For U2, Bono Makes the Big Ask

“Better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” That’s a Jesuit motto, as translated by my late Uncle Bob.

And that’s the position Bono is now in, having engineered a deal for Apple to drop U2’s new record Songs of Innocence into 800 million iTunes collections – and to leave it to the listener to save it or delete it: Begging for forgiveness, having declined to ask for permission.

There he was, semi-contrite in Rolling Stone; there he is, taking David Carr of the Times on a tour of his house in Dublin in order to get the message of contrition out the old-fashioned way: through a friendly item in the morning paper.

At Georgetown the other day a few of us, freestyling after a session on the Catholic imagination, wound our way through Bruce Springsteen’s debt to Flannery O’Connor and on to the spirituality of U2. Now, I’ve been a fan ever since a young woman I knew in high school showed up for French class bleary-eyed one morning, having seen U2 play at JB Scott’s in Albany the night before. (March 23,1981, on the Boy tour.) I’ve been a devotee – the word is apt – ever since I saw Bono climb the scaffolding over the stage during spring weekend at SUNY-Albany on the War tour (May 7, 1983).

But the nature of U2’s spirituality is complex and worth pondering just now. Because the spirituality of U2 – as much as the desire for “relevancy” cited in the Times headline – is what led them to do the deal with the cunning entity that is Apple. (As Richard Rodriguez has artfully pointed out, the company’s logo is a piece of ripe fruit with a bite out of it.)

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. “Are you kidding? They want to be on up on a f—-in’ satellite playing to the f——in’ planet,” he retorted.

Now they are, courtesy of iTunes. And now this band that memorably covered Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love is getting a taste of life on satellite.

A few years ago in the Times I proposed that John Paul II’s pontificate depended on whether he could perform acts of authentic contrition for the sins of the church. We await perfect contrition from the Vatican, but the popes have gone to their knees before the cameras, and it’s a start.

Now Bono is on the threshold of contrition, possibly for the first time in his long career. And if there’s any justice, it is this development – rather than any new format or distribution scheme —- that will keep U2 relevant into their sixties, and will keep their music spiritual and not just aspirational.

10 November 2014
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