SPIN MAGAZINE: Live Aid: The Terrible Truth — On the 30th anniversary of Live Aid, we’re republishing SPIN’s 1986 exposé on the so-called “global jukebox:”
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, instead famously saying: “I’ll shake hands with the Devil on my left and on my right to get to the people we are meant to help.”
And that’s pretty much what happened. Back in 2004, I did a piece for the Weekly Standard that came to the same conclusion, in response to the release of the original concert footage on DVD. (Sans Led Zeppelin’s stillborn reunion gig; the band’s lawyers refused to release the footage, though it’s now readily available on YouTube.) The concert itself was a spectacular event; the climactic moment for both the musical generation that began with the Beatles and the original, watchable iteration of MTV. But just as Altamont killed off the hippie ethos 15 years prior, the brand of rock music that many of us grew up with similarly began to tumble rapidly downhill after Live Aid, unfortunately.