Music Can someone explain to me what's happening about two minutes into the new version of Band Aid? Flying in the face of critics, I really like those first two minutes. I like the variety and mixing of the various vocal styles -- it captures a spirit of this time. I particularly like the rambling piano section, it's totally unexpected. Then at about minute 127 it all goes downhill. It's that rap section. I know the man won the Mercury Music prize this year, and he's perfectly talented, but his appearance here is totally inappropriate and worse sounds like that video David Owen made to bring in the youngsters to the SDP Liberal Alliance, that slightly patronising down with the kids feeling also evoked by that Nat West advert which is doing the rounds at the moment.
Then the momentum of the track disipates and the thing actually stalls like a ancient Reliant Robin on a the hardshoulder of the M62. Apart from some listless strings there are whole seconds of dead air. Then the 'Feed The World' chant begins nothing really recovers. Twenty seconds later everyone's joining in with a vocal track which is interchangable with the original followed by some ax-noodling by that guy from The Darkness (I think) and some maddening extension of the word 'world' repeat ad nausium. And presumably completing the line with 'Let them know it's christmas time' isn't very p.c. anymore. Then it ends in what sounds like the Ewok celebration from the original version of Return of the Jedi. This new version is a full seventy-five seconds longer than the orginal. I wonder what could have been cropped. Still, it could have been worse. It could have been Band Aid II.
The single is worth buying though for charity reasons and the Live Aid version which appears as the second 'B' side. As Bob Geldoff says: "There might be a bit of a cock-up, but if you're going to cock it up, you might as well do it with 2 billion people watching you." Then the song begins with David Bowie getting the first line wrong...
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