We all know, don’t we, that the 1984 char­i­ty hit “Do They Know It’s Christ­mas?” qual­i­fies as pos­si­bly the worst Christ­mas song ever record­ed? Does that go too far? The song’s writer, Bob Geld­of, went even fur­ther, once say­ing, “I am respon­si­ble for two of the worst songs in his­to­ry. One is ‘Do They Know It’s Christ­mas?’ and the oth­er one is ‘We Are the World.’”

There’s no objec­tive mea­sure for such a thing, but I’m not inclined to dis­agree, with due respect for the mil­lions Geld­of, co-orga­niz­er and co-pro­duc­er Midge Ure, and British celebri­ty super­group Band Aid raised to feed vic­tims of famine in Ethiopia in the mid-80s. Revis­it­ing the lyrics now, I’m shocked to find they’re even more ridicu­lous and cringe-induc­ing than I remem­bered.

We can quick­ly dis­pense with the absur­di­ty of the title. As an exas­per­at­ed Spo­ti­fy employ­ee help­ful­ly point­ed out recent­ly in a series of anno­ta­tions, “the peo­ple of Ethiopia prob­a­bly did know it was Christmas—it’s one of the old­est Chris­t­ian nations in the world” with a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian pop­u­la­tion.

The song’s aid recip­i­ents are referred to as “the oth­er ones” who live in “a world of dread and fear.” Lis­ten­ers are enjoined to “thank God it’s them instead of you.” And two years after Toto’s “Africa,” Band Aid man­ages to deliv­er the clum­si­est, most ill-informed stan­za per­haps ever writ­ten about the con­ti­nent:

And there won’t be snow in Africa
This Christ­mas time
The great­est gift they’ll get this year is life
Where noth­ing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christ­mas time at all?

Trou­bling­ly, the song “ped­dles myths about the cause of the famine,” writes Greg Evans at The Inde­pen­dent, “sug­gest­ing it was down to a drought, rather than the cor­rupt gov­ern­ment mis­us­ing inter­na­tion­al aid.”

But it’s Christ­mas, as you prob­a­bly know, so let’s not be too hard on “Do They Know It’s Christ­mas?” The artists who par­tic­i­pat­ed, includ­ing George Michael, Bono, Boy George, Sting, and many oth­ers had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the enter­tain­ment industry’s role in inter­na­tion­al aid, for good and ill. The song was re-record­ed three times, in 1989, 2004, and 2014, and it has become, believe it or not, “the sec­ond best­selling sin­gle in Britain’s his­to­ry,” Lau­ra June points out at The Out­line.

Evans notes that “a report­ed £200m was raised via sales of the sin­gle which went towards the relief fund and it lat­er went on to inspire the icon­ic Live Aid con­cert in July 1985, which raised a fur­ther £150m.” (Some of that mon­ey, it was lat­er dis­cov­ered, inad­ver­tent­ly made it into the hands of Ethiopia’s cor­rupt gov­ern­ment.) Oth­er ben­e­fit events, like Farm Aid in the U.S., would fol­low Geld­of and Urge’s lead, and the mod­el proved to be an endur­ing way for artists to sup­port caus­es they cared about.

See the unbear­ably earnest orig­i­nal video at the top of the post and, just above, a thir­ty-minute mak­ing of film with a who’s who of mid-1980s British pop roy­al­ty learn­ing to sing “let them know it’s Christ­mas time again” togeth­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream a Playlist of 68 Punk Rock Christ­mas Songs: The Ramones, The Damned, Bad Reli­gion & More

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

Relive 16 Hours of His­toric Live Aid Per­for­mances with These Big YouTube Playlists: Queen, Led Zep­pelin, Neil Young & Much More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Grow­ing up I thought there were only two uses for gongs. One was for mak­ing one large bonnnnnnng sound for some­thing impor­tant, like the announce­ment of a roy­al ban­quet or the begin­ning of a J. Arthur Rank pro­duc­tion. The oth­er was as a weapon against car­toon animals–it would make a fun­ny sound and their heads would be turned into a pan­cake. How was I to know there was so much more to gongs, espe­cial­ly 80-inch wide gongs that cost around $27,000? Thank good­ness for YouTube, then.

The above video fea­tures Sven aka Gong Mas­ter Sven aka Paiste Gong Mas­ter Sven (it’s not very clear in the descrip­tion) very gin­ger­ly play­ing this mon­ster sym­phon­ic gong, coax­ing out of it men­ac­ing, echo­ing groans and wails straight out of a hor­ror movie.

Just a gen­tle stroke can cause the met­al to vibrate and feed back onto itself. Using a small­er mal­let pro­duces sounds like whale songs. That some­thing so large can make such a stun­ning array of tones, and react to such del­i­ca­cy is fas­ci­nat­ing. (Watch with head­phones on or a good sound sys­tem, by the way).

If that whets your whis­tle, here’s more gong action with musi­cian Bear Love, who man­ages to make his gong sound like some­thing out of sci­ence fic­tion, incred­i­bly creepy. If there’s a ghost sto­ry movie out there with a one-gong sound­track, I’d believe it.

Michael Bet­tine plays the same Paiste gong in a more famil­iar way, by whack­ing it with a big mal­let. It’s impres­sive, and he doesn’t real­ly hit it that hard. “You can feel your inter­nal organs being mas­saged by the vibra­tions,” he says.

