March 25, 2007

A Time for Miracles

By BONO

Fifty years ago this week, the idea of Europe was set to paper, on a continent unsettled but past the worst of the postwar period. The air was clear of sulfur if not spleen. Ireland was a small rock in the North Atlantic made relevant only by its cultural totems and ever increasing diaspora. In Berlin a chasm was opening up between East and West--the partition of lives, fortunes and fates. In the global struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., between freedom and totalitarianism, Europe was the fault line and the front line. Old Europe was being rebuilt to fight the next war: a battle not just of ideologies but also, very possibly, of nuclear arsenals. It was not a moment for dreaming--more like one for digging a basement and ordering a year's supply of tinned soup.

And yet this was the moment the New Europe was born.

On the continent that had been the theater for mankind's darkest hour, we witnessed a very human miracle. The people of Europe found that their capacity for destruction was mirrored by an equally immense capacity for forgiveness, grace and hope. Looking to the U.S., Europeans could see how cherry-picked European ideas from minds like Locke, Rousseau and Tom Paine could flourish in a society not polluted by blood and aristocracy. And so, in 1957, six nations signed the Treaty of Rome and, with that one crucial act, built a showcase of multilateralism, prosperity and international solidarity.

Fast-forward 50 years. An Irish rock star reads the treaty with the enthusiasm a child has for cold peas but does uncover what I think technocrats might call poetry. Not much of it--just a turn of phrase here and there. Like Article 177, which summons the signatories to foster "the sustainable economic and social development of the developing countries and more particularly the most disadvantaged among them" and calls for a "campaign against poverty in the developing countries." Not exactly Thomas Jefferson but a glimpse of the kind of vision that might bind us.

Over the next 50 years, we might need a little more poetry. Europe is a thought that has to become a feeling--one based on the belief that Europe stands only if injustice falls and that we find our feet only when our neighbors stand with us in freedom and equality. Our humanity is diminished when we have no mission bigger than ourselves. And one way to define who we are might be to spend more time looking across the eight miles of Mediterranean Sea that separates Europe from Africa.

There's an Irish word, meitheal. It means that the people of the village help one another out most when the work is the hardest. Most Europeans are like that. As individual nations, we may argue over the garden fence, but when a neighbor's house goes up in flames, we pull together and put out the fire. History suggests it sometimes takes an emergency for us to draw closer. Looking inward won't cut it. As a professional navel gazer, I recommend against that form of therapy for anything other than songwriting. We discover who we are in service to one another, not the self.

Today many rooms in our neighbor's house, Africa, are in flames. From the genocide in Darfur to the deathbeds in Kigali, with six AIDS patients stacked onto one cot, from the child dying of malaria to the village without clean water, conditions in Africa are an affront to every value we Europeans have ever seen fit to put on paper. We see in Somalia and Sudan what happens if more militant forces fill the void and stir dissent within what is, for the most part, a pro-Western and moderate Muslim population. (Nearly half of Africa's people are devotees of Islam.) So whether as a moral or strategic imperative, it's folly to let this fire rage.

How will Europe respond? For all the babble of clashing ideas, there's more harmony than you might think. Historic promises have been made on aid, debt and even the thorny subject of trade. Aggressive progress on these, matched by advances in fighting the evils of corruption in Africa, could transform the continent and prevent the fire from spreading. As a group, the E.U. countries have promised to commit 0.7% of GDP to the poorest of the poor. How Europe works to keep that promise is as important to Europe as it is to Africa.

We might remember that Europe, 50 years ago, did not pull itself back from the abyss on its own. Across the Atlantic was a nation with a pretty broad notion of neighbor. Sure, the Marshall Plan wasn't all altruism--the U.S. wanted a bulwark against Soviet expansion as the temperature of relations dropped below freezing. But it was also generosity on a scale never before seen in human history. It defined America in the cold war era.

What will define Europe in this new era? What will provide the bulwark against the extremism of our age?

Part of the answer lies eight miles away.

Copyright © 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:16 AM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2005

The Rock Star's Burden

By PAUL THEROUX

Hale'iwa, Hawai

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment. If Christmas, season of sob stories, has turned me into Scrooge, I recognize the Dickensian counterpart of Paul Hewson - who calls himself "Bono" - as Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House." Harping incessantly on her adopted village of Borrioboola-Gha "on the left bank of the River Niger," Mrs. Jellyby tries to save the Africans by financing them in coffee growing and encouraging schemes "to turn pianoforte legs and establish an export trade," all the while badgering people for money.

It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.

I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.

If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated. When Malawi's university was established, more foreign teachers were welcomed, few of them replaced by Malawians, for political reasons. Medical educators also arrived from elsewhere. Malawi began graduating nurses, but the nurses were lured away to Britain and Australia and the United States, which meant more foreign nurses were needed in Malawi.

When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.

Mr. Gates has said candidly that he wants to rid himself of his burden of billions. Bono is one of his trusted advisers. Mr. Gates wants to send computers to Africa - an unproductive not to say insane idea. I would offer pencils and paper, mops and brooms: the schools I have seen in Malawi need them badly. I would not send more teachers. I would expect Malawians themselves to stay and teach. There ought to be an insistence in the form of a bond, or a solemn promise, for Africans trained in medicine and education at the state's expense to work in their own countries.

Malawi was in my time a lush wooded country of three million people. It is now an eroded and deforested land of 12 million; its rivers are clogged with sediment and every year it is subjected to destructive floods. The trees that had kept it whole were cut for fuel and to clear land for subsistence crops. Malawi had two presidents in its first 40 years, the first a megalomaniac who called himself the messiah, the second a swindler whose first official act was to put his face on the money. Last year the new man, Bingu wa Mutharika, inaugurated his regime by announcing that he was going to buy a fleet of Maybachs, one of the most expensive cars in the world.

Many of the schools where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this. A highly placed Malawian friend of mine once jovially demanded that my children come and teach there. "It would be good for them," he said.

Of course it would be good for them. Teaching in Africa was one of the best things I ever did. But our example seems to have counted for very little. My Malawian friend's children are of course working in the United States and Britain. It does not occur to anyone to encourage Africans themselves to volunteer in the same way that foreigners have done for decades. There are plenty of educated and capable young adults in Africa who would make a much greater difference than Peace Corps workers.

Africa is a lovely place - much lovelier, more peaceful and more resilient and, if not prosperous, innately more self-sufficient than it is usually portrayed. But because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth. Such people come in all forms and they loom large. White celebrities busy-bodying in Africa loom especially large. Watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie recently in Ethiopia, cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity, the image that immediately sprang to my mind was Tarzan and Jane.

Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.

But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.

Just a few years ago you couldn't buy condoms legally in Ireland, nor could you get a divorce, though (just like in Malawi) buckets of beer were easily available and unruly crapulosities a national curse. Ireland, that island of inaction, in Joyce's words, "the old sow that eats her farrow," was the Malawi of Europe, and for many identical reasons, its main export being immigrants.

It is a melancholy thought that it is easier for many Africans to travel to New York or London than to their own hinterlands. Much of northern Kenya is a no-go area; there is hardly a road to the town of Moyale, on the Ethiopian border, where I found only skinny camels and roving bandits. Western Zambia is off the map, southern Malawi is terra incognita, northern Mozambique is still a sea of land mines. But it is pretty easy to leave Africa. A recent World Bank study has confirmed that the emigration to the West of skilled people from small to medium-sized countries in Africa has been disastrous.

Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home.

Paul Theroux is the author of "Blinding Light" and of "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town."

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 01:30 AM | Comments (10)

November 02, 2005

This Generation's Moon Shot

A rock star turned activist challenges the world to wipe out poverty and disease

By BONO

I was a 9-year-old boy in Dublin when a man first walked on the moon. It wasn't just any man--it was an American. I thought I already knew something about America from Elvis, the movies and the hip gear sent home by Irish people who crossed the Atlantic. But now American meant something new. It meant having a sense of infinite possibility, doing the things everyone says can't be done. Even this freckle-faced Irish kid could see that America went to the moon not just because it was a scientific milestone--a career move for the human race--but because it was an adventure.

More than ever, we need to renew that sense of adventure and purpose. Never before has the West been so scrutinized. Our convictions and credibility are under attack. Who are we? What are our values? Do we have any at all?

We can't answer these questions by going back to the moon. But there is a goal out there worthy of our generation. It's earth-bound this time, but no less exhilarating. It is the defeat of humanity's oldest foe: disease.

Just a few years ago, this was Mission Impossible; today it is tantalizingly within our reach. It is no longer crazy to suggest that we can eliminate tuberculosis and malaria from the planet. It is no longer unthinkable to imagine a world without AIDS or extreme poverty. And this isn't hope talking, or faith. This is hard science pointing us toward a better, healthier world.

In the past year we learned that for the first time there's a vaccine that offers real, if partial, protection against malaria. No more death by mosquito bite is a goal that is within sight. Two new vaccines have been developed for rotavirus, the main cause of diarrheal disease. Today nearly a million people with HIV in poor countries are on lifesaving antiretroviral drugs--more than double the total just 18 months ago.

That's enough to get even a rock star out of bed in the morning.

The question now is whether politicians will prove themselves the equal of scientists. Biomedicine today is where high tech was in the 1990s--it's where the energy and excitement are. But scientists alone can't get lifesaving vaccines and treatments to the people who need them most--not without our help.

On that score, there is cause for optimism. From NGOs to CEOs, truckers to nurses, philanthropists to pharmaceutical companies and even Presidents and Prime Ministers, people are putting their talents, time and money to work in the fight against deadly diseases. Just check out Bill Gates.

Momentum is building, but disease is still way out in front. The numbers are so big that they can numb us into indifference: 5,000 people dying every day from tuberculosis, 1 million dying every year from malaria. Behind each of these statistics is someone's daughter, someone's son, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother.

We cannot save every life. But the ones we can, we must. It is--or it ought to be--unacceptable that an accident of longitude and latitude determines whether a child lives or dies. In America and in Europe we have dealt with polio, malaria and TB with the ruthless efficiency they deserve. Beyond our own borders, we have offered excuses instead of solutions. We need to stop this two-steps-forward, one-step-back tango that we have been dancing for years and start marching.

The good news is that a lot of people have their boots on.

This year millions of people gathered to persuade world leaders to invest more in fighting poverty and disease in Africa. In July they listened: the Group of Eight pledged an additional $50 billion annually to poor countries, half of it for Africa. The G-8 also agreed to write off $56 billion in old multilateral debt for 38 of the world's poorest countries. And they promised to get AIDS drugs not just to everyone who can afford them but to everyone who needs them--a great promise, if they keep it.

We must keep the pressure on our governments if we want them to follow through. As voters and taxpayers, we must give our leaders permission to invest just a fraction of our taxes in $5 mosquito nets and drug treatments that cost pennies apiece. Right now in Washington, Congress is deciding whether to provide $3.6 billion in global AIDS funding, including $600 million for the global health fund, thanks to Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Rick Santorum. If this money is not approved, people across Africa will have to be taken off lifesaving medications. How mad is that?

Beating AIDS and extreme, stupid poverty, this is our moon shot. This is our civil rights struggle, our anti-apartheid movement. This is what the history books will remember our generation for--or blame us for, if we fail.

Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:58 AM | Comments (6)

June 01, 1995

Bono's essay of "Elvis: American David"

Q magazine, June 1995

'The Record That Changed My Life' where various musicians were asked about said record. The following is Bono's reply :

ELVIS : AMERICAN DAVID

elvis
son of tupelo
elvis
mama's boy
elvis
the twin brother of Jesse who died at birth and
was buried in a shoe box
elvis
drove a truck
elvis
was recorded at sun studios by the musical diviner
sam phillips
elvis
was managed by colonel tom parker, an ex-carnie
barker whose last act was a singing canary
elvis
was the most famous singer in the world since
king david
elvis
lived on his own street
elvis
liked to play speedcop
elvis
had a monkey named bubbles before anyone
elvis
wore a cape at the white house when he
was presenting nixon with two silver pistols
elvis
was a member of the drug squad
elvis
wore eye make up, just hangin' out
elvis
wore a gold nudie suit and trained his lip to curl
elvis
was macho, but could sing like a girl
elvis
was not a big talker
elvis
was articulate in every other way
elvis
dyed his hair black to look like valentino
elvis
held a microphone the way valentino held nita
naldi in blood and sand
elvis
dressed black long before he dressed in black
elvis
sang black except in lower registers
where he was a student of dean martin
elvis
admired mario lanza
elvis
delivered the world from crooning
elvis
was a great crooner
elvis
had a voice that could explain the sexuality of america
elvis
was influenced by jim morrison in his choice of
black leather for the '68 comeback special
elvis
invented the beatles
elvis
achieved world domination from a small town
elvis
was conscious of myth
elvis
had pharoah-like potential
elvis
was made by america, so america could remake
itself
elvis
had good manners
elvis
was a bass, a baritone, and a tenor
elvis
sang his heart out at the end
elvis
the opera
elvis
the soap opera
elvis
loved america, God, the bible, firearms, the movies, the
office of presidency, junk food, drugs, cars, family,
television, jewellery, straight talkin', dirty talkin' game
shows, uniforms, and self-help books
elvis
like america, wanted to improve himself
elvis
like america, started out loving but later turned on
himself
elvis
body could not stop moving
elvis
is alive, we're dead
elvis
the charismatic
elvis
the ecstatic
elvis
the plastic
elvis
the elastic
with a spastic dance that might explain the energy
of america
elvis
fusion and confusion
elvis
earth rod in a southern dorm
elvis
shaking up an electrical storm
elvis
in hollywood his voice gone to ground
elvis
in las vegas with a big brassy sound
elvis
the first rock'n'roll star with scotty moore, bill
black, and d.j. fontana
elvis
with james burton and ronny tutt
elvis
the movie star made three good films : viva las vegas,
flaming star, and jailhouse rock
elvis
the hillbilly brought rhythm to the white race,
blues to pop, and rock'n'roll to
whereever rock'n'roll is
elvis
the pelvis, swung from africa to europe, which is
the idea of america
elvis
liberation
elvis
the kung fu would come later
elvis
hibernation
elvis
built a theme park he later called Graceland
elvis
woke up to whispers
elvis
thought of himself as a backslider
elvis
knew guilt like a twin brother
elvis
called God every morning
then left the phone off the hook
elvis
turned las vegas into a church
when he sang "love me tender"
elvis
turned america into a church
when he sang "the trilogy"
elvis
was harangued by choice;
flesh vs. spirit, God vs. rock'n'roll
mother vs. lover,father vs. the colonel
elvis
grew sideburns as a protest against tom jones'
hairy chest
elvis
would have a president named after him
elvis
was one of the boys
elvis
was not one of the boys
elvis
had an acute intelligence disguised as talent
elvis
broke pirscilla's heart
elvis
broke lisa marie's heart
elvis
woke up my heart
elvis
white trash
elvis
the memphis flash
elvis
didn't smoke hash
and woulda been a sissy
without johnny cash
elvis
didn't dodge the draft
elvis
had his own aircraft
elvis
having a laugh
on the lisa marie
in a colour photograph
elvis
under the hood
elvis
cadillac blood
elvis
darling bud flowered and returned
to the mississippi mud
elvis
ain't gonna rot
elvis
in a memphis plot
elvis
didn't hear the shot
but the king died
just across the lot from
elvis
vanilla ice cream
elvis
girls of 14
elvis
memphis spleen
shooting at the tv
reading corinthians 13
elvis
with God on his knees
elvis
on three tvs
elvis
here come the killer bees
head full of honey
potato chips and cheese
elvis
the bumper stickers
elvis
the white knickers
elvis
the white nigger
ate at burger king
and just kept getting bigger
elvis
sang to win
elvis
the battle to be slim
elvis
ate america
before america ate him
elvis
stamps
elvis
necromance
elvis
fans
elvis
psychphants
elvis
the public enemy
elvis
don't mean shit to chuck d
elvis
changed the centre of gravity
elvis
made it slippy
elvis
hitler
elvis
nixon
elvis
christ
elvis
mishima
elvis
marcus
elvis
jackson
elvis
the pelvis
elvis
the psalmist
elvis
the genius
elvis
the generous
elvis
forgive us
elvis
pray for us
elvis
aaron presley
(1935-1977)

