Tricky Treat

Courtesy Nick Diamonds/Vice Records.

Something awful happened in 1984. Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof and Ultravox singer/guitarist Midge Ure formed Band Aid — a supergroup of U.K. pop and rock musicians that included Sting, George Michael and more than 40 other stars — in hopes of raising money for Ethiopian famine relief. Band Aid’s charity single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, was an instant global hit, raising millions of pounds for the impoverished African country. What’s wrong about that? Simple: Geldof’s appalling lyrics. Ethiopia, although not explicitly named in DTKIC, was described as a land, “Where the only water flowing / Is the bitter sting of tears / And the Christmas bells that ring there / Are the clanging chimes of doom.” U2’s Bono, reigning world champion of celebrity activism, was the unlikely singer of the song’s killing blow — “Well tonight thank God it’s them / Instead of you!”

Something even worse, though, happened all the way back in ancient Britain and Ireland: Halloween. What started as a legitimately spooky celebration of Samhain, the Celtic end of summer — when dead souls were believed to visit their former homes, and not always with good intentions — has since devolved into a door-to-door parade of plastic masks and candy sacks. Nowadays, the event is more or less underwritten by the chocolate aisle at Wal-Mart. Put another way, Halloween is the pinkie toe of holidays: always there, never necessary.

Correction of these cultural errors now comes in the form of a new charity single, Do They Know It’s Halloween? The song — a catchy rebuke of All Hallows Eve and Band Aid’s misguided magnum opus — is the brainchild of Canadian musicians Nicholas Diamonds (the Unicorns, Islands) and Adam Gollner (Dessert), who hatched the idea in Los Angeles earlier this year. They wrote as a team, crafting catty lyrics like, “Trick! / Caramel apples that will make you sick / Treat! / And all those sweets will rot your teeth,” and “The writing’s on the tombstone, beneath the willow tree / No more razorblades in our kid’s candy.” The songwriters then leaned on their music industry connections to convince a hipster’s row of 30-some musicians and actors to perform their ditty. Indie darling Beck climbed on board, along with comedian David Cross, Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren, Elvira (“Mistress of the Dark”) and members of Sonic Youth, Sum 41 and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne lead a strong CanCon contigent, joined by Feist, Peaches, Buck 65, Nardwuar the Human Serviette, Sloan’s Chris Murphy and Tagaq, a throat singer from Nunavut who has collaborated with Björk. Collectively, the group is known as the North American Halloween Prevention Initiative.

Diamonds and Gollner brought DTKIH to the attention of Vice Recordings, a boutique label affiliated with Vice magazine, the unofficial bible of hipster shenanigans. Vice next approached Sony’s online music service, Sony Connect, for financial backing. DTKIH is now being sold online, with all proceeds going to UNICEF. The song’s revenues, projected at a modest $10,000 to $20,000 (US), are a piddling amount when compared to the $3 million to $5 million raised every year by trick-or-treaters carrying UNICEF donation boxes . That’s also a far cry from the financial goodwill that was ultimately delivered by Band Aid’s wretched ditty. Which goes to show — sometimes, there’s simply no accounting for bad taste.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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