Flight of the Conchords & Friends Play “Feel Inside (and Stuff Like That)”

Listen to this track by Kiwi musical comedy exemplars Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, aka Flight of the Conchords. It’s “Feel Inside (and Stuff Like That)”, a send up of a charity single that was also an actual charity single to raise money for New Zealand’s Cure Kids charity on Red Nose Day in 2012. In addition to the duo themselves, the song involved a galaxy of recording talent including Dave Dobbyn, Boh Runga, Savage, and Moana Maree Maniapoto.

Flight of the Conchords filmed a segment for New Zealand’s TV3 to help promote the cause. To do this, they revisited their 2007-09 characters from their own critically acclaimed HBO television show. The fictionalized series of events has Jemaine and Bret charged with putting together a charity single in aid of sick children. Their band manager Murray (brilliantly played by Rhys Darby) appears in the opening, taking the call from organizers and saying that he hasn’t seen the duo in three years, although they happen to be sitting in his office while he takes the call. What comes next is the heart of the project; a collaboration with a group of schoolchildren to help the duo write the lyrics to the song.

In real life, Clement and McKenzie were on tour together as the Conchords, having discontinued their TV show three years before. While playing shows in the evenings, the two visited schools in Wellington and in Auckland during the day to interview children between the ages of five and six. Their intention was to explain to the children that they were going to write a charity single together, with the children’s reactions and ideas informing the song’s lyrics. The two had no idea what would come out of the process. Luckily, the results are a riot of joyous and surreal chaos that even crack up the two comedians and musicians as they conduct the interviews with the kids.

There are certainly some potent perspectives expressed in those interviews. One girl expounds on her view that “spewing” as the worst possible illness to happen to anyone. Another recounts the time she got sick by drinking “bubble mixture” because she wanted to “turn into a bubble”. Another boy breaks down how the New Zealand economy works (bank -> the Prime Minister -> the Queen -> back to the bank again). Yet another boy talks about what all charity singles include in their lyrics: “feel inside and stuff like that”. All of these elements and more make it into the final song.

“Feel Inside (and Stuff Like That)” is Schrödinger’s charity single. It is a parody and a genuine effort at the very same time. It masterfully sends up the tropes of star-studded charity singles and their accompanying studio-bound videos. The lyrics are unfocused and difficult to parse, underscoring an observation that most charity singles like this really do sound like everyone is singing “feel inside and stuff like that”. We laugh at he incongruity of top shelf musicians performing a song like this. But we don’t question their intentions, either.

That’s what really makes this work; everyone involved leans into both aspects. They don’t mug for the camera. They don’t hold back their musical signatures on the recording. They deliver the goods as far as the song allows, and make light of themselves to a certain degree while they do it. They are in on the joke and committed to the bit. But there is a powerful contrast between parody and gravity at work, too. This tune is both funny and socially significant beyond the humour. As listeners and buyers of singles, the people were on board to the tune of $1.3 million raised for Cure Kids.

Another aspect to this is what’s common in the sometimes chaotic responses Jemaine and Bret receive during the interviews with the school kids. The song’s lyrics springs from the children’s understanding of the world, their creative ideas, and also their admirable willingness to engage with a fairly grim and worldly topic. Bret reported that not all of the children were as open with them, likely due to shyness. But among all the kids were the wild cards that made the whole thing sing.

“We talked to kids while we were on tour and we were kind of juggling a busy tour schedule and we would pop into these schools during the day and some of these kids were just terrified and couldn’t talk and just started crying,” McKenzie told TimeOut. “Every so often you would get a kid who was just a wildcard – perfect. We needed kids who could let their imagination flow.”

~Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, NZ Herald, September 2012 (read the whole article)

Despite the various reactions, the takeaway from the interviews as seen in the extended segment is that the children took what they were being asked seriously. As nutty as some of their responses are that fed the lyrics, the common denominator was that they all cared about the sick children they are told about. They weren’t making jokes. They really wanted to use their imaginations to come up with solutions to help them, responding in a way that was true for them.

That’s another thing this song captures. It doesn’t make fun of the kids. Instead, it perfectly expresses their pureness of intentions. It’s a true song of innocence; sweet and never mean-spirited. In a strange way, it challenges adult sensibilities, too. It suggests that in a complicated world of difficult challenges, sometimes even our craziest ideas can be a good start to making things better. This is true even if we don’t necessarily understand the nuances to completely solve complex challenges on our own. Sometimes, the first step is having the willingness and the empathy required to help others, and to lean into it as best we can with whatever we’ve got. When we acknowledge the struggles of others, we move closer to a more compassionate world.