Bono 1995

Posted by Jonathan at 08:46 PM | Comments (5)

April 13, 1995

"The Fly" on the Stage: Readings and Misreadings of the "New" U2

A Paper Presented to the Music Area of
The Popular Culture Association
April 13, 1995

Samuel R. Smith
Center for Mass Media Research
University of Colorado

Up through The Unforgettable Fire (1984) U2 were generally regarded as relentless critics of political repression and religious/ethnic violence, especially as practiced by warring Protestant and Catholic factions in Northern Ireland. They had established themselves by this point as arguably the most socially-conscious band in rock history. Their human rights sympathies found expression in affiliation with groups like Band-Aid and Amnesty International; their enthusiastic participation (along with like-minded "message" rockers Sting and Peter Gabriel) was key to the success of Amnesty International's mid-1980s promotional tours. They were also enthusiastic participants in other politically- oriented projects - Live Aid and Little Steven's Artists Against Apartheid are two which spring immediately to mind.

These activities earned the band a great deal of respect among socially-conscious music fans, but Bono (Paul Hewson, the band's lead singer) was also rumored to have earned a death threat from the Irish Republican Army, of whom the band had been extremely critical. I do not know if this rumor is accurate or is instead just another part of the band's burgeoning mythology. Even if the threat ultimately proves fictional, the important point for our purposes is that U2's unprecedented activism makes such a rumor believable. And while these days it seems that every band is a message band, we have to remember that U2 was spreading the gospel before it became "hip."

Commencing with The Joshua Tree (1987), however, the critical listener could discern a lessening of the overt politicality of the band's music. Despite the powerful anti-war sentiments of "Bullet the Blue Sky," which was more reminiscent of War, the songs which dominated and defined the album were more introspective and personal ("With or Without You," "Where the Streets Have No Name"). "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" is an open admission that the band's spiritual journey had yet to find firm footing upon which to make a stand.

I believe in the Kingdom Come
When all the colors will bleed into one
But yes I'm still running
You broke the bonds
You loosed the chains
You carried the cross
And my shame
And my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
(U2, 1987)

The prayer, plaintively delivered, reads quite simply as an acknowledgement that what has gone before isn't quite sufficient. In the wake of the band's next three projects, though, we are encouraged to explore more closely the relationship that exists between religion, politics, and artistic expression.

Rattle and Hum (1988) is a combination live album/rockumentary centered on the Joshua Tree US tour, and it found the band for the first time locked into a highly experimental mode, toying with musical styles like American blues and gospel, and collaborating with artists like B.B. King, Bob Dylan, and the New Voices of Freedom Choir. The political convictions remained intact, however, with live readings of the band's older material remaining quite faithful to earlier performative interpretations. Especially noteworthy was the band's unusually emotional "Sunday Bloody Sunday," their most famous anti-war anthem. The movie release featured the performance captured the night of the IRA's infamous Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing, and the band's rage over the attack led Bono to launch into an extended rant during one of the song's interludes. It would be next to impossible to watch this footage and conclude that the band's dedication to its longstanding values was slipping.

Nonetheless, scores of U2 fans were put off by the project's stylistic explorations, and less political material (the CD contains thirteen new tracks, several of which foreshadow the more personal mode the band would pursue on Achtung, Baby) led some longstanding faithful to mumble about a "sell-out" - and among "alternative" rock fans, most of whom are obsessive about authenticity, there is no more damning accusation. That definitions of "authenticity" vary widely is beside the point. If my numerous conversations with countless U2 fans can be taken as fair evidence, Rattle and Hum was the least popular album the band had released to that point. For many of these longtime fans, committed as they were to the style the band had cultivated on its first few releases, it was only going to get worse.

After a three-year hiatus U2 returned with Achtung, Baby (1991), a project which diverged wildly from the overt politics and straightforward presentation which characterized their work up through 1987. Instead, the lyrical content of the songs was decidedly more personal - of the twelve tracks on the disc, none is easily read as "political." Most are love songs, although we can see, in cuts like "Even Better Than the Real Thing" and "The Fly" how the band applies its larger societal concerns to personal relationships - in a sense, the revolution is now played out at home.

Even more confusing is the fact that the band's visual style has changed. In the minds of many fans U2 is defined visually by their famous Red Rocks show - the weather had turned nasty, but the band played on. And there was Bono onstage, jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt, belting out "Sunday Bloody Sunday," his breath steaming into the twilight. Now, though, Bono wears makeup. In concert he dresses in an absolutely plastic-looking black suit. He gestures grandly, turning 25,000-seat arenas and 100,000-seat stadiums into highly stylized theaters dominated by dozens of television screens. In every imaginable sense Bono appears, on the surface anyway, to be a pop star grown very full of himself. This new image seems constructed to offend every sensibility of the die-hard U2 fan. And the follow-up, Zooropa (1993), finds the band compounding a hundred times over every perceived sin of Achtung, Baby and the ensuing Zoo TV tour.

During this period I have had countless conversations with U2 fans (and former fans) - in a sense I can probably be said to have conducted a hundred informal interviews on the subject. Over and over in these conversations I keep hearing that U2 has sold out, has been sucked into their own fame, has become a part of the capitalist abomination that is the recording industry - that they have become "mainstream." It is apparent from the tone and tenor of these critiques that Dr. Jameson, in spite of the faults I have elsewhere found with his analysis, is not alone in his unwillingness to move beyond form and into a close perusal of content.

