Musical Monday - Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: December 15, 1984 through January 12, 1985 and December 23, 1989 through January 6, 1990.

In 1984, Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof saw a news report about a famine in Ethiopia. Moved to do something, he wrote one of the most white savious songs of the era, used his connections to recruit a Who's Who's of British pop music personalities, and recorded this single, pledging all of the proceeds to charitable famine relief. It was one of the iconic moments of the 1980s, and one of the most culturally imperialistic events of my lifetime.

To be fair to Geldof, his heart was probably in the right place. He really did want to help, and the single and resulting concert series (named Live Aid) raised millions of dollars, most of which apparently did go to food aid. I must confess that I am doubtful as to the actual impat of this fundarising on the actual famine - most famines in the modern era are not due to an actual lack of food, but rather due to poor infrastructure hampering distribution networks or political instability (or outright political repression) halting the flow of food from where it is produced to where it is to be consumed. Whether the aid was useful or not, Geldof actually did raise money and it seems to have actually been used for its intended purpose. What uis also undeniable is that Band Aid and Live Aid resulted in some of the signature moments of the 1980s, most notably a performance by Queen at Wembley Stadium, and stunts like Phil Collins playing in Live Aid events in both Britain and the United States on the same day.

That said, that doesn't make the song any less cringe-worthy. Many of the individual lines are somewhat offensive (the most obnoxious being "[t]hank god its them instead of you"), but on top of that, the entire premise of the song "do they know its Christmas?", is a very religiously imperialistic in tone. Africa is an incredibly religiously diverse continent. There are Christians to be sure, but the continent is populated with large numbers of Muslims, vast numbers of people who follow aboriginal African faith traditions, and a smattering of Hindus, Jews, and Buddhists as well as many others. To reduce this rich and varied collection of relgious beliefs to a question about whether the beknighted natives kow whether it is Christmas is stunningly offensive in its reductiveness.

In any event, the critiques of the song didn't dampen its pop culture dominance. The idea of a group of pop artists getting together to record a song for charity spread like wildfire through the music world of the 1980s. Band Aid's charity single was soon followed by USA for Africa's recording of the almost as cringey We Are the World. Live Aid was copied by Farm Aid, an effort spearheaded by John Mellencamp to raise money to save failing family farms. Ronnie James Dio and his bandmates got together a bunch of metal artists who put out the charity album Hear'n Aid. And so on. By the end of the 1980s you couldn't fall over without landing on one charity single or another. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Geldof should be the most flattered man of the decade.

Previous Musical Monday: The Wild Boys by Duran Duran

Subsequent Musical Monday: Like a Virgin by Madonna

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: I Want to Know What Love Is by Foreigner

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: Let's Party by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Hangin' Tough by New Kids on the Block

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

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Musical Monday - The Wild Boys by Duran Duran

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: December 15, 1984 through December 22, 1984.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

In 1984, Duran Duran was riding high. They were the darlings of MTV, having pushed out a series of catchy songs tied to slickly produced videos. More than just about any other musical act, Duran Duran had benefitted from the addition of the visual element to musical success, with their videos often being better than their actual music. It was at this point that Duran Duran did what so many musical groups had done before them: They decided to get artsy and experimental.

The Wild Boys was inspired by a 1971 novel by William S. Burroughs, and was the brainchild of Russell Mulcahy, a prominent music video director who had previous directed the videos for several of the band's songs, including the hits Hungry Like the Wolf and Rio. Mulcahy wanted to make a feature-length movie based on Burroughs' novel, and pitched the idea to Duran Duran with the idea they would do a song and he would direct the ensuing music video as a kind of preview of the hypothetical movie to be used as a teaser to entice movie studios to back the project. No movie was ever made, leaving this song and music video as the only extant artifact of the idea.

Indulging in arsty endeavors can either create a signature for a band - for example, Pink Floyd's concept album and related movie The Wall - or wreck a band - I'm looking at you Styx and Kilroy Was Here - but The Wild Boys seems to have had almost no real impact on Duran Duran's fortunes one way or another. The band was a glitzy pop sensation for a few years before The Wild Boys, and (notwithstanding some issues among the band members), they were a glitzy pop sensation for a few years afterwards. The band's fade from the limelight was more the result of their New Wave synth pop style going out of style than it was due to some career-ending experiment with quirky concept songs. perhaps the fact that The Wild Boys was just a single experimental song and video accounts for its apparent minimal impact on their ongoing success.