Flight of the Conchords is an active musical comedy duo today. You can learn more about them at flightoftheconchords.co.nz.

You can watch the full 14-minute segment associated with “Feel Inside (and Stuff Like That)” right here. This includes the opening skit with Rhys Darby as Murray their fictional manager, and select interviews with the children whose ideas are then included in the studio recording.

To learn more about the ongoing cause to help sick children in New Zealand, check out the Cure Kids site.

Enjoy!

Band Aid Sing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

Listen to this track by collective chart-topping voices of their pop music generation Band Aid. It’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, a mega-selling and generation-defining charity single released just in time for the titular holiday in 1984. Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox co-wrote this song with a yuletide theme in aid of famine relief in Ethiopia. To record it, they gathered musical friends and peers together in Sarm West recording studio in London to perform the song as one big-haired supergroup.

The participants in Band-Aid spanned a wide segment of the pop music spectrum in Britain and Ireland at the time. Members from some of the biggest bands in the world including Duran Duran, U2, Spandau Ballet, The Police, Culture Club, Wham!, and others were on the scene to add their very famous voices to the song. There were even a few Americans (Kool & the Gang, Jody Watley) here and there who were in London around the time of the session on November 25.

Everyone’s egos seemed to be in check the whole way along. Even the video was something of a low-budget and low-concept idea. This was in part due to the very narrow window of time in getting it out as a Christmas single. But otherwise, the novelty of seeing some of the era’s favourite pop stars laying it down in the studio together was a big enough hook to get the video onto MTV and other essential platforms to wide exposure and audience acclaim.

The central idea for the song started with a BBC news segment on what was happening in Ethiopia at the time; a terrible convergence of forces that ranged from corrupt governments, bad harvests, drought, poor infrastructure, and the military conflicts that made it very difficult to deliver resources communities need to survive. Among the viewers of that news segment was songwriter Bob Geldof and his partner, TV presenter Paula Yates. Geldof felt he was morally obligated to use his musical talents to do something to help. But to score a number one record by that time in his career and therefore make the most significant impact possible to generate sales and raise money, he’d need to go outside of his usual channels to do it.

The first person he called was Midge Ure, a musician who was coming off of a smash hit with Ultravox that same year in “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes“. Instead of a standard Christmas song cover, Ure convinced Geldof to co-write an original song with him to avoid having to pay any royalties to anyone. After some collaboration, they had their song. The other participants would come in later to record it after Geldof contacted, pursued, and ushered them into the studio, with some of the musicians interrupting their own tours to do so. In the meantime, Ure produced the backing tracks in his home studio and served as de facto producer on the session.

The resulting single would go on to raise £8 million in support of famine relief. The song also sparked several other singles that came out around the same time, produced and presented in similar ways. “We Are The World” was the American response. “Tears Are Not Enough” was the Canadian equivalent. There were other sessions and songs from other countries as well. Since then, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” has been re-released a number of times over the decades along with new versions that include new generations of pop stars. By the Nineties, there was even a Simpson’s parody of this kind of all-star charity single. You know you’ve won the pop culture game when you get on The Simpsons’ radar.

When it came to the release of the original “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, there was a split between how critics received it (not well), and how the public received it as expressed in record sales (very well). As it turned out, both camps were right about it. People were right to buy it since it represented an act of compassion. But despite the worthiness of the cause that inspired it, the critics were and are right about it, too. It’s not that great a record and not that great a song. It relies very heavily on what the singers bring to it, which adds up to quite a lot in places. But it’s not quite enough to make it very artful on its own. Writers and instigators Geldof and Ure weren’t too bothered by any of that. Even they knew that they’d written and recorded far better songs between them. To them, the song wasn’t the point. The money was.

The criticism continued as the decades rolled on. In some ways, it deepened. Much of that criticism focuses on how one-dimensional, condescending, and even factually inaccurate the lyrics are. It can be a cringeworthy exercise to consider many of the song’s perspectives on what Ethiopian people know or don’t know about Christmas or any other subject. This presumably includes their seeming lack of awareness and agency as to their economic, political, and environmental situation. The picture that many have in this song is that Ethiopian people were waiting around to be saved. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was certainly not the first expression of this false idea. This kind of messaging was common even from formal charity organizations of that time.

