To still enjoy songs that I know are politically incorrect?

[Thisismynewname123]

Sitting here watching MTV's Christmas hits. My favourite song is still Band Aid's Feed the World, despite knowing it's clearly ignorant and racist (or at best, no longer appropriate). Then next co es on Michael Jackson's Earth Song. I usually make an effort not to listen to MJ anyway, but I still love singing to his songs. Can you separate the musician from their life, or their message, or just enjoy listening to a song that is no longer politically appropriate?

I am guessing you are all under 40 I wish, 40 is a dim distant memory.

I was 9 the year band aid made the record, I can still vividly remember the news images of starving children.
Bob Geldof & Midge Ure achieved something nobody else could at the time & raised a huge amount of money.
I very much doubt the people that received food & aid due to that song have a shit what the lyrics were.

Snap!

I’ve a thing for cliff’s ‘wired for sound’
Which I seem to recall had him being surrounded by lycra clad peeps on wheels.

It sits just fine beside my Metallica, StoneRoses, Nirvana and drum/bass.
And if I ever roller skate again then that will be the song in my head.

Shoot me!

Just listen to what you want to listen to. It's as simple as that, imo.

Either you are able to separate the artist from the song to the degree that you still like it or you can't hear the song without feeling guilty or disgusted, so you stop listening to it.

There are so many singers, actors, and other entertainers whose beliefs and choices I don't respect or agree with, but I often still enjoy their work. If someone really gets on my naughty list, I might stop listening/watching, but I don't judge others who either don't know or don't care. It's not that big of a deal to me.

Oh bugger.

I always liked Lewis Carroll and Vivaldi.

Do the thought police demand I stop?

@BlackWaveComing

To be consistent, people would have to continually cancel artists as contexts change....nobody surely is arguing that their aesthetic taste in 2020 is the pinnacle of moral composition, which shall never be judged by history?

Artists are not their art - art is more than the fallible human making it - it's very ignorant, really, to think that one must approve of the maker to engage with the art.

Additionally, engaging with art forms isn't a approve/disapprove binary. We can enjoy aspects of a song, for example, while critiquing it!

I agree and there are various groups that have been cancelling and no platforming speakers for years but they will never admit that.

@VeniVidiWeeWee

Oh bugger.

I always liked Lewis Carroll and Vivaldi.

Do the thought police demand I stop?

Are you always so dramatic?

Absolutely no-one has told you what to do. What you listen to / read, and I really can’t emphasise this enough, is something I give absolutely zero fucks about.

So pack your histrionics back into your bag of boring self-righteousness and go listen to whatever the fuck you want.

Scautish

Well that is an overdramatic and OTT response.

I think that, looking back, Feed the World lacks nuance (particularly the generalising of 'Africa' into one homogenous place - a bit similar to how 'Africa' is still depicted in children's books today with pictures of lions and savannahs), but actually I think 'Tonight thank god...' is a very powerful line. My take is that it's a bit more than 'there but for the grace of god go I'. I think it's deliberately provocative - to make listeners realise that they're not only bloody lucky but also essentially selfish in thinking about themselves and not others. It ties in with the 'just give us your fucking money' sentiment - it was powerful and it worked.

FrippEnos

Yes it probably was but I’m just so tired of people trotting out these lazy and meaningless insults. I think it’s weariness from all the covid threads and the “covid police” type accusations. It’s the new version of “brigade” trotted out by daily mail types.

I don’t know, I’m not a fan of banning songs, books, films etc which contain material no longer considered to be politically correct. I would much prefer people could still watch, read, listen but do so objectively and understanding how opinions and accepted behaviour has changed over time
I agree.
Last year there were reruns of Fawlty Towers and I watched a couple. At the start there was a notice that it contained humour of an era that some viewers may find offensive.

I feel quite uncomfortable with banning culture. It seems to go hand in hand with over-zealous no platforming and cancel culture. I'm left leaning but feel there's some voices, largely on the left, that are simultaneously very fragile and utterly convinced that their criteria of goodness is absolute.

I think it’s important not to censor and ban but to look back and critique and be thankful about how far we have come. And how different things are now. Yes in the past people were more racist/sexist etc.