I will say that when the video was first released, I heard persistent rumors that the "original cut" had been so salacious and risqué that MTV refused to air it until several cuts had been made. This was always passed on by high school experts who would impart their knowledge with knowing looks. Unfortunately, I cannot find any evidence that this was actually the case. So much for the expertise of mid-1980s era high schoolers.

Previous Musical Monday: Out of Touch by Hall and Oates

Subsequent Musical Monday: Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid

Previous #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: I Feel for You by Chaka Khan

Subsequent #1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Like a Virgin by Madonna

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

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Musical Monday - Out of Touch by Hall and Oates

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: December 8, 1984 through December 15, 1984.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.

Built out a synthesizer riff backed by a drum machine, Out of Touch was Hall and Oates' most peppy and poppy song. It was also their last number one hit. They did have some lesser success over the next few years, but this song more or less marks the last moment Darryl Hall and John Oates were at the forefront of popular music. Alternatively, and more darkly, one could say that this was the beginning of the end of the duo's reign as one of the top musical groups in the world.

It is kind of easy to see why this was the start of the slow fade for the band. It is overtly pop in a way that most of their previous hits had not been, entirely lacking in the jazzy, urbane, and urban tone that Hall and Oates had made their signature sound. In a way, this song seems to have marked the transition of the duo from trend-setters following their own beat to trend-chasers trying to match a style pioneered by others. This song is kind of fun, but it lacks the spark that earlier songs by the band had had. This was, for want of a better word, bland.

It didn't really help that the lyrics are more or less nonsense. Granted, Hall and Oates was never a band that had deep or particularly meaningful lyrics: Their best songs were love songs or simple and fairly straightforward stories. This song, however, is lyrically a complete mess. It might be about a breakup resulting from a couple growing apart, but if it is, that is kind of obscure. It might just be someone insulting their partner over and over again. It doesn't really matter, because the end result is mostly gibberish - words strung together to match a meter and rhyme but with no real discernible meaning behind them.

It is possible that a young J.J. Abrams listened to the song and the lesson that he took was that if lyrics to a song could be a series of mostly unrelated words, a movie could be a sequence of mostly unrelated scenes that don't follow from one to another.

Previous Musical Monday: The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Wild Boys by Duran Duran

Previous #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham!

Subsequent #1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Like a Virgin by Madonna

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Hall and Oates     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home

Musical Monday - The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: Never.

#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.

#1 on the U.K. Chart: The week of December 8, 1984.

The song The Power of Love is kind of tangentially a Christian themed song. The video that accompanies the song explicitly tries to connect it to the Nativity story in what was clearly a gambit to try to score a Christmas day hit for the band (Christmas day hits are, or at least were, apparently a big deal in the U.K.). One thing I have always thought odd about the story is kind of highlighted here - God could arrange for shepherds to get a visitation from an angel and for wise men from distant lands to show up bearing kingly gifts (gifts of a nature that should have ensured that Jesus' family would be quite wealthy), but could not coordinate events in such a way that Jesus could be born somewhere other than a stable.

In any event, the song is okay, but kind of mediocre and Frankie Goes to Hollywood joins dozens of other bands that are one hit wonders in the United States but have multiple number ones in other countries. More to the point, this song didn't really land the way the band clearly wanted it to, and has been overwhelmed in the public consciousness by the song that followed it on the U.K. charts.

Previous Musical Monday: I Should Have Known Better by Jim Diamond

Subsequent Musical Monday: Out of Touch by Hall and Oates

Previous #1 on the U.K. Chart: I Should Have Known Better by Jim Diamond

Subsequent #1 on the U.K. Chart: Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid

List of #1 Singles from the Billboard Hot 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles from the Cash Box Top 100 for 1980-1989
List of #1 Singles on the U.K. Chart for 1980-1989

Frankie Goes to Hollywood     1980s Project     Musical Monday     Home