U2 might well have altered the style and thrust of their message, but I do not believe the substance of their last two or three projects supports the conclusion that they have sold anything out. First, we should note that as their audience has grown (especially in the wake of The Joshua Tree) its character has changed. Kids who became fans after hearing "With or Without You" and "One" are likely to be different from fans attracted to the political rage of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" or "New Year's Day." Bono and the rest of the band seem like bright enough men - it is entirely likely they have noticed this evolution. For this reason, we are probably safe in assuming that the band is aware of their commercial success and its qualitative implications.

A studied examination of the last two albums, along with the videotaped live Zoo TV (1994) performance in Sydney, Australia, indicates that the band is acutely aware of the commercialism of the culture in which it makes its living. "Even Better Than the Real Thing," for example, points up the consumerist ideology underpinning Baudrillard's notion of simulacra - commercial culture promises us products which are better than reality (Storey 1993). Bono is clearly aware of the false promise of consumerism and technology, begging his lover to "give me one last chance/We'll slide down the surface of things." Such indulgence in the shallowness of the consumer media playground is not without devastating implications, and Bono lifts directly from Greek mythology in promising, a few lines later, that "the sun won't melt our wings tonight" (U2 1991). In many respects U2 suggests the same things about late capitalist culture that Jameson does. The critical difference is Jameson's out-of-hand dismissal of popular art - say, for example, rock - on the basis of its surface shallowness. Here, though, we very clearly see the artifice of postmodern rock being deliberately used for purposes of irony. Where Jameson (1984) discards such work as pastiche, by taking a closer look we realize that there's nothing blank about the band's appropriation of the parodic style.

Central to U2's recent work is an understanding of persona. Some see the changes in Bono and conclude that he has become their worst pop star nightmare. In doing so, they accurately interpret the differences between the compelling character onstage in during the Unforgettable Fire tour and the posturing, strutting Zoo TV presence. What they have failed to perceive is that while Bono may have, at one point, been portraying himself (or perhaps "Bono" is best read as a character portrayed by Paul Hewson), the character onstage now is most decidedly not Bono. In fact, Zoo TV has featured at least two distinctly different characters - the televangelist of the black plastic suit and the mirror ball, and Macphisto, the self-indulgent devil who panders the glories of shallowness and celebrity. (I do not believe Bono used Macphisto at all in the US legs of the tour. According to interviews and radio features he was afraid the American public wouldn't understand the subtle irony of the character. He should perhaps have worried the same thing about the televangelist, for it is this persona which has evoked the hostility of the people with whom I have spoken.) Macphisto (the reference to Mephistopheles, the Lord of Lies, is certainly no coincidence) is the sarcastic voice behind such biting Zooropa numbers as "Lemon" and "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car." In the latter, especially, it is hard to fathom a "sell-out" reading - Macphisto reassures that "Daddy won't let you weep/Daddy won't let you ache/Daddy gives you as much as you can take" (U2 1993). Again, the culture of materialism and excess seems under attack, and one is fully justified in wondering if Bono isn't taking a fairly contentious swipe at his newer, younger fans, many of whom have no real sense of the band's history. If this is the case, as it seems to be, then the older fans' failure to perceive this subtlety piles another layer of irony onto an already hefty pile.

The magnificence of these personae are on full display in the band's Sydney show last year, however. And it is in this live performance that I believe we get the best evidence for the substance hiding beneath the bombastic surface. The concert intro as spectacle matches as anything I have ever seen. The stadium is packed to the brim. The stage is dominated by three huge video screens and several smaller ones, and a narrow runway thrusts the proscenium deep into the heart of the crowd. The concert is introduced by a mad explosion of montage on the video screens: public and political figures, sports, historical footage, product advertisements, political symbology, all intercut with videotext asking "WHAT DO YOU WANT?" in numerous different languages. After a period, Bono (in televangelist mode) is elevated to stage level in front of a flickering blue screen - this image, meanwhile, is projected onto other screens, and the slightly disorienting result is that, for a moment, it is unclear which of the backlit Bonos is the real one. From here, a raw, fuzzy guitar intro propels the band into a powerful, if relatively conservative, reading of "Zoo Station." Notable, though, is that Bono's persona at this point is determinedly flashy, playing the crowd with grand gestures and a general body language very unlike the more tightly-wound presence familiar to the group's older fans.

As the song ends the video monitors light up with "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG." As the band then launches into "The Fly" we reach, quite early in the show, what proves to be the band's critical master stroke. As the band performs the song, the screens are appropriated by a rapid-fire barrage of videotext - as many as perhaps twenty words or phrases are flashed onto the screens in a single second, while others are drawn out over several seconds, one presumes for effect. The words and phrases themselves are curious in places. A string like "WIFE / VICTIM / RAPE / FOOD / SEXY / WAR / BLOODY / KIDS / TRASH / MOM / FRENZY / FISH / COLOUR / NIGGER" makes no apparent sense - you merely have random words generated and presented in, as Jameson might predict, a blank pastiche.

Other sequences, though, appear more substantive. In one procession we get this string repeated two or three times: "CHARGE IT / WEAR IT / DEBT / DOUBT / HYPE / HOPE." This is closely juxtaposed with another repeated string: "GUN / PUSSY / SCHOOL." This last part is obscure, perhaps, but the debt string appears purposive in light of both the consumerist theme I assert above and the context in which the word "charge" will recur later.

In addition to word bursts, the audience is presented at intervals with phrases which range from the hopeful to the platitudinous to the sarcastic and cynical. "THE FUTURE IS FANTASY; SUPERFICIALITY IS GOD; AVOID CONFLICT; IGNORANCE IS BLISS; IT'S THE REAL THING; CONSUME LATER; DO NOT ACCEPT WHAT YOU CANNOT CHANGE; CHANGE WHAT YOU CANNOT ACCEPT; BELIEVE EVERYTHING; DO YOU BELIEVE ME; YOU ARE A VICTIM OF YOUR TV/HATRED/APATHY/SELF; IS THIS ALL WE GET?; YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE; WHAT DID THE FIRST PUNK ROCK GIRL WEAR TO YOUR SCHOOL?; WORK IS THE BLACKMAIL OF SURVIVAL; I WANT IT NOW; BE GENTLE WITH ME; THIS IS NOT A REHEARSAL; ENJOY THE SURFACE; FREE MANDELA; THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT; AMBITION BITES THE NAILS OF SUCCESS; IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN HERE; TASTE IS THE ENEMY OF ART; BELIEVE" (with the "BE" and "VE" fading, leaving only "LIE"); "MANIPULATION IS ART; YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE; EVERY ARTIST IS A CANNIBAL; CELEBRITY IS A JOB; DEATH IS A CAREER MOVE; MOCK THE DEVIL AND HE WILL FLEE FROM THEE; REBELLION IS PACKAGED; RELIGION IS A CLUB; CONTRADICTION IS BALANCE; I'D LIKE TO TEACH THE WORLD TO SING; GUILT IS NOT OF GOD; TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME; EVOLUTION IS OVER; SILENCE = DEATH; DEATH IS INEVITABLE; EVERYONE IS A RACIST EXCEPT YOU; ROCK AND ROLL IS ENTERTAINMENT; WEAR A CONDOM" (U2 1994).