We can’t rewrite or erase history. It’s getting ridiculous.

Do they know it's Christmas would have been fine (for the time - not today), had they not included the line about Africa and the horrendous inaccuracies and generalisations that followed. I know it was about Ethiopia but by putting 'Africa' in the lyrics made no sense.

"Won't be snow in Africa"
"Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow"

Really? No rain, rivers or snow on the entire continent? Stupid.

@LolaSmiles

I don’t know, I’m not a fan of banning songs, books, films etc which contain material no longer considered to be politically correct. I would much prefer people could still watch, read, listen but do so objectively and understanding how opinions and accepted behaviour has changed over time I agree. Last year there were reruns of Fawlty Towers and I watched a couple. At the start there was a notice that it contained humour of an era that some viewers may find offensive.

I feel quite uncomfortable with banning culture. It seems to go hand in hand with over-zealous no platforming and cancel culture. I'm left leaning but feel there's some voices, largely on the left, that are simultaneously very fragile and utterly convinced that their criteria of goodness is absolute.

Agree, although to be fair I found myself down a YouTube rabbit hole and found episodes of Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Do Us Part- both really made for quite uncomfortable viewing. I don't know how I would feel if they were just presented on TV. Maybe as part of a wider discussion on how far we've come about whats acceptable viewing? Even watching little Britain now can be quite cringe-inducing, and that was only on maybe 15 years ago?

I haven't insulted anyone. Lazy reading on your part.

There are many who say Jimmy Saville is now unacceptable.

Should I accept that?

@dingoesatemybaby

Do they know it's Christmas would have been fine (for the time - not today), had they not included the line about Africa and the horrendous inaccuracies and generalisations that followed. I know it was about Ethiopia but by putting 'Africa' in the lyrics made no sense.

"Won't be snow in Africa"
"Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow"

Really? No rain, rivers or snow on the entire continent? Stupid.

Mitch Ure said:

“I initially recorded the melody on a little toy keyboard onto a cassette. It was a lot slower than on the record. I sent it to Bob and he came over a couple of days later. He had this idea. He came up with the majority of the lyrics and at the time I thought these two things were totally incompatible.

“We started with these lyrics, ‘there won’t be snow in Ethiopia this Christmas’, which didn’t quite work, so we changed ‘Ethiopia’ to ‘Africa’, leading into the last bit, ‘feed the world’. The really hard part was to have this quite ominous change of time and then finish with this almost positive singalong part which would be so memorable. That was difficult.”

“At first, Bob wanted Trevor Horn to produce the record, but he takes six weeks just to produce a single! We just didn’t have that. So, I just said leave it with me. Because I had a studio at the house, I went down there for four days and knocked this think into shape. Bob would pop in occasionally, but I carried on working on the music, putting it together, instrument by instrument. “John Taylor [of Duran Duran] came down and laid down a track, and Paul Weller did some guitar which we didn’t actually use. But everything on that record is synthesised, except for Phil Collins drums, plus I also nicked a drum sound from Tears For Fears, from The Hurting.”

“A couple of people came down to my studio and did their vocal parts before the day itself - and then we had only 24 hours in the studio [Sarm Studio]. I would like to think that we did make the best job of it. But we had no budget to make this, the time constraints were huge, we had to grab whoever, whenever we could. As you can imagine, these people are all over the world and weren’t all available when we wanted them.”

You have to look at it as a song and as a record. What we made was a record and it did a brilliant job. It was quite nicely produced, it had lots of textures on it, lots of highs and lows - and you hear it coming out of the radio and it still does the job today. As a song, if you take away the periphery, the artists, the money raised and the reason we made it, I think it’s not that great. It’s not the best thing I’ve been involved in. But as a record…”

@VinylDetective They shouldn't stuck with the original lyric then.

*should've

To add to my post above- That's not to say I think those older programmes should be banned or never shown/talked of again. But I appreciate that some people would find them quite upsetting. I'm not really sure what my point is, apart from I'm glad times have changed and moved on.

