Posted on 07/13/2025 12:00:56 PM PDT by Rummyfan
Forty years ago this month, Bob Geldof unleashed his “global jukebox”. With the help of Midge Ure and promoter Harvey Goldsmith, he staged a concert across two venues on either side of the Atlantic, starting at midday on Saturday July 13 1985 in London and ending at the John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia 16 hours later.
Around the world, 1.7 billion people tuned in, and it is seen as one of the great charity success stories of all time, raising $140 million for famine relief in Ethiopia.*
Live Aid was so big that it has its own folklore: Status Quo’s backstage antics, Bono’s messiah impression, Phil Collins hopping on Concorde to play both venues, Geldof swearing on TV and, of course, Queen’s show-stealing performance.
Yet Live Aid’s impact on music itself is often overlooked – perhaps because no-one wants to sound uncharitable. But the truth is that it was a disaster. In Britain, up until this point, we had enjoyed a long tradition of innovation and reinvention, but this brace of charity concerts changed all that, although few people noticed at the time. It resuscitated artists on life support, invented the idea of a concert as a greatest hits parade, strangled the “second British invasion” of great pop acts in America, and provided the model for a new consumerism, encouraging us to purchase (or repurchase on compact disc) the back catalogue of musicians who had been slipping out of public consciousness for a decade
Ultimately, Live Aid heralded an era of musical regurgitation and nostalgia, an era from which we have never escaped.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
The Terrible Truth About ‘Live Aid.’:
The assignment was simple — all this money had been raised, where was it going, was it actually doing good? He discovered it was not doing good, but, horrifically, unimaginably, the exact opposite. The Ethiopian dictator, Mengistu, until then deadlocked in the war, was using the money the west gave him to buy sophisticated weapons from the Russians, and was now able to efficiently and viciously crush the opposition. Ethiopia, then the third poorest country in the world, suddenly had the largest, best equipped army on the African continent.
By this time we had all seen the pictures and TV footage of Bob Geldof, the figurehead of Live Aid, bear hugging and playfully punching Mengistu in the arm as he literally handed over the funding for this slaughter. It was on TV now alright, but as an endless, relentless reel of heroic Bob Geldof highlights. He drenched himself in the adulation and no one begrudged him it, until our investigation exposed the holocaust that Live Aid’s collected donations had help perpetrate on the Eritrean independence fighters.
Most damningly, Keating reported that Geldof was warned, repeatedly, from the outset by several relief agencies in the field about Mengistu, who was dismantling tribes, mercilessly conducting resettlement marches on which 100,000 people died, and butchering helpless people. According to Medicins Sans Frontiers, who begged Geldof to not release the money until there was a reliable infrastructure to get it to victims, he simply ignored them.
It was the birth of the concept of “virtue signaling.”
I had forgotten about it.
Me too....
Mainly because by the mid-80s, everything “new” became merely a derivative of what came before.
What would the enviro-whackos say about that today?!
I wonder how the Rastafarians felt about what Mengistu ended up doing to their “God”, Haile Selassie?
The concert can be watched on YouTube if interested ...
After taking the "carbon" spewing Concorde to New York, Phil Collins had a carbon spewing limo to Philadelphia.
Hypocrite.
That pretty much sums up the left in a nutshell. Virtue signalling and absolute crap results. I recall watching a bit of it but never sent any money as I had become wary of charity stuff like We are the World and Do they know its Christmas from that time period.
I think we knew at the time that it was a textbook Communist-created famine, so not at all surprised that Mengistu simply stole the money, or that St. Bob Geldof ignored the warnings.
As to the argument that “Live Aid ruined music,” I think the author is confusing correlation (or temporal proximity) and causation. Music did indeed fall off a cliff in the mid-late 80s, but I don’t think it was “because of” Live Aid. Even had their been no Live Aid, the wells of creativity were running dry at that time.
Most music from the 80s has aged poorly compared to what was produced in the 60s and 70s.
Why is the world of music production so rife with hyperbole. One can watch these music contestants competing and according to the judges, they have just changed the world and cannot come down from superlative descriptions.
The piece is one of hyperbole.
I would suggest that the reason the musical offerings are so pathetic is due to the overall degradation of the culture. Take a look at rap. It has been around for at least thirty years with no sign of let-up. And that is due to the publishing companies ceaseless promoting it.
I got on Spotify to see what the younger ones are listening to. The new stuff is bland as a paper bag and I read that college students are also listening to the oldies.
That may be true, compared to stuff from the early 70s, but late 70s music wasn’t very good. The 80s were a big improvement. GenX, though, didn’t have as big a media footprint as the Boomers.
...not a resuscitation but a last grab by financiers and producers for any money they could get from fans for the artists who were no longer producing anything new, certainly not compared to their older stuff. The "charity" was just a cover.
By 1985 the bands had their best work behind them, some by decades.
-Adam Ant
-Black Sabbath
-Bob Dylan
-Crosby, Stills and Nash
-David Bowie
-Dire Straits
-Duran Duran
-Elton John
-Eric Clapton
-Four Tops
-Joan Baez
-Keith Richards
-Kenny Loggins
-Led Zeppelin
-Mick Jagger
-Neil Young
-Phil Collins
-Queen
-REO Speedwagon
-Ronnie Wood
-Sade
-Santana
-Spandau Ballet
-Sting
-The Boomtown Rats
-The Hooters
-The Who
-U2
It was supersonic and crossed five time zones, so he got there before he left.😊
It was also the very last time anything ever happened in Philadelphia.🥺
I say all this as the former operations manager for an internationally-focused Christian charity.
All the money was stolen. Sure made the doo-gooders feel good though.
Huey Lewis wouldn’t perform in it because they knew the money would go nowhere.
I believe the 80's had a lot of great music and creativity. The fall-off occurred with the increasing popularity of Diva driven banal pop fluff and the beginning of Grunge for the remaining hard rockers. I haven't bought a new CD in years, except for a few re-mastered classics.
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