[Forty years ago this week, the musical supergroup USA (United Support of Artists) for Africa recorded their single “We are the World” (it would drop on March 7th). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that effort and other examples of musical activism!]
On how an
overblown controversy at one activist concert led to a second that endures to
this day.
As I mentioned
in yesterday’s post, “We Are the World” was directly inspired by the British
supergroup Band Aid’s late 1984 single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
Band Aid was the brainchild of producers Bob
Geldof and James “Midge” Ure, and in the summer of 1985 the pair decided to
build on that starting point with a “global jukebox” known as Live Aid,
comprising a number of concerts held around the world (but headlined by a pair
of star-studded shows in London and Philadelphia) on July 13th. Watched
by nearly 2 billion people around the world, the concerts raised hundreds of
millions for African famine relief (ostensibly, although the destination of
those funds remained controversial for many years to come). But at least one famous
performer at the Philadelphia show expressed a different perspective: before he
launched into a performance of his song “When the Ship Comes In”
(alongside Keith Richards
and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones), Bob Dylan
argued, “I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in
Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe one or two million,
and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers
here owe to the banks.”
Even in that
pre-internet era, Dylan’s quote went viral, and was quickly and consistently
misquoted (as hyperlinked above, there’s a full video of the Live Aid
moment, so the exact quote is perfectly clear) as “Wouldn’t it be great if we
did something for our own farmers right here in America?” The us vs. them
framing of that misquoted version is hugely frustrating, not only because it
plays into so many problematic broader narratives, but also because it goes directly
against the global solidarity exemplified by Live Aid. But if we set that false
framing aside, Dylan’s quote can be seen as offering a far more complementary
than contrasting perspective, and indeed as having set in motion conversations
that led to a complementary activist concert: Farm Aid.
Inspired by Dylan’s idea, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young
organized that September
1985 benefit concert, held at Champaign, Illinois’s Memorial Stadium, to
raise funds for family farmers in the U.S. Along with those three artists, Farm
Aid also featured performances from Dylan (natch), Billy Joel, B.B. King,
Loretta Lynn, and Tom Petty among many others. Attended by a crowd of 80,000
the concert raised nearly $10 million for its worthy cause.
That cause
didn’t evaporate when the final notes sounded, though, and neither did Farm Aid,
which has held concerts almost every Fall since 1985. The most recent, 38th
Farm Aid concert, held on September
21st, 2024 in Saratoga Springs, New York, still featured performances
by Nelson, Mellencamp, and Young, this time joined by Dave Matthews & Tim
Reynolds from the Dave Matthews Band, Mavis Staples, Nathaniel Rateliff &
the Night Sweats, and many others. It’s easy to see benefit concerts and other
musical activisms as a kind of parachuted-in moment without the staying power
that is required to make a lasting difference; I don’t think that’s entirely fair
in any case (raising millions of dollars as well as collective awareness are meaningful
effects no matter what), but Farm Aid certainly reminds us that many of these
efforts endure long after the initial concert, and can become an ongoing element
of vital collective activism.
Next
musical activism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Activisms you’d highlight?
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