Apologia Pro Vita Bono - Part II

Bono

Now, there is one thing that neither I, nor the best rhetorician in the world, can fix.  And that’s if you don’t like U2 because you just don’t like that kind of music.  I have this problem with Garth Brooks.  I’m well aware of the man’s popularity, of his songwriting abilities, his talent, his positive influence on the musical world, but I refuse to voluntarily listen to his music because I hate it.  In fact, I hate most country-western music produced after the early 1980s, unless it was created by a handful of country-western artists.  So, if you are one of those people who has uttered the phrase, “I know, I know, they’re a great band.  I just don’t like them!” then this probably isn’t the article for you.

Let’s split this argument up into three distinct objective reasons why everyone should love Bono (or at least not have Bono Hate).  Reason #1: Bono is a Modern Romantic, which is something that isn’t easy to pull off.  Reason #2: Bono has successfully become a rock star without sacrificing his character.  Reason #3: Bono has consistently worked on behalf of charitable organizations for most of his adult life, and we shouldn’t forget the amount of effort it takes anyone, much less a person who is a member of an internationally popular rock & roll group, to plead in good faith to industrialized, Westernized, rich nations on behalf of the world’s most poor over and over again, knowing that most of your requests will be met with indifference and patronization at best.  I think I’ve got the most essential stuff covered here, so let’s see how persuasive I can be.

Being as partial as I am to chronology, let’s start with Reason #1: Bono is a Modern Romantic.  Much of pop music today seems almost to celebrate lyrics that either could have been written by a wangst-ridden, 13-year-old junior high kid or by some kind of automatic song lyrics generator that has a little “genre” dial on the side.  You know about that machine, right?  This isn’t to say that there aren’t good lyricists out there, for there certainly are.  But more and more the most extremely popular acts in music today have become almost campy in their attempt at what they define as “originality.”  And while the act may look different, at the end of the day it’s still the same story that’s being told, day in and day out.

So how do these artists keep people coming back, even though people can probably recite the lyrics before they hear the album?  They are Romantics.  They are expressionistic and write about the things that people care about.  They fill one part of the music-shaped hole in our hearts (to use a well-worn metaphor), but they don’t quite complete us.  The originality that discerning ears crave is conspicuously absent. 

Listen to rap music by 50 Cent, and then listen to early N.W.A.  Now try to convince me that 50 Cent is as original as N.W.A. or has the charisma of Dr. Dre.  That’s because artists like N.W.A., or Bono (or U2), or Bruce Springsteen, or Arcade Fire, or Robert Plant (or Led Zeppelin) know that writing lyrics and producing music isn’t about taking older styles of music and reproducing them with a modern sound.  It’s about taking older styles of music, sticking them in a blender, pulling them out, and completely re-writing the ideas in new ways that expand and enhance our understanding of both our selves and the music to which we listen. 

To read the next part of this Apologia Pro Vita Bono, click here!