The celebrity sing-along benefits of the 1980's have been pretty widely mocked and derided. I think this is mostly unfair. Though of course I do enjoy this particular derision:
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Let's take the case of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and its instigator, Bob Geldof. It started the whole trend, and it's easily mocked because the people the song was about, starving Ethiopians, were, for the most part, not Christians and so therefore probably didn't care it was Christmas. Also, Phil Collins participated.
Still, while this is not the best of the 1980's benefit songs, it is a pretty good one: It basically cribs its sentiment from the Kinks' "Father Christmas", and there are a lot worse songs to steal from. So despite the fact that it's a Christmas song, it's not treacly: "And the Christmas bells that ring out/Are the clanging chimes of doom/Well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you."
And, it's a Christmas song, which has guaranteed it a much longer shelf life than any of the similar songs. This is a smart and nifty trick to ensure the charity-bound royalties keep coming year after year. You hear "Do They Know It's Christmas" every year, and it's been many years (though surely not enough) since I've heard "We Are The World." (Prince was scorned at the time for only contributing a song to the album and avoiding the recording of the single, but you can still listen to "4 The Tears in Your Eyes" without vomiting, which is pretty much impossible to do with "We Are The World." Having said that, Prince is on my shit list right now--more on that in a future entry.)
And so it's easy to mock a bunch of rich musicians for getting together and putting together a song instead of doing something more, and more effective, and apparently the whole Live Aid thing wasn't too successful at getting the food into the hands of the starving, but I think it's important not to succumb to the cynic's excuse: "your attempt to do something is not perfect, therefore I am justified in doing nothing."
Doing something about evil and injustice is always better than doing nothing.
And Bob Geldof shamed a lot of wealthy people into doing something for people who had less than them. In a pretty materialistic decade full of BMWs and Polo Shirts, this alternative story was going out: if you have a lot, you have a responsibility to give back. That's a pretty good message, and who knows how many people were impacted by it in some way?
Anyway, here's Bob, Sting, George Michael, Glenn Gregory from Heaven 17, Boy George, That Guy from The Human League, Simon LeBon, Paul Young, Bono, those fetchin' gals from Bananarama looking delightfully like they just rolled out of bed, and (shudder) Phil Collins with an imperfect attempt to do something worthwhile with their fame:
And here's the best benefit song of the 1980's:
