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 from home, and spending countless hours seeing this thing in heavy rotation. And while its parade of stars, from Sting to Bono to Phil Collins to Boy George to Duran Duran, weren't my thing (having gone all-in on college radio at that point), we were still at a time in music history when we were all still captivated by MTV even though they weren't playing the artists we'd listen to on record.

And you know what? Set aside some of those lyrics, and the song itself isn't bad. Collins gives it a nice beat, and the music (from Ultravox's Midge Ure) is undeniably catchy. Plus I'm a sucker for any song that starts small and goes big for the anthemic finish, a sing-along outro every bit as captivating as, say, "Hey Jude." It's certainly pretty solid when compared to absolute dreck like the American follow-up, "We Are The World" (though last year's documentary about that project was pretty fantastic, highly recommended if you haven't seen it yet). Bonus points for leading to 1985's Live Aid music festival, another event we were riveted to on MTV even if we weren't into most of the particular artists performing (and arguably one of the last times it felt like everybody was familiar with a lot of the same music).

Anyway, it's not a song I'm gonna cue up on my stereo; but it's also one of two songs this non-Christmas-celebrating-guy is actually pretty glad to hear playing at the supermarket and over the airport  loudspeakers every December.

2014 remake, which I didn't know existed until now, and I don't think I know who any of these people are, but at least it's a little less homogenous?

Performed at Live Aid 1985:

See the entire Top 2000 to date in a sortable database!