13 July

The 40th anniversary of Live Aid is everywhere online at the moment. Live Aid, where the Western world looked at the catastrophe of human starvation, and did what? It put on a gig. That’s what gig culture does to try to fix adult problems. We’re still doing it today, 40 years later. Still living in gig culture. There was no big gig for Covid. Covid destroys gigs culture. It’s why gig culture (adults never leaving high school) refuses to fight it. Some think I’m attacking music itself when I talk about gig culture. It has nothing to do with the music, or with attacking anything. It’s about understanding our own culture. From about the 1960s onwards, our favourite music became the way teens forged a path into the adult world. It already was the way they helped shape their identity, their favourite acts are a sort of tribal thing. But the countercultural revolution, the Woodstock shift, took this into adult life too. To ‘change the world’. It’s the only way teen life can understand adult life. A big, impotent, inarticulated, protesting mob, ‘the people’, as the Americans say, who began this cultural shift. That conceives adult life as dark forces doing bad things, that have to be opposed. Like parents, or teachers. They even tried to ‘ground’ us all, in ‘lockdowns’!