Live Aid – Onwards and Upwards (Finally…)

Let me just begin by saying, it was conceived as a ‘rock’ music concert, it raised a final figure of over £150m, and the live broadcast was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion viewers across 100 countries.

The UK event featured contributions from artists from UK, US, Australia, Japan, Austria, Holland, Yugoslavia, Russia, Germany, and Norway, but did not feature a single African act. This was because the organiser’s held the belief at that time that broadcasting African artists would deter a mass audience (a philosophy since proven wrong). The closest that the UK event came to any kind of authentic African experience was the appearance of US Blues legend BB King and Nigerian Born Afro British Soul singer Sade.

The US event, as well as featuring a glut of UK artists, did at least involve an important Afro-American presence including: Four Tops, Billy Ocean, Run DMC, Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, Ashford and Simpson, Kool and the Gang, Patti Labelle, Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffen, and Tina Turner. But again, supporting these world famous legends was not a single African or Ethiopian act. A surprise considering that the US had a significant Ethiopian Diaspora population including Aster Aweke, Tesfa Maryam Kidané, Girma Bèyènè, Ayaléw Mèsfin, and even Ethiopia’s top record producer himself Amha Eshèté. These people were resident (and some were still musically active) in the US at the time of the Live Aid Concert.

The truth is, live aid was never conceived to promote Ethiopian music or to aid the Ethiopia music scene by giving its musicians the exposure they required to become more self sufficient. Even if anyone had tried to organise an Ethiopian presence (or better still an Ethiopian event), this would have been impossible as the golden era of Modern Ethiopian music was now suppressed under a military Stalinist regime (the greatest cause of the famine), forbidding all urban night-life and restricted artists from traveling abroad. Realistically, at the time the only hope was the displaced Ethiopian artists based in the US, which never happened.

So, while debate continued to rage over what ‘should have happened’ at the 1985 LiveAid concerts, Ethiopians themselves were forced to wait in isolation until finally becoming a democratic republic in 1994. However, the former Ethiopia was partitioned into Ethiopia and Eritrea and a new war broke out (lasting until 2000) that continued to stifle creativity and the development of a domestic music industry. That brings us up to present day, past the release of Francis Falceto’s ‘The Ethiopiques Series’ from 1997onwards, and up to the recent release of ‘The Best of the Ethiopiques’ (2CD) 2007, the first attempt to cross over modern Ethiopian Music to a mainstream Western market. But will either of these European based re-issues finally succeed in gaining Ethiopian Music the recognition it deserves?

Cuban music was equally in a long term state of decline with its forgotten legends about to pass away, until Ry Cooder initiated the project that was to grow into the ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ gaining massive publicity and the rest is history. Although this article started out as a criticism of the missed opportunity of Live Aid, perhaps in fact, now is the only time it has ever been (and will ever be) possible to elevate the living legends of modern Ethiopian music to their rightful place in world music. So if Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Damon Albarn, Brian Eno or anyone else who has publicly stated admiration of modern Ethiopian music is reading this… Keep up the good work and more.

Timjim 2008

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chimchim/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0