Feed the World is still a banger but does have some regrettable lines like "nothing ever grows" in Africa. You don't need to cancel it but it is what it is. Don't apologise for it either.

MJ wasn't convicted in his lifetime but Saville wouldn't have been either. We got much more of the picture after their deaths.

It is easy to pontificate about feed the world but at the time it really was about raising as much money as possible to help people who were dying and that’s what it did. We can argue over the words but at the time it really was about saving lives.
The UK wasn’t as a sophisticated place as it is now, we saw the images and wanted to help it was as simple as that. Yes maybe the lyrics could have been better but I would rather have it rushed out to save as many as possible than have it delayed just in case people 30 years later got offended.

I don’t think we should analyse lyrics for songs like “feed the world” too closely. As a pp posted it was written in a hurry to raise money to get food aid to people. Ethiopia was changed to Africa because it fit the tune. Lyrics to songs often, in fact usually, don’t make perfect sense.

Do they know it’s Christmas is catchy which is why it’s still popular and still raising money for famine relief.

I think when it comes to “white saviour” stuff, it’s easy for people living in relative comfort to baulk because they disagree with the way in which poorer people are being helped. But if you are poor or starving or in need I doubt you have the luxury of caring.

If people are in need we should do something practical to help rather than criticise those who are.

If someone personally no longer enjoys a song or a play or film, or piece of art, because it just makes them think of something awful - that s totally fine. I change the station when Aerosmith comes on because of that kind of reason, it just makes me feel unhappy, and why listen to pop music that makes me feel unhappy? I don't watch Polanski films though I think some are really very good, because I don't want to fund such a wanker.

MJ doesn't make me feel that. Maybe something to do with his personal circumstances, maybe because he's dead and can't benefit, maybe because I se his contribution to pop music as too inescapable. I don't claim it's necessarily logical.

That is hugely different from saying it's wrong to listen to or watch any of those things, they should be banned from the radio, etc.

As far as somgs with lyrics that have become socially unacceptable like Money for Nothing - I really think that should be based on whether most people begin to feel uncomfortable about them (or if the writer does.) That's the only way to know when it's time to retire a song like that or change it a bit. I somewhat object in those cases however as I don't think that's really what's gone on, I think there has been this puritan push. I remember not that many years ago when a local to me radio station banned MFN - they were soon inundated with calls, including from the gay community, which told them they were being stupid.

I also think a lot of people who complain miss the fact that in both of those songs the whole point of using the word is that it isn't good company language and is meant to tell us something about the kind of culture the speaker comes from. It's like even the characters in a story have to make sure they toe the line and avoid wrongthink.

Which brings me to this:

Do you take everything this literally? It quite clearly means "there but for the grace of God..." It's about acknowledging that the famine victims are human beings, just like you and I. That nothing makes us special or different, and if life were different it could just as easily be us slowly starving to death. I can't believe anybody could fail to get that tbh.

It seems more and more people do take this sort of statement literally. I have seriously wondered what has happened to people's literacy levels. Even at the time it was considered challenging, that was the point, the listener was being reminded what a position of privilege they had, for no reason other than good luck.

They take the "do they know it's Christmas time?" literally as well.

The whole point of Band Aid was to raise money and awareness for Ethiopia. I personally have never liked the song and must be the only person not to have sat and watched the whole Live Aid performance. I had a Saturday job at the time and nothing would have made me sat and watched some of the band's performing. It seems to me as though some artists get a free pass whereas others get slated for misdomeanors. I can't understand why people object to Fairy Tale of New York yet listen to Santa Baby or Baby it's cold outside. Seems it's fine to use rapey language and promote slaughtering animals just to wear their skin, but use a word which the writer said was a term for scrubbers /tramps insert what ever word and people are up in arms. Again the song is about a different kind of Christmas to the ones usually portrayed. It reflects on a very imperfect relationship one where insults are thrown around as is the case in the real world, and the language was very realistic for the time.

I listen to and sing songs I like.
I can’t stand MJ so I don’t listen. I’ve never liked the band aid Christmas song - it’s always been a depressing song for Christmas time to me, far too depressing to want to listen to.
I like songs that I can properly sing to!