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Do They Know It's Christmas Yet?: They took a trip back to 1984 and broke it.

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Geldof and Ure had created a charity superband called Band Aid (get it?), and they had invited a host of popular British and Irish recording artists to perform the new song, which was written for a specific purpose: to raise money for Ethiopians suffering one of the worst famines in modern history. As most readers already know, the song had nothing to do with AIDS, but with a famine in Ethiopia. Fewer, however, know that the famine was man-made. The song’s cultural impact—both good and bad—is also hard to overstate, though many smile at the line “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?”

This is not to diminish the work of Band Aid. If you visit Korem today, you can still see evidence of its works, including a hospital completed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famine with proceeds from Geldof and co. Once [Bob] had Midge on board, all Bob’s friends who know his musical limitations would think ‘we know the record will get made now, so it’s not going to embarrass us,” one person familiar with the project observed.World poverty is a burden to be shared, but there is another principle now widely recognized,” Gill writes. “Poor countries will emerge from poverty only when they take full charge of their own destiny.”

The songwriters decided to divvy up the work. Ure would write the music for the song, while Geldof would polish the lyrics and work the phones to drum up performers.This is not to suggest that aid initiatives cannot help those suffering, or that people should not give to those in need. Giving is good and can help those in need, especially when combined with prudence—but it is not an end in itself. Helping people is the ultimate goal, and this requires more than just humanitarian efforts, as some members of Band Aid now realize. The assembled cast of performers had 24 hours to record in the studio, which was made available to them freely by producer Trevor Horn. (Horn had initially been asked to produce the song, but told Geldof it would take him six weeks, which would make a December release impossible; so the task fell to Ure.)

Do They Know It’s Christmas” was released on December 3. It opened with Paul Young on vocals, followed by Boy George, George Michael, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, Sting, and Bono. Numerous other artists also participated in the project. At some point, however, I began to love “Do They Know It’s Christmas”—I still get chills every time Bono hits “well tonight thank god it's them instead of you.” Peter Gill was one of the few western journalists in Ethiopia in 1984. Working with Action Aid, a global humanitarian group, he spent weeks in Korem, the epicenter of the famine, and the highlands of Amhara. Geldof received a dose of perspective that night when he turned on the BBC and saw a news report delivered by journalist Michael Buerk depicting a severe famine in Ethiopia. People were very busy burying the dead,” he said. “Because the Derg [the communist military regime running Ethiopia] had taken so many people away for resettlement, there was a shortage of labour and some of us were forced to become gravediggers.” Lessons From Band Aid

‘Death Is All Around’

There was a charming naivete about this song,” Sting said years later, while speaking to Ure. “I think a more sophisticated song wouldn’t have worked. It had to be a kind of Christmas carol, nursery rhyme, simple, idealistic vision. And that’s exactly what it was.” The song was recorded in a matter of hours, and Ure spent the next several days producing and editing in his home studio with engineer Rik Walton. This formula—peace and expanding economic freedom—has the power to transform Ethiopia like no amount of humanitarian aid can. The song implores us, “Feed the world.” This is precisely what economic freedom has done, sparking the biggest drop in extreme poverty in history. What few realize is that the famine was not an accident. Though drought played a role, many have overlooked that the Ethiopian government's military policies were the primary catalyst.

Aid is just a stopgap,” Bono pointed out not long after Gill’s book was published. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” A motley crew of the most popular UK performers in the world gathered, including Phil Collins, who arrived with his entire drum set, as well as Sting, George Michael, and others. A 45-year-old farmer named Ibrahim who Gill spoke to decades after the famine recalled being pressed into service digging graves as a young man because there were not enough workers. Mengistu’s plan might have been effective as a military strategy, but it ravaged the Ethiopian economy. Among the many problems it produced was that it created a surplus of labor in some places and a dearth in others.

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Smith’s formula might sound simple, but executing it is not. Power has a way of concentrating and unleashing itself on its own. Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the author of Red Tears, said this is perhaps the greatest scar of the Ethiopian famine.

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