The cumulative effect is numbing. The pace of the bursts makes catching and processing everything impossible, and in this sense U2 has quite successfully presented a microcosm of our mass mediated consumerist everyday lives. We are literally assaulted by sales pitches - I have heard estimates of anywhere from 1600-3200 per day - and seemingly no institution is innocent of contributing to the noise. In the videotext above, we see that most elements of our culture are represented - corporations, religions, advertising, schools, art, criticism, all are in some fashion called on the carpet.

The problem is that the form allows for no consideration of depth. All messages have been democratized, and the sublime is diluted at every turn by the ridiculous ("wear a condom" is potentially life-saving advice; "I want it now" is the impulse which arguably necessitates the condom message). On the surface, then, meaning has been rendered unknowable, and in the final moments of the song we find the band cynically undercutting sloganeering and the shallow ideology of social change. "IT'S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHANGE IT" is projected on the screens, then recycled over and over in a rapidly accelerating loop (in total this phrase is looped at least thirty times in twenty seconds, with one burst probably looping it fifteen-twenty times in five seconds). Upon seeing this the crowd explodes in a frenzy of cheering - on the heels of such a confusing mush of mixed signals, we shouldn't be surprised to see idealistic young U2 fans seizing fervently upon a moment of hope.

However, it only appears that this phrase has been presented over and over in a reaffirming cycle of hope. In fact, the third and fourth loops replace "change" with "charge" - "IT'S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHARGE IT." Again, consumerism is challenged, and this time it is challenged within the context of U2's traditionally positive social-consciousness. They have always been a band spreading the rhetoric of change, but here they undercut the message, implying that the potential for change is undercut by rampant consumerism. We are, it seems, mortgaging much more than our financial futures. As noted, the song began with "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG"; fittingly enough, as the final chord fades into the crowd's frenzied cheering, the monitors resolve into "WATCH MORE TV."

We might read this performance as a subtle, yet pointed indictment of a culture hijacked by television and its attendant consumerism. The shallowness of the culture is certainly evident in every facet of the presentation, and Bono's televangelist and Macphisto indulge in a decadent wallow which, at the very minimum, paints an unseemly picture. Macphisto's appearance, ninety minutes in to the show, signals the coming-out of the self-indulgent parody. Gold-suited, gold glittered platform shoes, washed out pale makeup and bright red horns - "Look what you've done to me," he tells the crowd. "You've made me very famous, and I thank you." He then announces that his time among the audience is almost over (we're into the encore at this point) but he is leaving a legacy in his wake. "I leave behind video cameras for each of you."

But there's more. For the people of America: "I gave you Bill Clinton - I put him on CNN, NBC, C-Span." He thanks the people of Asia, "without whose tiny transistors none of this would be possible." The people of Europe he has united - when he came among them they were bickering and fighting, but now they are "all hooked up to one cable, as close together as stations on a dial." He has given the people of the former Soviet Union capitalism, "so now you can all dream of being as wealthy and glamorous as me." And in the bitterest irony: "people of Sarajevo, count your blessings. There are people all over the world who have food, heat and security, but they're not on TV like you are." Macphisto's is the unapologetic, sweet speech of the marketplace, but we the audience are clearly encouraged to recognize him as the Prince of the Power of the Airwaves. The message is bitter and unmistakable, and is wholly inconsistent with the question that launched this inquiry - has U2 sold out?

The counter-question, then, is this: has U2 recognized the hopelessness of the situation and given up? The answer here is more complicated. On the one level we can see that the band has, for now anyway, abandoned the Big Social Issue approach which defined their early work. Broad calls for peace and sharing have been replaced by the intimacy of the interpersonal. And it is in these smaller love songs that we can still sense the band's power and intensity. Achtung, Baby's haunting "Love is Blindness," the next-to-last number of the show, finds Bono summoning a young woman out of the audience. As The Edge offers up a brooding, impassioned interlude, Bono clutches the woman tightly, moving around and around in a desperate slow dance. He holds her as her sings the final verse, and only after the last strains of the song fade does he release her. It is hard to maintain cynicism at this point - the moment is both compelling and beautiful. And if we track the thematic and emotional trajectory of the performance we see that what began as spectacle, brilliant surface and bombast, has concluded in the deeply meaningful and personal relationship of two people. Fittingly, the final number is a wrenchingly pretty cover of Elvis' "Can't Help Falling in Love With You." Thematically, at least, this suggests that the journey from the social to the personal is an inevitable one. And if we can believe the power of the intimate moment, meaning is not beyond our reach. What has been lost in the grand political arena has been found, safe and secure, at home.

SOURCES CITED

Jameson, F. (1984). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review, 146 (Jul/Aug), 53-92.

Storey, J. (1993). An introductory guide to cultural theory and popular culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

U2 (1983). War. Lillywhite, S. (Prod.) (Medium: Audio Disc.) New York: Island Records.

U2 (1984). The unforgettable fire. Eno, B., & Lanois, D. (Prods.) (Medium: Audio Disc.) New York: Island Records.

U2 (1987). The joshua tree. Eno, B., & Lanois, D. (Prods.) (Medium: Audio Disc.) New York: Island Records.

U2 (1988). Rattle and hum. Iovine, J. (Prod.) (Medium: Audio Disc.) New York: Island Records.

U2 (1991). Achtung, baby. Eno, B., & Lanois, D. (Prods.) (Medium: Audio Disc.) New York: Island Records.

U2 (1993). Zooropa. Flood, Eno, B., & The Edge. (Prods.) (Medium: Audio Disc.) New York: Island Records.

U2 (1994). Zoo TV live from Sydney. Mallet, D. (Dir.) O'Hanlon, M., & Oldham, R. (Prods.) (Medium: Videotape.) New York: PolyGram Video.

Copyright Samuel R. Smith, 1995.

This paper may be downloaded, copied and distributed as long as its authorship is fully and properly attributed.

Posted by Jonathan at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)

December 06, 1992

Baptist

Spirit, December 6, 1992 (Vol 5, No 10, 2nd Sunday of Advent)

Sent in by Robin P. Blanchard

by Johnny Mack

Baptist

A.D. 30/The Voice

The wilderness beckoned to a young man named John, who wanted to feel the edges of his own soul in the scorching desert wind, wear skins, and survive on grasshoppers and honey from beehives in the rocks. The wilderness swallowed his every outcry in its silence -- his anger at all the holy people who thought their family trees would hold up in eternity.

Who is this voice that says there must be more to life? Who says folks have got to get a life? The King? The Boss? Bono? No, Baptist.

His first release to climb the charts at home in Palestine was _Change of Heart_, with its haunting repeated line "Somebody runs this world, not me, not you." The hit brought people from the cities out into the wilderness to hear Baptist; they joined those from the little towns who had first heard his voice. His second hit single gave him his name: _The Voice in the Wilderness_.

Voice in the wilderness,
voice no one hears.
Voice in the wilderness,
crying out, "God nears."

The Judean wilderness is a place of basics. Where ther's shade, the breeze is cool; where there's none, the sun burns and beats on people. When there's rain, the hills green; when the rain stops, they brown. Where the springs flow out of the rocks, those who know the wilderness find rest and peace. Baptist's last wilderness song summed up his life alone finding his psyche in the silence far from the markets of the temple courts.

In the desert I got a life.
In the silence I heard my soul.
I found my way. I'm on my way.

