Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Hit Parade: The Charity Megasingle Edition

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History,

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2017

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the mid-1980s, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and “We Are the World” gathered dozens of the biggest stars in music to put on a show for a good cause. The two songs spawned imitators, but today, the charity megasingle is a relic of pop music’s past, except around the holidays. This month, we examine how good intentions, pique, excess, and vanity led to the rise and fall of the do-gooder celebrity pop song. Email: hitparade@slate.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music.
0:10.6	Welcome to Hit Paray, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate and Panoply, about the hits from
0:16.7	coast to coast.
0:18.0	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's
0:21.9	Why Is This Song Number One series. On today's show, 32 years ago, a plethora of music stars
0:29.6	put on the largest concert event in history in two cities on a single day, July 13, 1985.
0:38.0	The event was called Live Aid, and the benefit for Ethiopian famine relief was watched by billions around the world.
0:45.9	We are champions for failure.
0:54.0	And we don't even party to be. build build as a global jukebox live at wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia.
1:14.5	A few of the day's performances are now considered immortal, such as those by Queen,
1:19.8	U2, Mick Jagger, and Tina Turner. But each of the two live-aid concerts ended not with a galvanizing
1:26.8	rock band, but with a shambling sing-along.
1:30.2	London's concert closed this way with a Christmas song in July.
1:34.9	Sing it to the world.
1:48.0	And the Philadelphia live age show ended this way.
1:52.0	We are the children.
1:56.0	We are the ones to make the ride of final day, so let's start hearing.
2:08.0	It's not unusual to close a multi-artist concert, particularly a benefit show with a communal sing-along.
2:15.9	But what made these two songs unusual was they were conceived and
2:20.3	recorded from the start for big group sing-alongs. Even Stranger, both were enormous hits,
2:27.7	just months before the concert. Indeed, they were the spark that ignited Live Aid in the first place.
2:34.9	The singles Do They Know It's Christmas by UK Supergroup Band-Aid,
	...

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