Remarking on Bono’s recent faux-contrition over his band’s deal with Apple to push their new Songs of Innocence onto iPhone 6s and iTunes playlists everywhere, Paul Elie finds “the spirituality of U2” is to blame for the debacle just as much as any desire for relevancy:
Well before Nirvana perfected the soft-loud-soft song approach, U2 perfected the already classic secular-spiritual approach that might be called you-You-you – in songs addressed to a lover in the verses and to the crowd and/or a divinity in the chorus. (“Song for Someone” on the new record is the most recent example.) Bono sings to “someone” — his wife, or his friend, or his son, or to the listener; at the same time, he sings to everyone – everybody on the planet, in his own estimation – and to God or God’s surrogate, too.
That’s the essence of the spirituality of U2: the notion that we are, in the end, one people, one audience, with a common humanity and shared aspirations, which U2 has evoked for a third of a century in its frankly aspirational music.
But just as the aspiration to address everybody, speaking to us and for us all, is intermittently the hubris of various world religions, so it is intermittently the hubris of U2. “You know, they’re not punks – they want to play Madison Square Garden,” I said cleverly to a college DJ I knew after that spring-weekend gig [in 1983]. “Are you kidding? They want to be on up on a f—-in’ satellite playing to the f——in’ planet,” he retorted.
Previous Dish on U2 and religion here.
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