Gin night ruined by my son?

[Becc91]

So my DS came back from Bristol Uni (with a mullet no less 😣) and told me off in front of my girl friends - all for singing Do They Know It's Christmas?
Apparently one term of a politics degree makes him qualified to tell me what I can and can't sing in my own home after a few gins. Feeling quite hurt and embarrassed as this all happened in front of my friends.

I don't see what I've done wrong but I don't want to be ignorant, is it just me??
Opinions wanted , thanks xx and merry christmas

So, unless he caves and is racist like his racist mama and her racist friends, he is cut off?

Nice bit of duress

Bristol uni students are so far up their own arses - it is a very ideologically driven institution

That song is the gift that keeps on giving 🤣 (yes pun intended)

When it was released it was a preachy msg of ‘you suck because you don’t care about anyone but yourself’
Now it’s the ‘you suck because you’re a white savior and don’t know anything and care in the wrong way’

So… yeah if you like the song sing it… no matter what someone will judge you for being wrong. If you don’t like it the rejoice, you’ll be able to use it as a stick to beat people with for new and exciting reasons 😁

I always found the lyric "tonight thank god it's them instead of you" particularly distasteful.

Even setting aside the very questionable details of the lyrics, this is essentially a song about famine and pain. Why would it be anyone's party-singalong song? It's just totally lacking in good taste to be merrily screeching along to this while over-indulging in food and booze. (See also "Stop the Cavalry" by Jona Lewie). This has been bothering me since schooldays in the early 90s, and now I have a nice anonymous forum, I've finally got it off my chest. Phew!
Everyone lectures their parents about social issues when they're on their way to adulthood, it's virtually a rite of passage, but OP's son should probably have chosen a better time.

It means 'there but for the grace of God go I' - that the singer has only God to thank (or, if you are not a believer, it's purely a matter of luck) that they were not born into a famine-stricken region.

Kids always return from uni thinking they now are the knowlege on everything and anything. Just smile, nod and continue on as before.

I know what it means.

But you can thank god that youre not starving without thanking god that someone else is starving instead. It's not a given that someone has to starve so you would rather it was Africans than white people.

Surely the Christmas spirit is wishing no one was starving rather than being grateful it's Africans starving instead of you and your family.

It's distasteful.

I will say tho I do hate that live Aid song. It's incredibly condensing and patronising to the people of Aftica.

But it was a given at the time that people in Ethiopia were starving, and the lyric is tonight thank God it's them, instead of you.

It isn't saying 'Please, God, let others starve as long as I don't have to.'

It is saying, at that specific moment in time ('tonight') be thankful that it is not you who is starving.

I'm no English Lit student but I always felt the 'thank god it's them instead of you' lyric was a modern way of saying 'there but for the grace of god go I'.

Perhaps I'll ask my Cambridge English grad son what he thinks. Brain the size of a planet that one, but has always found smarter (and more polite) ways of challenging ideas and views he doesn't agree with.

I think that's what I'm struggling with here. It's absolutely fine to challenge. But if you do it politely then you generally make your point far more eloquently. Op's son sounds quite charmless, and that won't serve him well in life.

Fast forward afew years and the next group of students will be telling your son that lots of things he says , does are wrong , not acceptable.

I suspect half the problem has arisen from the difficulty they had from including the word ‘Ethiopia’ in a lyric, so ‘Africa’ was used instead. Poorly written? Yes. Racist? I don’t think so.

Meh. It was a song of its time. There are loads of misogynistic songs playing at any given time in the top 100 and I’m sure your son taps his toe to a few.

But you can still say "thank god we're not starving" without saying "thank god it's them starving and not us". Or you can wish to god that they had food like us

Thank god it's them is just never going to come across nicely.

Ask him what his preference is:

A possibly politically incorrect/thoughtless pop song that poured millions into various countries and did actually save lives

Or not

But it's pointing out the selfishness of the west that was ignoring the situation

It was quite a powerful way of saying it

Has he bought any Christmas presents?

Given his back?

Done any voluntary work? Helped the homeless or the lonely this Christmas?

Polished his halo?

That was the point...

I agree sparklyturtle. The argument that the lyric was intended to mean something other than the plain English it was written in falls flat. It’s an attempt to rationalise a lyric that explicitly says “thank god it is them [dying of starvation] (Africans) than you (Europeans)”

It is thanking God for only starving Black people in Africa. Implying that Europeans have God’s favour and Africans must have been really wicked so thank you god for punishing them.

It’s a racist lyric; one of many such in the original song and later edits.
It’s not like one clumsy fuck up in a song, it is part of a pattern of racism.

It's a song written to persuade people to give to a charity which was going to provide emergency famine relief. The message of the song was that British people having a normal cheerful Christmas should spare a thought for the less fortunate and make time to do something to help them. If you read the whole lyric it's perfectly obvious that they weren't saying 'Thank God the mostly white population of the UK is OK and it's just the Ethiopians starving, phew'. They were saying, clumsily, as is often the way with song lyrics dashed off in a hurry, 'You should stop and think a moment about how lucky you are and not take that for granted, and let's see if we can do something about this'.

Yes! Should have checked to see if anyone had already made this point, which you have done more clearly than me.

Do they know it's Christmas though? What did your gin friends think?

Geldof and Ure wanted to raise a lot of money in a hurry. The skills they had were singing and writing pop songs. They therefore wrote a simple, catchy song. They persuaded dozens of other well-known musicians to sing it with them. They raised millions out of it in a few weeks. If they had had other skills they would have done something different. It's as simple as that. I'm sure they never expected that anybody would be singing it even by January 1985, never mind December 2024.

I stand by what I said.

They could simply have said thank god we're not starving. There was no need to include thank god it's them in the statement. They could have said thank god we have food, let's send some to Africa too. Or wish for food for Africa or just ask god for food for Africa. Thanking god for the Africans starving was never necessary or an acceptable thing to say.

The song being written in a rush is not an excuse for such a selfish sounding lyric.