This is not to say that Geldof and Ure intended to write a song with such an uniformed perspective. It certainly doesn’t mean that they held these kinds of views in any conscious way, necessarily. The intended sentiment behind the statement do they know it’s Christmas? wasn’t really meant to be about any of that. The song’s central idea is that when you’re in indescribable agony where you are, it’s hard to remember that joy exists anywhere else, even at Christmas.

That point gets lost in the shuffle in this tune. It would get lost in any pop song that deals in broad strokes in reaction to nuanced and complicated problems. Even so, the more historically recent indictment that this tune is Eurocentric and even colonial in its central viewpoint is hard to ignore or refute.

In addition to questions around the song’s artistic worth and social implications, there are also some questions about its effectiveness as a money-raising effort. How much money and food actually reached the Ethiopian people thanks to this pop single and subsequently from Live Aid by the summer of the following year? How much did these efforts help in the long term? That’s hard to determine.

In fact, there are difficult stories to tell on that front characterized by making deals with the corrupt governments, poor planning, lack of knowledge and cultural sensitivity, bad communications, and a hubristic failure to acknowledge the intricacies of the situation while facing up to one’s own limitations in light of them. The overall scalability of charitable efforts against all that represents a very important set of issues to examine. This is true whether we’re talking about a generation-defining, million-selling number one Christmas single or not.

Overall then, judging the quality and the intention behind this humble Christmas charity single actually turns out to be pretty complicated and even controversial. But is it really as bad as all that? Is there no value to be found in this tune that remains to be so beloved as a heartfelt expression of concern and heartbreak? Can this song be preserved somehow, or at least re-contextualized so that it can be better understood in today’s era? Or, must we condemn it to the fuchsia-coloured flames of Eighties Hell along with designer jeans, crimped hair, and the 20-minute workout?

Given the complex criticisms aimed at it, maybe it’s best to consider what is simple and pure about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by asking a couple of pointed questions about it. First; was it a good idea for the pop stars of the time with large audiences and access to big platforms to broadcast the need to feed people and support them in a troubled time? Of course it was. Between that and doing nothing, maybe putting out an earnest, shallow, Eurocentric record that seems to make some pretty clumsy assumptions about the way people in other countries live isn’t the worst thing that one could do with one’s time. The execution and follow-up may be another matter to discuss. But the original intent was pure.

Second; did the record have a largely positive cultural impact all over the world and raise awareness about an important issue? Damn right it did. Everyone of a certain generation remembers when they first heard this tune and saw the video. As for its social value, it was enough to get a whole generation of Western teenagers thinking globally and to consider that there really is a world outside our window that is not like the one we live in. To what degree that spurred further action beyond buying a pop record is hard to determine, maybe. But this song did its part to plant the seeds of some very important ideas about how the world works in reference to socioeconomic issues as adulthood loomed ahead of us.

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is a curio of its era. There is plenty to criticize in it. But it may also be helpful to think of it as some awkward steps in the start of a journey. It was one that found many of us who are burdened with Eurocentric perspectives and biases to be well-meaning, but also very unsteady on our sociopolitical pins. The sentiments in the song are native to an era before we built up our knowledge around global issues and before serious examinations of colonial attitudes to which we are still prone today became mainstream. Like many of the opinions we all once held and espoused when we were younger, it’s perhaps a constructive exercise to consider this song’s sentiments as a part of an in-transit perspective rather than as a definitive statement about how European rock stars can save the world.

This song was never meant to be that anyway. It was meant to raise money to help people during a specific time and place and set of circumstances. It’s the result of two musicians, and eventually many musicians, trying to do that using the best tools at hand to suit their particular talents. The dire situation the Ethiopian people were in then is still true for many people in many parts of the world today. So, now that we’re so much more evolved in our thinking around all that, what are we going to do about it using our own particular talents? Maybe an effort like an all-star celebrity pop single in time for Christmas isn’t exactly applicable. But if not that, then what?

To start and/or continue thinking about that question, here’s a link to the United Nation’s World Food Program to learn more about food insecurity all over the world and what people and organizations are doing about it.

For more information about how they made the “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” video, check out this 28-minute mini-documentary that will certainly press the nostalgia button in many a Generation Xer out there.

If you’re interested in the personal perspectives of Midge Ure and Bob Geldof who look back on this time in their careers, here they are talking all about that along with some of the other participants of this culturally resonant recording session.

Enjoy!

#80sMusic #BritishMusic #charitySingles #ChristmasSongs #PoliticalSongs #WorldEvents