Baptist drew crowds at the Jordan River. People by the hundreds walked into the water to wash away the past and show the change of heart he challenged them to make. Success didn't change Baptist. When he saw people receiving his baptism just because everyone was doing it, he was the voice crying out again:

Cut them down
the trees without fruit.
Bring the ax to the roots,
cut them down,
at the roots cut them down.

About this time Baptist began singing about a friend of his -- someone who would have more than water to offer, someone of fire and Spirit. This someone dominates Baptist's current hit single "Someone greater will follow me."

The One who is coming
has the Spirit to give.
The One who is coming
has the Fire to live.
The One who is coming
blows the chaff from the wheat.
The One who is coming
I hear his beat.

A.D. 1990s/The Voice of U2

Two thousand years ago Baptist invited the wilderness to awaken his soul. Today a lot of suburban bedrooms and family rooms are carpeted wildernesses where individual selves hang out all too alone. On the air waves voices penetrate the silence of everyone's own rooms, awakening hope for a common soul.

In the 60s hippies stuck daisies in the rifle barrels of soldiers, heard peace blowing in the wind, let their hair grow and the sunshine in. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, school desegregation, poverty programs, the end of the Vietnam War. Communities of resistance. Was it the dawning of the Age of Aquarius?

Punkers in the mid-70s said no, it's the Age of Hypocrites. They stuck safety pins in their noses, hung chains on their clothes, spiked their hair, and disassociated themselves from the everybodies who walked the streets to jobs and homes. They drifted, sometimes bitter and cynical, through the wilderness of poured cement malls and suburban culde-sacs.

In this wilderness U2 became a voice of connection, beginning in 1978, when three high shcool kids answered a note on a school bulletin board. A drummer named Larry Mullen wanted to form a band. The school was Mount Temple, the first, comprehensive, nondenominational, coeducational school in Dublin, Ireland, founded to build tolerance between Protestants and Catholics in this divided land. Three guys answered Larry's note -- Dave Evans, Adam Clayton, and Paul Hewson.

From their first performance, the four had a willingness to give, sparked by their search for connectino. Paul's punk friends in another band named him Bono after the word _Bonovox_ in the window of a hearing-aid shop. Bono named Dave Evans, Edge.

The summer they finished Mt Temple, the four worked from midmorning to night every day in Evan's 8"*10" garden shed. Bono brought his image and Edge, a series of chords. With Adam they played with song ideas. In the evening Larry came from work and added in drum lines. In these months the four became U2, a name they chose for the band because no one could be sure if it referred to the American spy plane, the U2 submarine, or the EverReady battery.

A Shaolm prayer group helped Bono find a way out of his wilderness. It met twice a week, sang gospel songss, and discussed the bible. Shalom gave both Bono and Edge neutral space in which to search for God. Here Bono could feel the pain of his mother's death, speak his fears -- and dreams.

In _Boy_, the first U2 song to chart in the USA, Bono sings:

A boy tries hard to be a man
His mother takes him by the hand
If he stops to think
He starts to cry. Oh, why?

Like Shalom meetings, live performance became gatherings where Bono spoke the sould within him and the longing he felt for human community and believable heroes. _Gloria_ is the voice of Bono the believer, of his conflicts, promises, and pleas to God.

I try to sing this song.
I try to stand up, but i can't find my feet.
I try, I try to speak up, but only in you
I am complete.

U2's best work was always live, their own souls trying to find identity and community with those who heard them. They lent their voices to a search for noviolence and peace. The refused to glorify the so-called martyrs who kept Irish Catholics and Protestants in conflict. They sang of real heroes who like Jesus came in the name of love.

Early morning April 4
shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last they took your life
The could not take your pride
in the name of love.

The U2 of the 80s became a voice in the wilderness of screaming rock n' roll guitars, that called us to let our souls hurt so we might become live-aid to each other again.

On its 1992 Zoo TV Tour, U2's voice of conscience has turned playful and comic. Bono, Edge, Adam, and Larry are over 30 years old now. They created their new album _Achtung Baby_ in Berlin, Germany, where the old wall between Communism and democracy has crumbled and a new society is forming. They named their show for a Berlin subway stop named Zoo Station.

The Zoo TV Tour combines live performance, industrial souns, and high- tech images. On overhead screens computers mix local cable TV (including Home Shopping Guide) with a barrage of prepared images and saying such as: "Rock 'n roll is entertainment." "Over 1 billion served." "Guilt is not of God." "Call your mother." "Nobody is promised a tomorrow." "You're not immune." "Believe."

U2 is not so sure what's happening in this new, chaotic world of the 1990s, but they're singing about the change and the challenge. Their new song _The Fly_, pictures life -- a wall, the sheer face of a mountain. A low voice competes with a gospel voice to descrive how love can make a person beg and crawl, shine, rise, burn, fall.

A man will beg, A man will crawl
On the sheer face of love
like a fly on the wall
It's no secret at all.
Love, we shine like a burning star
We're falling from the sky
The sky...tonight.

_The Fly_ talks about U2's conscience and ambition, about how being an artist can eat a person up as one tries but also fails to say what's truly happening.

It's no secret that a conscience
can sometimes be a pest
It's no secret that ambition
bites the nails of success
Every artist is a cannibal,
Every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration
and sing about the grief.

_Until the End of the World_ is a conversation between Jesus and Judas, and also perhaps between U2, the voice of conscience, and U2, the stars who can't fully live up to their own ideals.

I kissed your lips and broke your heart
You, you were acting like
it was the end of the world.
In my dream I was drowning my sorrows
But my sorrows they learned to swim
Surrounding me, going down on me
In waves of regret, waves of joy
I reached out for the one i tried to destroy.

The Zoo TV program shows U2's idealism. It includes membership forms for Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and a voter-registration group. The proceeds from the song _One_ goes to AIDS research.

Did I ask too much, more than a lot
You gave me nothing. Now it's all I've got.
We're one but we're not the same.
We get to carry each other, carry each other. One.

U2's older songs stir our souls for connection with each other; their new songs speak the pain of becoming one but not the same in relatinoships. As their best-known song says, they aren't sure what they're looking for but their dreams include Jesus' kingdom come.

I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colours bleed into one
But yes I'm still running
You broke the bonds
You loosed the chains
You carried the cross
and my shame, and my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for.

What is it Bono and U2 are still looking for? Who is it they and we, their audiences, cannot live with or without? Their voices cry out in the wilderness.

[questions concerning previous text:]

Connections

1. What are John the Baptist and U2 looking for? How are their voices alike? How different?

2. What U2 lyrics, if any, express your own feeling and search?

3. Which of these words best describes Bono -- _poet, rock musician, prophet_?

4. When have you needed to forge an identity apart from the crowd like John the Baptist? When have you needed to connect like Bono?

5. How are the searches for identity and community connected?

6. What does John The Baptist have to say about hypocrisy? [reference to Matthew 3.1-12]

How Does the Spirit Work in Us?

The Holy Spirit is God presend to and within us. We experience the Spirit of God through our own spirit, at our limits, in those moments when we go beyond our egos and transcend ourselves. U2's Shalom group unerstood that being ego-centered closes us up in self-sufficiency. Openness to anyone outside ourselves is openness to some degree to the Spirit of God.

