Old Art, New Eyes: Horrendous Holiday Edition

So good! But so bad! But then so good again! But wait, oh no

Earlier this year, around March, I started a series, with promises to write about Les Miserables and Dirty Dancing and other pieces of media I’ve had passionate relationships with in the past, to see what I thought of them now.

In April, I started the series in earnest, writing an elegy to The Phantom of the Opera on the occasion of its closing.

I was pretty proud of that one. But then, the night after the show closed and I published the piece, my friend and fellow theatre artist, the irreplaceable Jaie Deschene, died suddenly.

I feel as though that put the brakes on the series for a while, though it wasn’t intentional. There’s a weird thing that happens when you write something impassioned and then you lose someone you love. Of course my thinking brain knows that neither my piece about Phantom, which rocketed Jaie’s favorite performer, Sarah Brightman, to stardom, nor the closing of that musical after 35 years — only one year less than Jaie’s age; she was perhaps the same age as the show’s British premiere — could have had any impact on her death, nor caused or hastened it in any way.

But bodies and hearts and subconsciouses are strange beasts, and I think something in me believed that it did, and decided that at least for a while, I shouldn’t go writing impassioned screeds about art.

Anyway. Regardless of what my body was on about, that is in fact what happened.

All of this is by way of saying: here at last, after only eight months, is installment #2 of:

Old Art, New Eyes: The OG Christmas Megaband

It’s weird, right? Sort of cozy, sort of sinister? Sort of how am I meant to feel about this exactly? It’s AI, right? I’m thinking this is AI.

I started writing this as alt-text on the above image, but I think I’m going to leave it here, because as I describe it I realize it illustrates, by analogy, the point of the larger story. In the image, a girl in red and white, carrying a giant, golden glowing lantern, looks down a snowy hill at a house with light coming from the windows but also dark, creepy-looking eaves. The background looks like a dark misty forest, but also there seems to be strong sunlight, and the picture is full of lens-flare from multiple directions. It seems like it’s meant to seem like a Christmasy Thomas Kincaid or something but instead it’s weirdly unsettling. The vibes, as they say, are off.

And so it is with so many things about the holiday season. But today, let’s talk about the music.

In these times when Christmas rolls around, everybody starts doing this whole dance about the songs they love to hate. Mariah Carey is trotted out as a gaily-dressed terrorist of enforced jolliness. The LBD Challenge pits stalwart shoppers against the ever-present danger of hearing some version of “Little Drummer Boy.” Friends compete in the deathmatch called Whammageddon by evading the dreaded “Last Christmas” for as long as possible. (I don’t partake, but if I did, I would have entered Whamhalla last week at my local food co-op.) And of course my favorite tooth-grinder of the season is the psychotic “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” sung by Johnny Mathis on what sounds for all the world like a cocaine bender. My eyes start wobbling just thinking about it blaring to life while I’m trying to choose butter under the aggressive fluorescents of a supermarket.

Given all this recycling, all this irony, and the way the holiday mania gets earlier and earlier every year, I find myself surprised by how seldom I hear the song that was such a favorite for me starting near its release in 1984. It has it all: overt religiosity, saccharine sincerity, synthesized church bells, and of course, the requisite white vast oversimplification of a horrific international crisis.

Of course I’m talking about “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by Band-Aid (clever group name alert!), an agglomeration of around 20 of Britain’s biggest musical stars of the era (including, tellingly, George Michael), singing a holiday tune for aid to…Africa, I guess.

It was that time, in the mid-eighties, when everyone in the world was making a video or throwing a music festival or doing some other artistically desperate thing to raise money for starving people in famine-wracked Ethiopia, after the UNICEF boxes I carried trick-or-treating and Sally Struthers’ continual pleas for American adults to foster children thousands of miles away for seven cents a day failed to be quite enough.

I don’t mean to sound cynical, but sometimes the Gen-X just comes out.

Which is sort of what this series is all about, right? How do I return love and respect to that kid who loved these things so much? And when I do, is there still something there to love?

In this case, there very much is.

But first…hoo boy.

Do they know it’s offensive at alllllll

When I first started thinking about writing about This Here Song, I couldn’t stop cringing while recalling the lyrics. The whole thing is of course frightfully sincere, bit of emphasis on the “frightfully” there. And of course it was incredibly effective, and raised a boatload of money for relief of the devastating famine in Ethiopia. It touched off related projects like USA for Africa (yes, this was the blueprint for the inescapable “We Are The World” the next year) and Live Aid. In some ways I can’t fault it at all.

In other ways, well. Moments include:

Sting being made to sing the line, “And the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears” (see what they did there?!)

The whole crew busting into the bridge with “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime…” (No kidding. There’s a whole lot of equatorial and sub-equatorial places in the world that won’t be getting snow in December and January, or in some places, ever. That’s hardly the tragedy here.)

Bono belting “Well tonight THANK GOD IT’S THEM INSTEAD OF YYEEWWWWW” (I don’t know, seems rude??)

