This past July marks 40 summers since Live Aid, oft cited as the largest benefit concert in history. Organized in the wake of the ’83-’85 Ethiopian war and famine, the 16-hour show was simultaneously broadcast from both Wembley stadium in London and JFK stadium in Philadelphia, featured a murderer’s row of some of the biggest British, Irish, and American Rock stars of the era, was reportedly watched by nearly 40% of the earth’s population, and raised around ₤150 million for famine relief in Ethiopia (roughly ₤465 million today adjusted for inflation, or $617 million USD). The concert is perhaps best remembered nowadays for revitalizing Queen‘s popularity in the ’80s, for the associated “Do They Know It’s Christmas” single that still gets overplayed on Holiday radio every December, for an awkward Led Zeppelin reunion show that only proved why they were right to break up after John Bonham’s death in the first place, and for an off-the-cuff (and widely misquoted) comment by Bob Dylan that inspired the Farm Aid concert series stateside.

As is inevitable for a fundraiser of that magnitude, Live Aid has come in for plenty of criticism in the decades since, viz: a benefit concert for the horn of Africa somehow failed to include even a single Black performer (they could have, at a bare minimum, landed Michael Jackson at the height of his star power); that it fed into way too many celebrities’ White Savior complex; it remains hotly debated whether or how much of the aid money intended for famine victims ended up in the pockets of the murderous Mengistu Haile Mariam junta then ruling Ethiopia; that it failed to address some of the root causes of African poverty, including usurious lending from First-World banks designed to keep the Third-World in permanent debt and bondage; and etc.

The concert however remains vigorously defended by Bob Geldof–frontman for the Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats (and, incidentally, the actor of Pink in the film version of The Wall)–who spearheaded and co-organized Live Aid alongside Scottish musician Midge Ure. Without getting lost too much more in the weeds here, Geldof’s arguments largely boil down to: it is better to feed starving people in the here and now—even if the junta skims off the top, even if you have to use predominantly white Rock stars to fund-raise for it, even if you still have not yet addressed the root causes of the famine itself—than it is to not feed starving people. When you and your family are dying, who frankly cares where the food comes from, or why? You have to feed people first before you can do literally anything else. (It is perhaps also worth emphasizing that, as an Irishman himself, Geldof is a descendant of the survivors of the 1847 Potato Famine, which left over a million Irish peasants dead by 1848; the Irish, too, little cared how the food could have gotten to them–not when they were chewing and swallowing raw grass just to make the hunger pains go away.) (Upon reflection, no wonder an Irishman is who organized this concert.)

But I am not here to take sides or re-examine this 40-year-old debate, which is obviously far beyond the scope of this article or this website. For whatever it’s worth, I generally agree that it is better to feed as many famine-victims as you can, by whatever means necessary, than to not do so–even as I also recognize that them naming their charity-trust “Band Aid” was ironically appropriate, since that’s all the concert ended up being on the much larger problem of African poverty anyways. But it’s not like I have more effective solutions to proffer either, at least none that I can implement on an individual level. Geldof at the time had access to far more resources than I ever have, and still his individual efforts were inadequate to the catastrophe.^[1]Though here I can’t help but note that the half-billion dollars raised in relief funds would be less than 1% of the Church’s present hedge fund wealth, if they ever decided to use it to feed the … Continue reading Indeed, when I even try to comprehend the scale of the problem of Third-World suffering, the blood and horrors of this earth immediately exceed my meager mortal comprehension, my mind shorts out, and it all makes me acknowledge that the atheists mayhaps have a point: how can an all-wise, all-powerful, all-benevolent God allow such immense suffering to thrive so widely and so unchecked? At what point does “life is a test” (c.f. D&C 101:4) cross over into “life is unmitigated torture” (c.f. Mathew 27:46)? But I digress.

For now, I must of necessity focus on concerns much more mundane: namely, when Bob Geldof finally took the stage at Wembley himself for Live Aid (as linked above), he opened with the Boomtown Rats’ biggest hit, 1979’s “I Don’t Like Mondays.” That in itself wasn’t controversial: the whole point of assembling this massive roster of Rock stars was to attract donations for famine-relief, so everyone made sure to play only the hits. (This was not the time for deep-cuts or fan-favorites.) Though the song never even threatened to crack the Top 40 in the U.S., “I Don’t Like Mondays” shot straight to #1 across the rest of the Anglosphere in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and South Africa only six years earlier.

Yet what a strange song to have as your band’s defining hit–let alone feature at a famine-relief concert! There is, just for starters, the fact that this upbeat little piano ballad was a complete departure from the rest of the Boomtown Rats’ oeuvre, which stylistically tended much more towards Punk and New Wave, with such deeply sarcastic titles as “(I Never Loved) Eva Braun” and “She’s So Modern.” “I Don’t Like Mondays” is a definite outlier in their repertoire.

Not that there wasn’t still a touch of Punk Rock subversion on the track: the deceptively wholesome lyrics, which at first glance appear to be about some dutiful teenage “good” girl who, like, always has to help get her siblings ready for school in the morning or something, until one Monday she snaps and runs away from home or whatever—which is doubtless how the lyrics were interpreted by millions of fans worldwide—are in actuality a direct allusion to the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego, California.