We human beings are made with a capacity for transcendence. We are made for more than any of us are or will find in our lives. We are made for oneness with God. U2's anger at the trenches dug deep in Irish hearts expresses a desire to transcend divisions between people and find what can bind people into community. John the Baptist wanted the Pharisees and Sadducees to open their stone hearts.

The prayers and signs of our worship describe the telltale signs of the Spirit's prescence. The _Sequence_ for Pentecost Sunday prays that the Spirit soften the hard-hearted, warm the cold-hearted, heal the hurt, bend the stubborn, direct the lost. John 3.8 compares the Spirit to wind that blows freely where it will, invisible except in what it sets in motion.

Oil is the sign of the Spirit in Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Orders, and Anointing of the Sick. Oil shines, soothes, and heals. Early Christians compared olive trees which live for centruies to God the Father; the fruit of the tree, the olive which gets crushed and pressed to get oil, to Jesus, God's Son; and the oil itself which runs free-flowing to heal and soothe to the Spirit.

In the _Procession of Faith_ we pray, "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son." The Spirit is the love of Father and Son for Each other, the inner life of the Trinity present within us.

The Spirit speaks through the prophets, according to the _Profession of Faith_. John the Baptist and U2 have prophetic voices, calling people beyond their certainties and their egos into openness to God and to one another. The role of the prophet is to let the Spirit speak from withing him or her.

The voice of the Spirit has often been the voice of the singer -- the one who could inspire people by singing the epic songs that held their souls. Homer sang the Greek epics. Bands of prophets sang and sought God in ecstasy in ancient Israel. Music has spiritual power; it can carry us out of our egos into states of openness to the Spirit. Music can _in-spire_, that is, _in-spirit_.

For John the Baptist and U2 one source of their words in the past -- for John the words of the prophet Isaiah, for U2 the heroism of Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. Prophets invite words and images of their own experience to intermingle in their deepest souls with events and symbols that have inspired human beings in the past.

Without our voices, the Spirit has no voice in our times. To find words and voice we have to find our souls, work to give words to our experience, and remember in the face of troubles like homelessness and violence, all who have lived in the name of love. The Spirit who is the love of Father and Son calls out from within the desire we each have for transcendence. The Spirit calls us to the oneness in God we're all looking for.

......

Isaiah's Ideal King

Ahaz, who became king of southern Israel in 735 B.C. and made an ally of the superpower Assyrians against his own people, disgusted the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah put his hope in God's power to raise up a real spiritual king from the royal family tree of David, whose father was Jesse.

[Isaiah 11.1-6]

[questions concerning above text]

[1] How is Isaiah's spirit-filled leader like the leader John the Baptist says is coming and like the heroes of U2 songs?

Copyright © 1992 by Sisters of St Joseph of Carondelet. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 1991

"The Making of Achtung Baby"

by Brian Eno

Cool, the definitive 80's compliment, sums up just about everything U2 aren't. They are positive where cool is cynical, involved where it is detached, open where it is evasive. Thinking about it, in fact, cool isn't a notion that you'd often want to apply to the Irish, a people who easily and brilliantly satirise, elaborate, haggle and generally make short stories very long, but who rarely exhibit the appetite for cultivated disdain - deliberate non-involvement - for which the English pride themselfs. The Irish are storytellers, pattern makers, great salesmen and inspired fantasists and they remake their world by re-describing it - several times a day. Temperamentally, they aren't inclined to remain spectators to someone else's idea of how things are:they'll jump right in and make it up for themselfs. "Reality", that arid bottleneck of European thought, comes to seem much more relative and negotiable there: something to be continually reinvented, even at the cost of occasionally losing touch with it completely. It is this reckless involvement which makes them terminally uncool: cool people stay 'round the edges and observe the mistakes and triumphs of uncool people (- and then write about them).

So, here I am, writing about this record with which I had a tangential involvement, still hopefully warm from the experience. U2 had asked Dan (Lanois) and myself to produce this album with them, but I'd already made plans for much of the period. The role I ended up with was luxurious: I came in now and again for a week at a time, listened to what had been going on, and made comments and suggestions. I could point to something and say: "This doesn't do much for me", and suggest how it could be done otherwise without being made aware that I was casually dismissing three weeks' work. On the other hand, I could come in and try to re-enthuse everyone about something that had, for whatever reasons, fallen out of favour. I can think of worse jobs than hearing something you like and then telling the people who made it why they ought to like it too. But the solid backbone of the producing work was down to Dan and (engineer) Flood, who stayed with it through months of ups and downs, and twists and turns, and maintained their concentration and good humor. And, of course, the band members themselfs, whose dogged optimism and good-natured preserverence infect everyone who works with them.

Which is just as well, for working on a U2 record is a long and demanding process. The pattern seems to go like this: a couple of weeks of recording throws up dozens of promising beginnings. A big list goes up on the blackboard, songs with strange names which no one can remember ("is that the one with the slidy bass or the sheet-of-ice guitar?"). These are wheeled out, looked at, replayed, worked on, sung to, put away, bootlegged, and wheeled out again until they start to either consolidate into something or fall away into oblivion. The list on the blackboard begins to thin down, although, Bono, the Mother Teresa of abandoned songs, compassionately continues arguing the case for every single idea that has ever experienced even the most transitory existance: "we HAVE TO HAVE a song like this on the record", "this will be FANTASTIC live", "imagine THIS coming out of your car radio". But as the weeks pass, and the seasons turn outside the studio windows, some things seem to start holding a shape while others get passed over.

And a language starts to evolve. it's a language of praise and criticism, the first flagpoles marking out the landscape within which this new music is being made. Buzzwords on this record were trashy, throwaway, dark, sexy, and industrial (all good) and earnest, polite, sweet, righteous, rockist and linear (all bad). It was good if a song took you on a journey or made you think your hi-fi was broken, bad if it reminded you of recording studios or U2. Sly Stone, T.Rex, Scott Walker, My Bloody Valentine, KMFDM, The Young Gods, Alan Vega, Al Green and Insekt were all in favour. And Berlin itself, where much of the early recording was done (nostalgically for me - we were in the same room where Bowie's "Heroes" was made) became a conceptual backdrop for the record. The Berlin of the Thirties - decadent, sensual and dark - resonating against the Berlin of the Nineties - reborn, chaotic and optimistic - suggested an image of culture at a crossroads. In the same way, the record came to be seen as a place where incongruous strands would be allowed to weave together and where a probably dis-unified (but definitly European) picture would be allowed to emerge.

The emotional scope of the record was prefigured in the scope of its aspirations: phychedelia, glam, R&B and soul. These earlier eras of pop music, however, were characterized not by the search for perfection but by bizarre enthusiams, small budgets, erratic technique, crummy equipment and wild abandon.The dichotomy between that and the way in which we were working gave rise to a lot of questions. Given the choice, how much do you allow a record to exhibit warts-and-all spontaneity, and how much do you repair? Are you really making a record that's recorded in a garage, or are you making a record that reminds you of the feeling of records that are made in garages (- the way a film-maker might use a hand-held camera to give the impression of documentary urgency)? Does it make a difference if people hearing the record say: "that record sounds like trash", rather than, "they've deliberately chosen to make a record that sounds like trash"? Can you use that kind of detached, craft-ful irony and yet come over as emotionally sincere at the same time? On the other hand is "sincerety" important, or are we here as actors, purveying credible IMPRESSIONS of sincerety? Should a record be a picture of where you are now, or of all the places you could just as likely be?

