I’m Dreaming of a Hardcore Christmas
After winning Canada’s esteemed Polaris Music Prize, the hardcore band Fucked Up have kept their word on using the $20,000 award to fund a Christmas benefit album for missing aborigine women in Canada. The band’s label, Matador records, has confirmed that the group will be collaborating with some of the biggest names in the music industry for a re-recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, originally released in 1984 as a charity single for an Ethiopian famine.
In the ongoing tradition of including popular musicians to contribute to the project(s), band frontman Pink Eyes revealed to Vulture, New York Magazine’s entertainment blog,
“David Cross, members of Vampire Weekend, TV On The Radio, Broken Social Scene, the GZA, Bob Mould [of Husker Du], No Age, and Yo La Tengo [have] all confirmed. I’m still waiting on confirmation from Feist, Jarvis Cocker and MIA. We wanted the biggest people we could get. If we could get a Jonas Brother on this, I would get a Jonas Brother.”
Previous experiments with the “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” projects have churned out collabs with members of U2, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and Culture Club in 1984, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Lisa Stanfield and Bananarama (again) in 1989, and a twentieth anniversary version in 2004, initiated by Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, featured a rap segment by U.K. hip-hop artist Dizzee Rascal. In every year that the project was attempted, it reached number 1 on the U.K. pop charts.
While the previous versions hold a humble, albeit boring, aura of social awareness, one look at the list of contributors will assure that this new version will bring much needed excitement and energy to the charity laden project.
Put that in your stocking!
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