Feed the World

One of my badly-kept pop culture secrets is that I adore the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" recorded by Band Aid back in 1984. I love it to the point that I learned to play it on my keyboard, and every time I do, I pretend I am surrounded by 80s rock stars, and that we're all singing our hearts out to raise money for starving kids in Africa.

I was just reading a Guardian article about how it's bad for your career to record a Christmas single, and in the part about Band Aid, they mentioned that the song was rerecorded this year. Since my world is MTV-free at the moment, I hadn't heard, so I immediately Googled for more info and found Band Aid 20's official website, where you can watch a clip of their video. (Sidenote: It made me feel REALLY old when it hit me that they are called "Band Aid 20" because it has been 20 years since the original song was recorded.)

That video looks okay in a helpful hipster sort of way, but I think I'd rather participate in the the 1985 live-in-concert version. You can see the video of that one in its awesome entirety on Yahoo's Christmas video page.

If I could have just one pop culture wish this Christmas, I would choose to time travel back and crowd onto that stage with all those famous and not-so-famous people. Maybe I'd be slightly tipsy because it's the end of a big night, and maybe I'd share a mic with David Bowie or George Michael, and we'd all sort of sway together as we sing a tiny bit off key because we can't quite hear ourselves over the noise of the crowd. And for four minutes or so of giant-concert euphoria, we would look out at all the dancing people and know that we were helping hungry kids just by rockin' out. God, that would be cool.