And then another crop of questions: if you know you're probably going to sell several million albums on the strength of your track record, should you remain consistent to that track record? Are you decieving people by moving off in new directions? Do people value you for your consistancy or your suprises? It's easy for a theorist (normally someone who isn't selling 20 million records) to answer these questions: naturally, he or she will recommend the supposedly riskier choice, releasing the weirdest and most extreme album possible. But this apparently heroic stance is based on a romantic view of what artists do; the idea that they drag benighted publics into shocking new worlds for their own good. There's a certain medicinal note to the whole process - if you don't like it, it must be doing you good. Pop music has never really been like this: it's practitioners don't usually shield themselfs behind the shimmery veils of High Art, divinding the world into insiders and outsiders - they expect to be liked (or at least talked about) by significant numbers of people. They want to be part of a world that excites them, not way out beyond it. Actually, I can't think of any artist I know who is not concerned about the reactions of his or her listeners: not with a view to pandering to them, but with a view to not dissapointing their trust.

So now you get the picture: we left the songs in Berlin three long paragraphs ago and disgressed into a series of "What are we actually DOING?" discussions. This is quite normal. It can take four or five hours a day -two or three days a week. U2's records take a long time to make not because they're stuck for ideas, but because they never stop talking about them.

Records that are made over an extended period, however, ("Achtung Baby" took about a year), court the curse I call "Hollywoodization". This is the process where things are evened out, rationalized, nicely lit from all sides, carefully balanced, studiously tested against all known formulae, referred to several committees, and finally made triumphantly unnoticeable. It's the Dunhill lighter approach to culture, grafting a miserable concept of polish onto a conceptually creaky frame, where deficits of nerve, verve and imagination meets the surfeits of glitz and gloss. The only reason that pop hasn't fallen completely into this trap is that few investors - and thus few opinions - have traditionally been involved in the making of a record. Compared to the returns that a big-selling band like U2 can expect, the actual cost of recording is traditionally quite small. And compared to film, music is technically relatively simple: a record is usually the result of a small, tightly knit team working in very close contact and with a continuity of attention. Thus, 'big' records still keep appearing that are genuinely suprising, that haven't been whittled down to normalcy, kitched out or democratically neutered.

I have a feeling that, whatever else people accuse this record of, it won't be those things. It's a long step taken with confidence. U2's state of mind going into this record was similar to that before 'The Unforgetable Fire'; ready for something bigger, rebelling against their own stereotypes. Listening to the result, it all makes sense, sounds coherent. You might be forgiven for thinking that they knew just what they wanted before they began, but I don't think that's true. I doubt anyone ever does until they run into it, and even then it might take a while to recognize. There's a very general compass bearing when you start out, a few pointers and code words that get you going, some musical oases that you'll hope to visit on the way. But those are just hints: they don't tell you where you're headed, just what you're likely to pass. On the other hand, though, you can know what you DON'T want, and a lot of the process of making a record comes to be the task of finding a cultural space that isn't already ringing with unwanted resonances and over-tones. This can be a new space, one that no one had identified before, or, it can be an old one that suddenly sounds fresh again. Pop is a lot to do with re-evaluatin, tapping into the perodic cycles of energy that things radiate as they recede into history. Occasionally there are memorable moments of vision, powerful lights to head boldly towards, and when they happen they supply the drive for a whole new slew of work. Although no one sits around WAITING for them (nothing comes to he who waits), if your attention is somewhere else, you can miss them. That's why rough mixes are so important; they allow you to postpone your attentiveness.

Attention is noticing where you are, as opposed to where you thought you'd be. It's easy to get stuck in the detailed work of overdubbing, fiddling and tweaking, but it often doesn't get you far from where you started. Bigger jumps take a type of nimbleness, the agility to switch back and forth from detail to big picture, from zoom to wide angle. The advantage of working in company is that you don't have to do both yourself. With U2 it's very rare that EVERYONE in the room is using the same lens at the same time. Larry (Mullen) and Adam (Clayton) are reliable wide anglers when things start to lose perspective or become too narrowly focused: they become the voice of musical concience. Edge, the archaelolgist of the rough mix, delved back through earlier strata in the song's development, emerging triumphantly with a different vision on a battered cassette. Steve Lillywhite, a welcome addition at the mixing stage, comes in fresh and enthusiatic, free of history, and trusts his gifted ears. Dan listens to feel, to the skeleton of the song, and draws attention to things that everybody else has stopped noticing. Flood reawakens sleeping songs with brilliantly original mixes after we've all gone home. I trust my instincts, wax doubtful or enthusiastic, grumble Englishly and liberally contradict myself. All these shifts of perspective make the development of a song very non-linear: from the inside, the process often feels chaotic, jumping from one identity to another, stretching the song this way and that until it all falls apart, then picking up the bits and starting over.

But the bottleneck (in most records, probably) is lyric writing. Why? It's because the lyricist assumes the really specific job of focusing the music, of pointing it somewhere. Words are very sharp objects. On a vocal day, Bono appears with numerous written sheets which he fans out over the floor of the control room. Dan, as always, will have made the situation as conducive as possible: usually no headphones, a hand-held mike, loud monitors, nice reverb, good lighting - and regards the ensuing technical difficulties as his problem, not the musician's. Bono gets singing, jumping physcially and conceptually through the emerging song, weaving lyrical threads into bigger patterns. The vocal elides gracefully between recognisiable language and fluent Bongolese - semi-linguistic scat forming temporary bridges ocer lyrical gaps. Meaning is chiselled out bit by bit, polished, broadned, inverted, discarded, revived. Close attention is paid to subtle shift of vocal tone and emphasis. Homeless lines wander hopefully from verse to verse. A single ill-fitting word chokes process for half an hour. Flood smokes sympathetically. Dan keeps careful notes, Shannon (Strong, assistant) and Robbie (Adams, assistant engineer) keep all the many logs up to date. Work continues in this way until several vocal tracks are recorded. The picture becomes more detailed.

Later, Dan and Flood work through the tracks, 'comping' a line-by-line best-of from that evening's work, and making a rough mix. Bono listens to and studies this comp over the next few days, changes a word or a line or a verse, rephrases and re-sings, and the process takes place again. In this way, he begins to hone in on a performance, an attitude, a persona. He discovers who is singing the song, and what kind of world that person inhabits. Who and where.

In the meantime, someone will come in with an old rough mix he's just rediscovered, which, for all its shortcomings, HAS SOMETHING. What is it? Can we get it back without abandoning everything that's happened since? Can we get the best of both of them? When it fails, the outcome is dilute, compromized, homogenized. When it succeeds, and a hybrid comes into being, there is a synergy of feelings and nuances that nobody ever forsaw. If that happens, it's news. There's a lot of that kind of news on this record: 'So Cruel' is epic and intimate, passionate and chill, 'Zoo Station', perkily manic, industrially jovial, 'Ultra Violet (Light My Way)', has a helicopterish melancholy, 'Mysterious Ways' is heavy-bottomed and light-headed. To find a single adjective for any song proves difficult: it's an album of musical oxymorons, of feelings that shouldn't exist togheter, but which are somehow credible.

And this is exactly what I've always liked about pop music: its ability to create crazy emotional landscapes and invite you to come and dance in them.

1991 Brian Eno

Posted by Jonathan at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)