Customer Reviews

Do They Know It's Christmas? / Feed the World

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I remember when this came out. 25 years ago now, it doesn't seem possible. Anyway, the video was in heavy rotation on MTV and we had to have the 12" single. My roomate Job and I drove all over Boston one night until we finally found it - everyone had sold out. Now, it pops up on my Ipod this time of year and it always reminds me of those days. The world seems so different now ...

"Do they know its Christmas" is a classic. I readily admit that I hate it, loath it, feel disgusted by it, and hate it some more! This bizarre blend of the saccharine and the lachrymose is a real fossil of a time when Black Africans were seen as harmless little victims of strange and incomprehensible forces beyond their control. A bit like kittens, I suppose. "We" in the West were supposed to come to their aid, blah blah. Charity, dear citizen, charity! Nothing more politically controversial than that. (Thank God for Artists United Against Apartheid!)

Sure, I don't oppose aid to the starving. Quite the contrary, in fact. Yet, wasn't there some kind of connection between the famine in Ethiopia and the Communist-fascist regime of one Mengistu Haile Mariam? Or between the parasitical practices of the global establishments and world starvation at large? Or between liberal-Green do-gooders and the lack of development in the Third World? Who's afraid of GM crops in Africa, who doesn't want China and India to surge ahead with hydro, nuclear or economic growth? I wonder what these people would have done, had Ethiopia decided to build a breeder reactor outside Addis Ababa? Threaten to cut off the food aid, perhaps?

Struggle, not charity, is the bottom line. And no, I didn't like Boy George's terrible hair cut, either.

I remember this song and always will... I believe this song was 10 times better than We are the World! I bought this Record the day it hit the shelves and sadly it wore out and I never got another copy. I will buy or download another to my MP3 player asap...but THIS IS THE BETTER SONG BETWEEN IT AND WE ARE THE WORLD!!!