A Kind Of Magic

About

Queen’s shift to playing all-stadium tours in the mid-1980s wasn’t just a business decision. It was an artistic one. Rock ’n’ roll had once been a weird, rebellious youth culture; now, it was the sound of pro sport, political rallie, ad campaign, and general communal uplift—a transition no band navigated more seamlessly, or profitably, as Queen. Like an infrastructure architect, or a product designer for a new-and-improved dishwasher, Queen was working on a scale of millions now, and making the music to match. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, there remains something astonishing about a performance as huge but as stripped-down as the group’s Live Aid set from 1985, with paper Pepsi cups littering the top of Freddie Mercury’s piano, and no special effects or prerecorded assistance to be found. As far as pure rock spectacle goe, it’s pretty much the beginning of the end. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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