On the heels of its 40th anniversary, it’s time to ditch “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
The original Band Aid, charity supergroup made up of various musicians and recording artists, was founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. Their aim was to get some of the world’s most famous musicians into one room to record a song to raise money for anti-famine efforts in Ethiopia. Band Aid and their well-known 1984 hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” were born from this vision.
The song features big names like Bono (U2), Phil Collins (Genesis), Simon Le Bon (Duran Duran), George Michael (Wham!) and Sting (The Police), with David Bowie and Paul McCartney providing spoken messages on the B-side of the record. Altogether, 40 of some of the biggest names in music at the time came together to put together the track, and upon its release, it became the number one Christmas song on the charts. Even better, the song sold over 2 million copies around the world and raised more than $24 million to support the people of Ethiopia.
The success of Band Aid resulted in the creation of Live Aid, two benefit concerts in London and Philadelphia on July 13, 1985. While Live Aid is well known for the iconic performances of Queen, U2 and David Bowie in London, the American counterpart also featured huge names like Simple Minds, Madonna, Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan. Both shows drew in huge crowds and eventually raised $127 million for famine relief in Africa.
Band Aid has reassembled with new members on three more occasions: once in 1989, a second time in 2004 for the 20th anniversary of the original track and a third time in 2014 for the 30th anniversary. Each time Band Aid has returned, it has been able to send relief to a country or group of people in need, raising millions of dollars for various causes. Even now, 40 years after the release of the original track, it would be hard to debate against the fact that Band Aid has done good for the world.
But it’s probably time to stop singing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
When it was announced that Band Aid would be celebrating its 40th anniversary by releasing a new mix of the song featuring audio from the original 1984 track with audio from Band Aid 20 and Band Aid 30, people began to voice their concerns about the song’s lyrics online.
The consensus was that while Band Aid was a great cause, the lyrics of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” are patronizing at best, and a clear indication of colonial, white supremacy beliefs at worst.
The song starts out normally, but quickly devolves into uncomfortable territory with lyrics like, “Where the only water flowing is / The bitter sting of tears.” While this line seems to be trying to get the listener to empathize with the struggles faced by the people of Ethiopia, it’s a complete overshoot into cartoonish mockery. The first part of the line seems to refer to the massive drought affecting Ethiopia at the time, one of the causes of the famine. This reference in and of itself isn’t much of a problem, but rather the implication created by the inclusion of the second line (“The bitter sting of tears”).
While the line might be effective in making the listener feel empathy for the Ethiopian people, this empathy is created by creating an image of Ethiopians as passive bystanders who have no agency in their own lives. Instead of suggesting that, with some help, they could be an active participant in the search for a solution, this line reduces Ethiopian people to being entirely helpless in the fight against famine. All they can offer up is their tears.
This reduction of the Ethiopian people into a harmful stereotype — being not only demeaning but also dehumanizing and incredibly offensive — has only gotten more mainstream following the release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
It’s impossible to escape what some have come to call “poverty porn,” a type of media often utilized by NGOs working in Africa to make a profit off the guilty consciences of the Western world. “Poverty porn” often comes in the form of short advertisements played during commercial breaks on cable TV or before videos on internet platforms like YouTube that show footage of starving, skeletal children and brutalized groups of women pleading for help set against the backdrop of emotional, instrumental music. While this marketing tactic has been successful in making money, it also creates the lasting image of oppressed populations as people to be pitied. While “poverty porn” has been around for a long time, many people consider Band Aid to be the catalyst for it becoming so mainstream.
As the song progresses, things get even worse. The lyric, “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime,” said with complete seriousness is comically redundant. Putting aside the fact that Africa is the second largest continent in the world and cannot be rendered down to such a ridiculous generalization, geographically, Ethiopia shares a border with Kenya and Somalia which both literally make direct contact with the equator. The only place snow made an appearance in Ethiopia in 1984 was high up in the Simien and Bale mountains. It’s laughable.