And of course the classic chorus: “Do they know it’s Christmastime at alllll??” (A wag I saw in another social media space commented, “Yes, they know. They’re f***ing Orthodox.”)

All of this is of course mortifying. In fact I am dead right now and writing this to you from the grave.

But at the same time…damn. I mean have you ever heard anything as smooth and splendid as Boy George coming in with “But in our worrrrld of plenty, we can spread a SMAAAL of joy…throw your arms around the world at Christmastaaaahme!”

(Did you know he flew across the world on a Concorde to be there in time to record, because he was touring in the States? Total icon. Also that’s pretty bad for the climate.)

We are the children

It’s tough to parse these things! Because wow…I went and watched this video and listened, and then of course followed the Youtube madness to “We Are the World,” and I have to say that in both cases, seeing all these legends gathered in one place to use their talents to make a song that helps feed people — I mean, it’s electric. In the case of “We Are the World,” the pairing of Stevie Wonder’s buttery soul with Bruce Springsteen’s gravely machismo on one of the choruses is one of the most inspired duets I’ve ever heard. Both Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper beeline for the microphone at their big moments and steal the entire show for about 10 seconds each. And when Ray Charles takes the thing over near the end with the gospel invocation, “Come on now, lemme hear ya!” I mean, legendary.

Even so, when I was a kid, I liked this earlier, scrappier, more British song even more. At ten years old or whenever thereafter I first heard it, its sweetness, perhaps its Britishness, its New-Wave-ness, and probably its utter lack of country musicians spoke to me more powerfully. Of course I loved George Michael and Boy George and Duran Duran at that time, too. And look, Phil Collins on drums, I know him! And isn’t that the lady who sings “Bette Davis Eyes”??

There was all that of course, but also, what can I say. It just… moved me.

Feeeeed the woooooorld

I guess what I’m learning by writing about this, and by listening to these songs again (and watching Boy George with his wild yellowish eyes, and young Michael Jackson in his glittery Sgt. Pepper jacket), is that I’m tired, very tired indeed, of all the irony. I’m tired of Rickrolls, tired of mean humor, tired, even, of dismissing broad swathes of media from past decades out of hand because they’re problematic.

I know I’m not nearly the first person to say this, but: everything is problematic. Like, everything. If it weren’t, if we couldn’t look back and cringe at what we made or enjoyed or shared with all our friends because we didn’t know any better, who would we be? And where would we be, now?

I’m not really interested at going into a huge thing here about “cancel culture” or any of that; I have opinions about it which can largely be boiled down to “stop giving horrible people money by spending it on their stuff” and “keep doing stuff, buying stuff and making stuff that lifts up the less-heard voices.” But what I’m really interested in talking about here is this odd intersection between this thing that really touched me as a kid, and the way things like this were actually really effective at what they were trying to do.

Because here’s the thing: were Band-Aid and USA for Africa and all those supergroups and festivals super tone-deaf about Ethiopia, its people, the famine, and all the politics surrounding it? Oh mercy yes. They were absolutely terrible at telling us who these people were, describing their humanity, contextualizing their suffering, or even saying the name of the country they were in.

You know what they were friggin great at, though?

Making white people feel super guilty and open their wallets.

It gets a lot more problematic though, or, a deeply unfortunate afterword

And then, just when I’d redeemed the damned thing, I dug deeper.

In the course of doing a little bit of research for this article, I found this 2015 link from Spin magazine that contextualizes an expose of theirs from 30 years ago. In it, the reporters describe the absolute, if you’ll forgive me, shitshow that Bob Geldof set off with the whole Band-Aid/Live-Aid/Everything-Aid thing.

It turns out that while they were incredibly successful at raising money, started a massive trust, and even started building their own infrastructure for delivery of money and food to the starving people of Ethiopia, they did so in the context of a blood-soaked dictatorial government that was blocking the aid from getting to the people who needed it, trading grain for arms from Russia, and thus pumping up the then-dictator’s armies toward speeding his literal death camps.

Needless to say, the material at that link is real, real rough stuff to read. What stuns me even more though is that nobody talks about it anymore. Seems like when people do, Bob Geldof gets really upset, and Bob Geldof, shockingly enough, has heaps and heaps of money.

It’s confusing, too, because while The Guardian has this piece talking about it, and in particular the BBC’s reporting on it, it’s hard to tell where the missing money truly went. Some places say that because Geldof worked with the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, he used it directly to fund his campaigns against the rebel forces he’d been at war with for ages already. Others say that rebels posing as merchants sold aid workers fake grain and used the proceeds to buy weapons for themselves.

Either way (or both ways, which seems more likely), the Band Aid Trust seems to have funded more guns than grain.

Sometimes, things are just ruined

I guess that’s one lesson of this series so far: sometimes, a thing can’t really be saved. I peel back the veneer of cynical whatever-ness I’ve placed over something I used to love, find the shine and the wonder again when I allow myself a few minutes of sentimentality, and then turn the page again to find that no, actually, it really is hollow all the way down.

Luckily, there’s still Boy George’s entire back catalog. And of course…there’s “Last Christmas.”