The facts are these: early in the morning of Monday January 29, 1979, a poor and suicidally-depressed 16-year-old girl named Brenda Spencer, who lived in a run-down house with her divorced Dad across the street from an elementary school, opened fire on the school’s front gates with a rifle her Dad had bought her for her birthday, killing two adults and injuring eight children and a cop. It was the first recorded school shooting in modern U.S. history, 20 years before Columbine (which perhaps explains why the song isn’t anywhere nearly as popular in America; certainly the San Diego stations never played it). As she holed up in her house during the ensuing police standoff, a reporter who had been cold-calling every landline in the neighborhood to find the shooter got a hold of her and asked why she did it. “I don’t like Mondays,” she reportedly quipped, “This livens up the day.”

That instantly-quotable sound bite, “I don’t like Mondays,” officially escalated the shooting from horrifying tragedy to full-scale media circus. Bob Geldof read the news-story via Telex while passing through Atlanta, then wrote, recorded, and released the song by July. (Brenda Spencer, meanwhile, surrendered peacefully to police later that same day, was tried as an adult, and is still serving a life sentence; she is next up for parole in 2028.)

But the song didn’t go number one in four countries because so many people had heard about this school shooting overseas, no: as mentioned above, the vast majority of people who bought the single likely did so because they resonated with that simple, Garfield-esque sentiment of “I don’t like Mondays,” all without ever looking at the lyrics deeper (similar, perhaps, to how so many Americans never listen to Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” beyond the chorus). Indeed, I suspect most of those music buyers would have been horrified to learn what the song was actually about—that the line “And the lesson today is how to die” wasn’t metaphorical at all, that “I want to shoot the whole day down” was in fact meant quite literally. It was perhaps the 1979 equivalent of when Foster the People snuck a feel-good song about a school shooter onto Pop radio in 2010, as an impish prank played at the listening public’s expense. One can imagine the Boomtown Rats similarly chuckling at all the casuals out there singing along morosely to “I Don’t Like Mondays” as though it were just some sappy sequel to the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” utterly ignorant of its horrific context.

Except that, when you watch Bob Geldof’s performance of the song at Live Aid 1985 up above, there isn’t even a hint of sarcasm or irony anywhere in his voice or body-language. He sings it straightforwardly, as a fist-raising teenage anthem. He does not appear to be having a joke at anyone’s expense here; he purposefully left his Punk Rock persona at home that day. If you knew nothing about this song or band before their Live Aid set, you really would assume it was just about being bummed out by a Monday morning. His rendition appears to be entirely in earnest.

Perhaps that’s simply because the concert entire was in earnest; he finishes the song by declaring “I just realized today is the best day of my life,” because he was by all appearances genuinely thrilled to finally be doing something concrete to feed the hungry. Since Geldof really did want to help Ethiopian famine victims as fast as possible, he knew this was neither the time nor place to antagonize the audience. If millions of people worldwide had inadvertently developed an emotional connection to this song about a school shooter, who was he to disabuse them? The phone lines were open and Ethiopians were starving, so he played the hits as straight as possible; some things are simply more important than Punk cred.

Or maybe this song was always performed in earnest! Maybe there was never any intended prank here whatsoever! Maybe he really did personally resonate with this story of a broken young girl who finally snapped one day and did the unthinkable. Maybe as a resident of Ireland who came of age during “The Troubles,” Geldof fully understood just how easily an impoverished child can be driven to desperate acts of senseless terrorism. Maybe for him, the only thing shocking here was that such awful violence happened in a so-called “First World” country for a change, not a colonized one, where such horrors happen on the reg. Maybe in this sense, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was actually the perfect song to sing in a relief concert for dying children–to address a catastrophe that dwarfed the Cleveland Elementary Shooting by many orders of magnitude, but was still fueled by the same callous disregard for all human life. Young Brenda Spencer was in a sense just enacting on a local level what the First World does to the Third World every day.

These are all of course only speculations, which is sometimes all we can do in the face of all the horrific suffering and violence in the world. In any case, I recall again that old seminary scripture mastery 1 Nephi 19:23, which concludes with “for I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning.” Typically this reading has been a call for us to relate distantly ancient events to ourselves, in our own time and day–but this heuristic is not only applicable to the scriptures, but to all forms of media. The Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” may have initially had nothing to do with the Ethiopian famine, but on that July day in 1985, it was suddenly about nothing but; the song’s own repeated refrain of “They can see no reasons/Cause there are no reasons/What reasons do you need to be shown” apply just as easily to a man-made famine in Africa as to a school shooting in America.

Likewise, for the hundreds of thousands of people who bought the single because they were often depressed on Mondays as well, the song really was only about their melancholy, too; it frankly didn’t need to be about anything else. All these lenses are valid; every interpretation is permitted. The song stopped being about a school shooting almost immediately, as everyone applied it instead to themselves–including Bob Geldof–and the same can also be said for every passage of Isaiah, and every other scripture besides, for that matter. For why else were they written? How can we not apply them to ourselves? How else are we to cope with the blood and horrors of our mortal probations? What reasons do you need to be shown?