Elliot Ross
Africa is a country | December 24th, 2012
In 2004, the British press reported that the album cover Damien Hirst had designed for Band Aid 20’s re-recording of the 1984 single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
had been rejected by the organizers, for fear it would frighten small
children. “The record, that’s the important part,” explained Midge Ure.
“The cover doesn’t really matter. Throw the cover away. Buying it is the
important thing.”
Hirst had depicted an emaciated black child perched on the Grim
Reaper’s knee, while on the other side of the album a white child
cradled in Santa’s lap clutched wads of banknotes. There was a sense
that this particular juxtaposition could be considered distasteful, but
the reason that got around was that the kids would be scared. An
alternative cover arrived, in which an emaciated black-and-white black
child walks naked through the snow into a full-color fairytale
landscape, menaced on either side by a herd of outsized cartoon reindeer
and a large family of hungry looking polar bears. Hirst’s excessively
disturbing double image had been replaced by what was plainly a playful
riff on “Vulture stalking a child,”
the world-famous photograph of a Sudanese girl taken in 1993 by South
African photographer Kevin Carter, who committed suicide months after
the image was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
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