One of the biggest problems with the song is the title itself. First of all, the type of Christmas celebration being portrayed in the song is a predominantly Western-centric one, perpetrated by capitalist consumerism which is different from the way Christmas is celebrated in many African countries. Secondly, not everyone in Ethiopia is Christian and it’s ridiculous to assume they are. Thirdly, it’s not strange to assume that they wouldn’t know it was Christmas, but not because of the famine. Ethiopian people follow the Julian calendar and so they don’t celebrate Christmas until Jan. 7. And finally, it’s just a stupid question. Whether or not they knew it was Christmas was irrelevant when they were dying of starvation.
While it should be abundantly clear at this point that the song is inappropriate and fostered an incredibly harmful image of not only the Ethiopian people but the whole of the African continent, the use of the money raised by Band Aid and its sister project Live Aid should also be questioned.
When asking for donations, Band Aid portrayed the Ethiopian famine as being strictly the result of a natural disaster, when this simply wasn’t true. In 1984, Ethiopia was embroiled in an incredibly violent civil war and an even bigger factor that contributed to the famine was the system of government that was in power in Ethiopia at the time. Bob Geldof, the figurehead of the Aid series, has been vastly criticized for depoliticizing the causes of the famine and these criticisms were made worse when rumors about how the money was used started to spiral following the conclusion of Live Aid.
A controversial SPIN article published in 1986 claimed that a good portion of the money was handed over to Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu is a former dictator of Ethiopia who was later convicted of committing mass genocide because of his orchestration of the Ethiopian Red Terror, a violent political repression that resulted in the death of between 10,000 and 980,000 people in just two years. The Human Rights Watch describes the Red Terror as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by the state ever witnessed in Africa.”
The story goes that after Live Aid, Mengistu was given a portion of the money which he used to buy new, sophisticated weapons from Russia to aid him and his government in winning the civil war that was ravaging his country. Still, due to the unstable political climate of Ethiopia at the time, 40 years later these statements cannot be corroborated. While Geldof claims to this day that the money was all used for aid, there is a suspicious lack of a paper trail that can be accessed by the public explaining exactly how the Live Aid money was used, including where it ended up and how it got there.
Still, Bob Geldof and Band Aid did a good thing, right? Ethiopia needed help. Sure. It would be incredibly hard to argue that the Ethiopian people didn’t need support. But when considering the whole affair, it would also be remiss not to consider the colonial context of the entire situation.
While Ethiopia was never colonized, apart from a five-year occupation by Italy’s fascist dictator Mussolini, it is surrounded by countries that were colonies of Britain and Italy during the age of the Empire. Once these countries gained their independence from European powers, the trauma caused by colonialism resulted in the development of corrupt practices amongst the new leaders of these countries who bared the scars created by colonial subjugation. The mentality of scarcity created by the environment perpetrated by Western control led to a survivalist mindset in leadership, with new rulers looking to prioritize short-term gain and personal enhancement instead of collective welfare. These colonial scars left a mark on much of Africa, and it would be ridiculous to assume that Ethiopia somehow got out unscathed.
Furthermore, the Italian occupation of Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941 disrupted Ethiopian governance, and later Cold War dynamics fostered a culture of dependency on the Western world that limited Ethiopia’s development. These forces left long-term legacies of economic instability and weakened government structures, making the Western world somewhat responsible for what caused the Ethiopian famine.
So yes, Ethiopia needed help and support in 1984, help that Band Aid contributed to, even if the paper trail is dubious. But the question we should be asking is absolutely not “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” We shouldn’t even be asking whether Ethiopia needed help at all, but instead, question why they needed help in the first place.
I’m not trying to say that Band Aid didn’t do any good. It likely did. But the song is also a product of its time and should be phased out. Furthermore, looking back at the entire Aid series 40 years later, we must examine the whole affair critically before we can make a judgement on whether we should continue to propagate it today.
Not everything should live on forever, and while the charitable intent of Band Aid is important, it’s time to let the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” regress into the shadows of our history.