20 November 2014
Let’s first jump forward to Band Aid 40 in 2024. It won’t be featuring here in its own right, since it didn’t get to number one in Ireland or the UK. Okay, it was just a mash-up of Band Aids 1, 20 and 30, harshly omitting Band Aid II, so there was no novelty or intrigue: who’d be on it, and who’d sing which line? Still, clearly the brand alone could no longer shift the product. It looks like Band Aid 30 will be the last time we have a Band Aid record at number one. Band Aid 40 may even be the last time we have a Band Aid record at all.
The tepid response to Band Aid 40, if it marks the decline of the Band Aid project, is heartening. Yes, any discussion of Band Aid has to include the important caveat that it sprang from genuine concern and actually saved lives. However, even in 1984 governments and global capitalism could have intervened to address the famine in Ethiopia and support equitable trade and development across Africa. They didn’t, and they haven’t. Leaving it to millionaire celebrities shaking a bucket for charity is all part of that systemic failure – or perhaps it’s a systemic success, given that the system in question is still the Reagan-Thatcher worldview: the rich get richer, the poor get thoughts and prayers; well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you. Plus, framing the whole issue within a Christian religious festival falls in neatly with traditional western Christian colonialism and condescension: Noddy Holder’s “It’s Christmas!” shouted by a missionary priest.
Anyway, Band Aid 30. Like version 20, it picks ‘sombre’ from the mood board, although this time it’s less to do with landfill-Britrock indie-core 6 Music fear of pop and more the slo-mo ‘journey’ bits of The X Factor laced with the white-saviour segments of Comic Relief. The effect is the same, though: One Direction look suitably serious, Rita Ora pseudo-souls, Chris Martin simpers, and Bono lends his imprimatur. On sound and style alone, I have trouble telling my Band Aid 30 from my Band Aid 20.
Where Band Aid 30 changes things is by updating the cause to the contemporary Ebola crisis in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and neighbouring west African countries. It also updates the lyrics, somewhat. Bono’s Line becomes “well tonight we’re reaching out and touching you”, which may not be the wisest course of action during an Ebola outbreak. Similarly fluffy sentiments replace some of the more geographically questionable lines about the lack of snow, water and vegetation. No one gets angry. The changes here are just superficial.
Another innovation for Band Aid 30 comes in the inclusion of a certain two vocalists. It’d be harsh to say Angélique Kidjo is there purely as a token west African or convenient cover from charges of condescension; her activism for her native Benin and its surrounding region leaves Bono and Bob Geldof looking like millionaire rock stars swanning from summit A to photo-op B. And if you wanted anyone to sing truth to power, it’d be Sinéad O’Connor. But even they can’t transcend Band Aid 30’s stultifying gloop; the solo lines they get to sing—“And there’s death in every tear” and “Why is comfort to be feared / why is to touch to be scared?” respectively—are more of the same. A record on which Angélique Kidjo and Sinéad O’Connor instead get free rein to let rip on the rotten systems underpinning and perpetuating global misery and injustice, as well as our comfortable first-world responses to these issues and events – well, that would have been a Band Aid worth having. We’ll never get that now.
The truth is, even by version 30 the Band Aid brand was fading. For one thing, did they know it was still only mid-November? Well, this may have been a bit of market realism: The X Factor had put the UK Christmas number one spot out of reach for a decade while also creating a mid-November window for a charity collective chart-topper. Geldof even shlepped onto The X Factor like a returned missionary priest sermonising at school assembly, there to plug the track, give its premiere, insert the project into the participants’ ‘journey’, and effectively look for grace and favour from the court of Simon Cowell in the same way a millionaire rock star might sidle up to any other world leader and think they’re the ones benefitting from it. I suppose we’re lucky Band Aid 30 didn’t come with a cardboard cut-out poppy.
As it happens, 2014 will also see the UK’s final X Factor Christmas number one; after this, for them it’s another charity collective, a couple of actual pop singles, and then five Christmasses of LadBaby, who don’t cross over Cromwell-like to Ireland but are the Christmas number one Brexit Britain deserves. Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.
