From Farm Aid to Fire Aid: The Benefit Concert as Symbol of the Welfare State in Decline

• In Event: Musical Movements and Sonic Identities

Abstract

On the 30th January 2025 a broad range of musical artists performed in two separate L.A. venues to raise money for the victims of the California Wildfires that destroyed over 16,000 structures, burned almost 60,000 acres, and resulted in 28 wildfire-related fatalities. Aptly titled Fire Aid, the benefit concerts were streamed live via various social media platforms, while also being aired in some AMC movie theater venues. Given the all-star, multi-generational, and multi-generic line-up, and the numerous ways in which audiences could access the event live, the benefit concerts (and subsequent Grammys) promised to raise a significant amount of money to help Californians in need. With the current U.S. federal government’s dismissiveness of the catastrophe, and its constant threats to withhold financial aid from Democrat-run states, such charity funds will no doubt be vital to wildfire recovery.

Fire Aid is, of course, not the first charity mega-event designed to raise awareness and funds for those in need. The US has a long history of raising money for vulnerable populations through live-broadcast, celebrity-driven, corporate-sponsored benefit concerts and telethons. It is therefore not surprising that such spectacular mega-events are now seen by many Americans as the logical go-to response whenever local and global crises arise. Yet, while capable of inspiring audience members to donate, and subsequently providing some level of aid to intended beneficiaries, such mega-events are more effective at promoting celebrity and corporate brands than exposing or addressing the structural inequities that lead to environmental and social catastrophes. Like the multiple 'Aid' movements and events that preceded and inspired it, Fire Aid is yet another corporate mega-event that promotes the neoliberal logic of responsibilitization, the notion that members of the general public—not the state—should assume the burden of protecting and supporting victims of disaster, ideally through the purchasing of charity merchandise.

This paper traces how, over the past four decades, benefit concerts such as Fire Aid have not only helped teach audiences how to function as ‘good’ neoliberal citizens who exercise compassion appropriately and sparingly through their purchases, but have also promoted and normalized corporate values within the American popular imaginary. The rhetoric of charity mega-events, alongside that of the corporate media that promotes them, has effectively laid the groundwork for the populist acceptance of a sudden and violent dismantling of federal social programs and USAID under the second Trump administration. My analysis of the emergence, evolution, and logic of the benefit concert in the late capitalist era (ranging from the Farm Aid festivals to Live Earth, from the 9/11 and Haitian earthquake telethons to Fire Aid) illustrates how mass charity, celebrity-driven mega-events ultimately serve to reinforce a neoliberal agenda that provides extensive short-term benefits to capital’s corporate regime at the long-term expense of both ordinary citizens and intended aid recipients.

Biographical Information

H. Louise Davis is an associate professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her teaching and scholarship focus on compassionate consumerism and celebrity-driven activism, social and environmental justice, and cultural representations of marginalized peoples disseminated in the Global North. She is currently working on a book project titled *Mass Charity Movements: Corporate Philanthropy, Global Spectacle, and the Norming of Neoliberal Values in the US and UK*.

Author

• H Louise Davis, Miami University of Ohio