2000 Great Songs #1282: Do They Know It's Christmas?
It's hard to think of a song more fully packed with cringe than Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas," from the misguided if well-meaning lyrics, to the cover art pictured above, to the not-exactly-diverse line-up of mostly British, mostly white male pop artists. And its legacy is mixed, from the amount of money actually raised for famine relief to the slew of often terrible benefit projects that followed. But it'll always have serious nostalgia value for me, so let's just pull this sucker out of the Guilty Pleasures file for a moment. The all-star one-day recording, instigated by Boomtown Rats' Bob Geldof, came about at the end of 1984, while I was on break from my first year of college. It dominated MTV for weeks--the video, the behind-the-scenes video, the non-stop hype--at a time when we were all still watching MTV all the time. I still have vivid memories of hanging out with high school friends, a brief reunion after our first semester away fr...
