Satellite of Love: Live Aid, Bad, Bono and the tragic triumph of irony

Welcome to a new experiment in gratuitous discursion about music, culture and modernity.Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.This is a little different that the usual JC fare, and in lieu of any strengths plays to my weaknesses, which is the ability to get utterly sidetracked by the simplest questions.On a train up to see my daughter Antagonista I happened across U2’s album The Unforgettable Fire. A guilty, embarrassing pleasure, but halfway though the six-minute, two-chord epic Bad it struck me what a magnificently great song, and performance it is, and that called to mind U2’s legendary, notorious performance of Bad — all ten minutes of it — at Live Aid. I have a theory that Live Aid was a fundamental cultural touchpoint for people of my generation — that it changed the world in ways we do not often acknowledge – and this pulls on a few JC strings, and I started writing it up as a sort of appreciation of rock bands, guitar rock, digital delays, ambient music, plonkers, irony one of the great vocal performances — and and realised it would work much better as full audio surround sound experience. So here it is. Hope you enjoy! If this goes well I might do a bit more of this sort of thing.The original text — though it isn’t half as much fun — is here.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.There is a Spotify playlist of the forty seven — FORTY SEVEN FOLKS — songs name-checked and sampled in this podcast! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subscribe