Understanding mega‐events

Abstract

In one of those moments that cried out for a grand social gesture, Joan Baez opened the Live Aid concert with the words: “Good morning, you children of the eighties. This is your Woodstock and it's long overdue.” While there was undoubtedly a historical connection between the two events, close examination reveals as many differences as similarities. Woodstock was participatory, communitarian, and non‐commercial (indeed, anti‐commercial), with no great spiritual or physical distance between artist and audience. Its terms came from the vocabulary of folk culture yet Woodstock ushered in the big business/mass music culture of the contemporary era. To deal with the seeming clash of “folk” values with the commercial imperatives of mass culture, counterculturalists often sought refuge in the social relations of an idealized past. The hippie diaspora that was the “Woodstock Nation” longed for the imagined simplicity of an earlier rural life even as it embraced the electronic—not to mention the sexual—revolution. Live Aid, by contrast, was hardly an occasion for folksy nostalgia; it was an unabashed celebration of technological possibilities. While Woodstock was hailed as countercultural, there was little at Live Aid that could have been construed as alternative. If Woodstock tried to humanize the social relations of mass culture, Live Aid demonstrated the full‐blown integration of popular music into the “star‐making machinery” of the international music industry. Yet, paradoxically, Live Aid may have opened spaces for cultural politics that would have been unthinkable at the time of Woodstock.