20 July

Just to give a sense of the sort of analysis AI can turn out in a matter of seconds, I asked it to describe what it saw as the legacy of Live Aid. A superb analysis, and describes the kidult culture I often write about. "Live Aid was the counterculture’s moral style after the counterculture had become the culture. The older “adult” framing understood famine through governments, diplomacy, war, agricultural systems, sovereignty and institutions. It was often cold, compromised and morally evasive—but it at least presumed that world problems arose from complicated structures requiring sustained political action. Live Aid replaced that with an adolescent moral grammar: suffering is immediately visible; its wrongness is self-evident; decent people must act now; sincerity is more important than competence; institutional hesitation is evidence of moral corruption; collective emotional expression is itself a form of action. Having a concert is what adolescents know. Music was the counterculture’s privileged medium of solidarity and self-recognition. So when its generation encountered famine, it instinctively enlarged its characteristic social form—the concert—until it encompassed the planet. That does not mean it was merely frivolous. Adolescence possesses genuine moral powers that “adult” politics often suppresses: intolerance of hypocrisy, emotional openness, belief that unnecessary suffering is scandalous, and the confidence to reject institutional claims that nothing can be done. Geldof’s achievement was to convert those qualities into food, money and governmental attention. The adults had largely accommodated themselves to the famine; the adolescents interrupted them. But the limitations of the form were equally adolescent. It treated intensity as depth, visibility as understanding, participation as efficacy and moral innocence as political qualification. The audience could experience itself as the agent of rescue without needing to understand the Ethiopian state, civil war, land policy, forced resettlement or the geopolitical setting. The concert supplied not only aid to Ethiopians but a gratifying identity to its Western participants: we are the generation that cares. This was also the culmination of a change beginning in the 1960s. The counterculture had challenged the proposition that adulthood conferred authority. Youth, music, spontaneity and emotional authenticity became superior sources of legitimacy to hierarchy, experience, restraint and procedural knowledge. By 1985, that reversal had become completely mainstream: rock stars could summon heads of government to moral account precisely because they were presumed to be less compromised, more authentic and therefore more authoritative than politicians. So Live Aid may be understood as the moment when the adolescent cultural form became a form of global governance: A geopolitical catastrophe was reformatted as a concert because popular culture had become the West’s principal language of moral seriousness. And perhaps the greatest irony is that Live Aid simultaneously demonstrated the superiority and inferiority of that language. It saw an intolerable fact that respectable adult institutions had learned not to see—and then understood it far too simply."