U2: Beyond Music

The recent labor of the most famous Irish group in the world. Once again on the trail of a religious experience, but one that is not at all spiritualistic. Grace, like a “beautiful woman,” walking down the street

BY MAURIZIO CAVERZAN

People used to say that rock was the devil’s music. And maybe it was partly true. But today, the biggest rock star of the moment writes prefaces to the book of Psalms. This is a 40-year-old Dubliner who calls himself Bono and is the leader of U2, perhaps the most inventive rock group of the last twenty years. It is not that their music can be called, by contrast, “God’s rock.” But in November 1999, at the MTV Europe Awards presentation in Dublin, a little scene took place that had symbolic overtones. It fell to Mick Jagger, the legendary leader of the Rolling Stones, to present the award to Bono Vox. Bono, in front of the audience of his home city, took the liberty of making a meaningful comment: “This is the devil giving an award to god.” Nothing more than a comment, to be sure, but a revealing one, showing his awareness that U2’s music contains a charge that is in its own way subversive. In his lyrics, interviews, and writings, Paul David Hewson, Bono’s real name, gives the surprising testimony of a religious, non-conformist spirit. “Explaining faith has always been difficult. How can you explain a love and a logic in the heart when the world is so full of trouble? Explaining faith is impossible… Vision more than visibility… Instinct more than intellect.” These are questions and insights which also fill the songs of this group from Dublin, a city where the warfare between Catholics and Protestants has been going on for decades and where the creative co-existence of four classmates from Mount Temple High School has represented and still represents a little big anomaly. Besides Bono, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., is also Catholic, whereas guitarist The Edge (Dave Evans) is Protestant, and bass player Adam Clayton is agnostic. Paul David learned tolerance and mutual understanding of differences early, in his family. About his childhood with his parents, before his mother died (when he was only ten years old), he says, “My mother was Protestant, my father Catholic. This fact would be irrelevant anywhere except in Ireland…. After going to Mass at the top of Finglas Hill, in the north part of Dublin, my father would wait outside the little chapel of the Church of Ireland at the bottom of the hill, where my mother had taken her two children…. I stayed awake by thinking about the pastor’s daughter and would let my gaze wander about the technicolor stained glass windows. Those Christian craftsmen had invented cinema… light projected through color to tell their story.” In those years, the Hewson family lived in Ballymon, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Dublin, and Paul David attended Mount Temple school. Here he met Alison, who would become his wife a few years later. And here in this school, not only his family but also U2 had its origin, set up when he was 17 years old. A year later the group cut their first 45 rpm record, Paul David became Bono, and in 1980, with their first album (Boy), the group’s popularity went beyond the borders of Ireland.

Elevation tour
On March 24th, “Elevation Tour 2001” started in Miami. Elevation is the third song on All That You Can’t Leave Behind, the group’s latest album, which has sold almost seven million copies all over the world. The album’s title indicates the road of return to your roots, the attempt to save the things you care about most, your friends. Written very tiny and hidden on one side of the cover, which shows the group at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, is “J 33-3.” This is a cryptic reference to the Bible verse, Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to me and I will answer you; I will tell you great secrets of which you know nothing.” Those who attend the “Elevation Tour” concerts will probably hear Forty, the piece inspired by Psalm 40 (“I waited, I waited for the Lord, and he stooped down to me, he heard my cry. He drew me from the deadly pit, from the miry clay”), which since 1983, when they cut War, is the song they use to close almost all their concerts. “Psalms and hymns gave me my first taste of inspired music,” Bono writes. “I liked the words, but I wasn’t sure of the melodies, except for the Twenty-Third Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd.” I remember that they were mumbled and sung on a monotone rather than real singing. And yet, in a strange way, they prepared me for the honesty of John Lennon, the baroque language of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, the full-throated belting of Al Green and Stevie Wonder. When I listen to these singers, I reconnect with a part of me that I can’t explain… my soul, I suppose. Words and music,” Bono goes on, “have done for me what solid, even rigorous religious argumentation has not been able to do; they have introduced me to God–not to faith in God but rather to a tangible sense of God.” This is what Bono is like. It is not that this matter in itself modifies the formulas and contents of the universe of rock. On the contrary. Among the high priests of the subject, critics, and on-the-road pseudo-intellectuals, Bono Vox’s Christianity arouses irony, disappointment, and embarrassment. It is almost always left out of reviews and news reports of his concerts. The lyrics are usually disregarded, hardly ever quoted. Critics x-ray the sound quality, the interchange of the instruments, the stratification of rhythm arranged by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, authors of many of the group’s songs, but the third dimension of the most atypical and nonconformist rock star of the moment is left in the shade.

The right path
In no way a bigot, moralistic, or with spiritualistic leanings, he has no bodyguards and doesn’t like to be ferried about in a limousine when on tour. To take part in the most recent Pavarotti & Friends, he turned down the offer for a private plane and arrived with The Edge and Brian Eno after a long trip on commercial airlines. “Before, the idea that the Scriptures were full of thieves, murderers, cowards, adulterers, and mercenaries shocked me, but now it is a source of great comfort.” About his music, he says, “Pop music is made for telling people that everything is fine. Rock says the opposite, but also that things can change.” All you have to do is read the lyrics to Wake Up Dead Man or Grace to grasp the conflict between a chaotic world and the possibility of finding the right path again. And also to understand the source of Bono’s social commitment. Even his wife Alison, now expecting her fourth child, is not exactly what you imagine a rock star’s woman to be. Involved in the Chernobyl Children’s Project, she goes often to Chernobyl and devotes time to hospitality for sick children. In 1985, as newlyweds, they went to work in a first-aid camp in Ethiopia, in direct contact with the most heart-wrenching forms of malnutrition, abandonment, and poverty. “When you are there seeing it, you think that you will never forget,” Bono says, “but then you do forget and go back to being an artist. For me this was unacceptable.”
To promote Jubilee 2000, the campaign for the cancellation of Third World debt, he met with the powerful of the earth, from Rockefeller to Clinton, from British Prime Minister Tony Blair to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. When he was received by John Paul II he gave the Pope his sunglasses, and coming out of the audience said, “We have a very funky Pope.”

Four kids
Last October, he delivered to Kofi Annan a petition signed by 21 million people in favor of the Third World countries. “Now the salvation of the world is in the hands of better-qualified people than me,” he said in response to the provocation of the Times, which ran a headline “Can Bono Save the Third World?” A few days later, his most recent album came out, Walk On. The fourth track on it is dedicated to San Sun Kyi, the woman leader of the opposition to the military regime in Birmania, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. The album is banned in Birmania, where anyone who listens to it risks imprisonment.
A few months ago, Bono’s father, Bobby, turned 75, and he invited all their friends to celebrate the birthday at the Clarence Hotel in Dublin, which he owns. That morning, to greet his father when he woke up, he had giant posters put up all over town saying, “Happy Birthday, Dad.”
This is Bono, leader of U2, “a band that has always looked beyond music.” A band that behind its songs hides “four kids in a room full of gloom.”