Final­ly, Tom Soltron Czarto­rys­ki, slims it down to a 62 inch “earth gong” with its array of inden­ta­tions, and cre­ates a near­ly 10 minute ambi­ent work, which is one expan­sive dose of space music. Groovy and some­times stress­ful, fas­ci­nat­ing and all-encom­pass­ing. Enjoy!

(Note to self: Resolve to find a local giant gong and have a go.)

via Kottke.org

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Mod­ern Drum­mer Plays a Rock Gong, a Per­cus­sion Instru­ment from Pre­his­toric Times

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

Punk Dul­cimer: The Ramones’ “I Wan­na Be Sedat­ed” Played on the Dul­cimer

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

There are those who say that Radio­head was the last of the great rock bands before the inter­net crushed the record indus­try and pop­u­lar music frag­ment­ed into a pro­lif­er­a­tion of micro­gen­res. Maybe it’s fair to say some of those peo­ple have been hum­ming Radio­head songs since the band’s debut, Pablo Hon­ey, in 1992.

And maybe rock isn’t a thing of the past, it’s just evolved, thanks in no small part to Radio­head, who also helped ush­er in the very stream­ing and down­load­ing rev­o­lu­tion that killed the rock star sys­tem. They did so with sev­er­al ground­break­ing exper­i­men­tal albums that seemed to uncan­ni­ly coin­cide with major shifts in dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy.

Now you can stream all of those albums on YouTube, from Pablo Hon­ey to 2016’s Moon Shaped Pool. Revis­it not only the songs on their debut besides “Creep” but the albums that dev­as­tat­ed, then reshaped, the indus­try, and irrev­o­ca­bly changed the sound of pop­u­lar music.

Go back to 1997, after Win­dows 95 had put mil­lions more peo­ple behind a PC, and hear Radio­head decon­struct the sound of mas­sive gui­tar rock and reassem­ble it into a Futur­ist machine called OK Com­put­er. Oth­er bands were forced to reeval­u­ate their whole approach. The indus­try held on to the old ways for a few more years, but Radio­head need­ed to change as well.

“There were oth­er gui­tar bands out there try­ing to do sim­i­lar things,” said bassist Col­in Green­wood. “We had to move on.” Thom Yorke believed rock had “run its course.” Then came the dev­as­tat­ing dual attack of Nap­ster and Kid A, The shar­ing ser­vice sent labels into a pan­ic. By the time of the album’s release in 2000, it had been ille­gal­ly down­loaded over a mil­lion times.

Not only did Kid A “kick off the stream­ing rev­o­lu­tion,” as Steven Hyden writes at Grant­land, but young inter­net-savvy indie artists just begin­ning to put their own com­po­si­tions online looked to the record’s warped, glitchy dread for inspi­ra­tion, spin­ning its elec­tron­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion into webs of loose­ly-relat­ed genre hybrids.

As Yorke had pre­dict­ed, Nap­ster encour­aged “enthu­si­asm for music in a way that the music indus­try has long for­got­ten to do.” The indus­try began to col­lapse. File shar­ing may have been utopi­an for lis­ten­ers, but it was poten­tial­ly ruinous for artists. 2007’s In Rain­bows showed a way for­ward.

Released on a pay-what-you-want mod­el, with a “dig­i­tal tip jar,” the release was met with bemuse­ment and con­tempt. (The Man­ic Street Preacher’s Nicky Wire wrote that it “demeans music.”)  Two years lat­er, the jury was still out on the “Radio­head exper­i­ment.”

Yet it wouldn’t be long before both musi­cians and small labels start­ed sell­ing music through Band­camp, which debuted in 2008 with a sim­i­lar busi­ness mod­el, com­bat­ing pira­cy with a kind of online hon­or sys­tem that lets fans deter­mine their own slid­ing scale. (The “dig­i­tal tip jar” has become a stan­dard fea­ture of all online pro­mo­tion.)

Radiohead’s release strate­gies have allowed them to keep sur­pris­ing fans with rar­i­ties, like the sin­gle “Ill Wind” at the top, and Scotch Mist, a 2007 film in which they played songs from In Rain­bows for a New Year’s Eve web­cast (see “Weird Fishes/Arpeggio” fur­ther up). All of these are free to stream, in addi­tion to their nine stu­dio albums and re-releas­es like OKNOTOK, a remas­tered OK Com­put­er.

They may be fol­low­ing indus­try trends this time, espe­cial­ly the Bill­board move to include YouTube video plays in its offi­cial rank­ings. But in its scope, this offer­ing is unique­ly gen­er­ous, and allows a gen­er­a­tion too young to remem­ber “Creep,” Win­dows 95, and the shock gen­er­at­ed by Kid A to dis­cov­er the band’s evo­lu­tion and take it in even more rad­i­cal direc­tions.

via Con­se­quence of Sound

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radio­head Releas­es 18 Hours of Demos from OK Com­put­er for a Lim­it­ed Time–After Hack­ers Try to Hold Them for Ran­som

The Secret Rhythm Behind Radiohead’s “Video­tape” Now Final­ly Revealed

The 10 Most Depress­ing Radio­head Songs Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence: Hear the Songs That Ranked High­est in a Researcher’s “Gloom Index”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness