. It was a twelve-inch vinyl edition that had the radio edit of the song, an extended version that featured some in-song chit chat from various artists, and an instrumental version with holiday greetings from the musicians that was clearly just there to fill the grooves on the B-side. I probably listened to that thing a hundred times, trying to identify the various singers and pouring over the group photo on the back cover of the album. The part in the extended version where the music breaks down and David Bowie intones “It’s Christmas 1984, and there are more starving folk on our planet than ever before…” seemed impossibly cool and serious, and it always gave me a shiver.

The origin story of the song is pretty well known. In October of that year, Bob Geldof, the leader of the Irish punk/new wave band The Boomtown Rats, saw a report on the BBC about a serious famine that was affecting Ethiopia. Geldof decided to try to raise some money for famine relief, and called up his friend Midge Ure of the band Ultravox. Together they quickly wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and started recruiting people to perform on it. They got forty artists to agree, including some of the biggest stars of the day such as Bono, Boy George, and Sting. The song was recorded on the 25th of November and released four days later.

Band Aid – as the project was known – was, on its own terms, a fantastic success.  It became the biggest selling single in UK history, selling almost four million copies that Christmas. It also spurred a number of copy-cat fundraisers for Africa, including Canada’s Northern Lights (“Tears Are Not Enough”), USA For Africa (“We Are the World”) and the heavy metal song “Stars” by the excellently named Hear ‘n Aid.

But Band Aid also kicked off a decade-long excursion into socially conscious rock, which saw a steady stream of benefit songs, albums and tours devoted to raising money and awareness for a host of causes and injustices. These included the 1985 song “Sun City” by United Artists Against Apartheid, the Farm Aid concerts that started that same year, the A Conspiracy of Hope tours for Amnesty International in 1986, and, later into the 1990s, the Tibetan Freedom concerts. 

But the one with the biggest cultural influence, the one with the most significant generational import, was Live Aid, again organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure as a direct followup on the success of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. Billed as a “global jukebox”, Live Aid was held on Saturday, the 13th of July 1985, at both Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. It featured a legendary performance from Queen, as well as appearances from U2, The Who, Sade, and Paul McCartney (in London), and Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, and Mick Jagger and Tina Turner in Philadelphia. Famously, Phil Collins hopped the Concorde and managed to play in both venues that day. 

Despite significant technical problems throughout the broadcast – including McCartney’s mic failing for the first half of “Let it Be”, Live Aid was just massive. Somewhere close to two billion people, in 150 countries – about 40 percent of the world’s population at the time – watched at least part of the broadcast, which ultimately raised around $140 million. There were at the time, and there continues to be, serious questions about the use of the funds; Médecins Sans Frontières had warned Geldof that the famine in Ethiopia was not an ecological disaster but instead had been engineered by the country’s socialist military junta, and told him that a lot of the money he was raising for famine relief was being used to be weapons from the Soviet Union. 

Back home in Ottawa, we didn’t much care about that angle. A bunch of us gathered around our TV and watched almost the whole thing, waiting for our favourite bands to come on while drifting away during the boring ones. Queen was good, and U2 and Duran Duran and Bryan Adams and Madonna were awesome, while Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan and Mick and Tina all seemed impossibly old. But despite the Baby Boomer focus of a lot of the acts, there was no question that a torch had been passed in the culture. Joan Baez, whose records my parents owned, nevertheless captured it pretty well as the opening act in Philadelphia, saying: "Good morning, children of the '80s… this is your Woodstock, and it's long overdue."

Live Aid nostalgia is trendy again, largely thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody, the Freddy Mercury biopic that put a fictionalized version of Queen’s Live Aid set at the centre of his AIDS diagnosis.  But it all pretty much started with the catchy Christmas song Midge Ure and Bob Geldof banged out in early November, 1984. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” has since been remade a number of times, including a reworked pop version in 1989, a 20th anniversary version in 2004 that was initiated by Chris Martin of Coldplay, and, a decade later, a 30 anniversary version aimed at bringing attention to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. 

For this last version, some of the song’s more obviously problematic lyrics were given a substantial rewrite. To put it generously, the original lyrics betrayed a strong naivete about the nature of the famine (a land “where nothing ever grows/no rain nor rivers flow”) and the cultural context (“And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time/The greatest gift they'll get this year is life”), not to mention a routine positioning of the white man as saviour (the chorus “Feed the world…Let them know it's Christmas time again”). 

It’s all pretty bad, looking back. I suspect we knew at the time the lyrics were a bit off; the song’s sketchy take on the causes of, and cures for, world hunger even spurred an absolutely vicious comic bit from Sam Kinison (“Move to where the food is!”).

But none of the remakes have really caught on, while the original continues to be a staple of Christmas time radio playlists. Exactly why is hard to say. Most regular Christmas music tends to hit on perennial themes of the birth of Jesus, playing in the snow, the awesomeness of Santa, or the holiday-inspired sting of lost love and the hope of redemption. But “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is a period piece, a novelty song that is in many ways just a more earnest analog to that other early ‘80s Christmas classic, Bob and Doug McKenzie’s “Twelve Days of Christmas”.

But there has to be more to its ongoing popularity than nostalgia — when was the last time you heard “Tears Are Not Enough?” It may be because the broader themes of universal charity and solidarity with all humankind that motivated the song in the first place have resonance that transcends the awkwardness of the actual lyrics, and happen to fit well with the Christmas spirit. It probably helps though, as my sister said way back when, that it’s a pretty catchy tune.

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Welcome new subscribers! Thanks to everyone who has been reading and sharing these dispatches. I’m not sure where we’ll go next week; I have some fairly heavy stuff to talk about from the nineties but I don’t want to be a holiday bummer. Suggestions welcome! As always, thanks for reading and please, if you like this, I’d appreciate you sharing it with anyone who might it enjoyable as well. — ap