There’s no need to be afraid, but 40 years since the advent of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ by Band Aid there is a dispute raging about the commemorations. There is to be an ‘ultimate’ version of this haunting ditty – haunting in the Borley Rectory sense – in which vocals from across each of the four versions of the star-spangled roundelay are combined, including those of the sadly deceased.
For me, the release of Band Aid was the day the music died
Perhaps inevitably, given the fraught cultural world we now live in, even at the frothiest end, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ has sparked rancour this time around. Given that it hits several boiling hot spots – international politics, racial and cultural difference – how could it not? Ed Sheeran, who appeared on the 2014 version, has let it be known that he would not have permitted his vocal to be used on the ultimate mix had he been consulted, which he was not. He has cited the objections of British-Ghanaian rapper Fuse ODG to the venture. Mr ODG has said that the song is replete with ‘colonial tropes’ and the ‘white saviour complex’, and paints Africa as a whole in a jolly bad light.
Bob Geldof has snapped back in characteristically spirited style. ‘These are not “colonial tropes”, they are empirical facts.’ Climate change affects the poorest first and worst, etc. Like so many of our public spats of the 2020s it’s handbags at dawn between totally disconnected people blowing off the steam of a sixth-form debating society.
I think Ed Sheeran is right to want to distance himself from Band Aid, but for the wrong reasons. On an aesthetic level, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ is a horrible song, and whatever its fund raising may or may not have achieved, for me its cultural effect, and the cultural effect of the subsequent Live Aid concert, were very bad for the western world, never mind Africa for the moment.
First off, it’s such a crushing shuffle of a dirge. It’s very much the product of the grim mid-80s, the period when the Fairlight synthesiser had been invented but before the widespread use of the bubbly house percussion that loosened things up; a bit like the period of world war one where barbed wire had been invented but not the tank. It grinds and clanks cheaply.
And whatever ‘colonial tropes’ it may or not possess, revealed by the fullness of time, it has some of the worst lyrics in history, which was apparent on the day of its release in 1984. The opening couplet features a desperate search to find a rhyme for ‘be afraid’ that settles on ‘we banish shade’. We hear how in Africa ‘nothing ever grows’ – perhaps some confusion there with Antarctica – and how ‘the only bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom’. It has, in fact, a full house of all the ‘lesses’ – it is witless, artless and tasteless.
For me – I was 16 at the time – the release of Band Aid was the day the music died. Overnight, pop music went from being disreputable and barely tolerated to being everywhere, and pop stars went from being thrillingly countercultural (or at least playing at that) to being moral exemplars and political heavyweights, forever putting in their two penn’orth. In 1984 it was markedly unusual that Duran Duran and Bananarama were singing, however ineptly, about a serious political and humanitarian issue. Nowadays it is much more of a surprise when pop stars keep their big gobs shut on things that they know nothing about.
Geldof has been hoisted with his own petard here. It was he who opened this door, letting the daft idea of treating pop people’s dribblings with respect escape via Band Aid from the inky corners of the NME. Something at least partly for children and teens became fully absorbed into showbiz. A way of teenagers figuring the world out, on their own and for themselves, became everybody’s cultural baseline, and lost its little enclave. The grand adolescent gesture, the simultaneously stupid and pompous, became the accepted way of looking at the world for adults. Sheeran is merely continuing down that path.
There is something interesting also in Sheeran remaining as big a star ten years on, as do many of the 2014 Band Aid intake, and a good few from 2004’s. Most of the stars of the original version – Heaven 17, Marilyn, Jody Watley– were as a scattering of pop dust by the time of the second in 1989, which saw Bros, Big Fun and Sonia spending their equally short time in the sun. Pop stars used to dissolve into the distance with their millions, and good luck to ‘em, when something fresh rocked up. However Sheeran – along with Coldplay, Sam Smith and Paloma Faith – will apparently be with us forever. Despite the cultural horrors of the last decade, all the cancellations and the mainstreaming of nutty and unpleasant ideas, the faces and the sounds remain the same. Why is Ed Sheeran, of all people, still bloody there? We got three years of Jimi Hendrix and barely two of Klaus Nomi, but this goon lingers like the aroma of a dead fish sewn into the lining of a curtain.
Something is gummed up somewhere. And I suspect the gumming and the dumbing began with Band Aid. Can it end with it too please?
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