I once saw a piece of graffiti in the bathroom of an East Village bar that said: Bono, I love you so much I hate you. I hadn’t known my deepest feelings could be expressed in so few words or that there were other people who felt the way I did. I still remember the shock I felt in seventh grade when John Lennon was killed and the greater shock when it came out in the papers afterwards that the guy who shot him was a fan. But by 1995 when the singer Selena was killed by the president of her fan club, it had become axiomatic. It’s always your biggest fan you have to watch. Murder is usually intimate rather than random. In most cases the killer is not a mugger on the street but someone close enough to care; if it’s a woman her husband or lover is usually the guilty party.
The great hypocrisy surrounding Bono today is that he is considered to be political because of his activism, when he has given up being political where it really counts, in his songs. When you hear Bono sing “Elevation” at an NBA half-time show brought to you by NetZero, nothing is communicated but the most fake and watered-down idea of spirituality. The net effect really is zero, though I’m sure the day’s gross was substantial.
Most of U2’s last album is vague and trite even by love song standards. “Beautiful Day” and “Walk On” are chicken soup for morons. “Peace on Earth” asks for too much because it doesn’t really want anything; it’s as vapid as the final round of a beauty pageant. The notebook-rap filler of “New York,” if you dope it out, is about Bono leaving his family in Ireland and taking a mistress in America. Of course there’s plenty of fine print about Amnesty International and Greenpeace in the liner notes, but you can get their contact info off the web. What people need is a musical reason to care and there isn’t one here.
This is not to say that their younger days were so wonderful. When PBS rebroadcast U2’s 1983 Red Rocks concert recently during Pledge Week, I was surprised to see how indistinguishable it all was from a fascist rally: the boots, the martial drums and flags, the blood imagery and fists raised in salute. If fascism really is the aestheticization of politics, as Walter Benjamin said, this is as good a place as any to start looking for it in our time.
Still, when Bono says U2 is the greatest rock band in the world, he might be right. Since Kurt Cobain’s suicide, there isn’t much competition. But really what he’s saying, whether he knows it or not, is that rock is dead again. No one believes in it and no one’s buying. For years now rock has been losing its market share to rap, while rap has been losing sight of its one-time principles in favor of Puffy-style poolside party jams. I don’t judge art by its political content, but if it has no content whatsoever it’s usually worthless. Gone are the days when Chuck D. could say rap was CNN for black people. It’s more like Playboy Channel now. The Old Guard packed up and moved to Hollywood, while every new rapper seems to have an identical line of signed baggy sweats to push. It’s all about the bling-bling and the Benz-o.
Next page: Eminem: As American as Bugs Bunny and Friday the 13th
