What Bono Knows
by Bob Cook

At heart, we want our rock stars to be incredible fuck-ups. Our daily lives are dreary and boring; we need and want the visceral connection with people who seem one half-step removed from the insane asylum, who risk what we would never dare, who get to sleep with anybody they want, and who eventually crash with unintentional hilarity for our pleasure. "If I could stick a knife in my heart/Suicide right on the stage/Would it be enough for your teenage lust?/Would it help ease your pain?" sneered Mick Jagger on 1974 "It's Only Rock and Roll," the Stones' acknowledgement of how we want them to jazz up our humdrum lives.

This may explain why so many people hate Bono. It's not just that he does the Jesus Christ Pose onstage (and off) — it's that he's completely sincere when he does it. Bono has no major scandal to speak of; he seems in no danger of flaming out. He raises his children, he raises the world's conciousness about the crushing effects of debt on the world's poorest nations. His band, U2, can put out a new album 20 years after its debut, and unlike any other band, can still have a hit and get away with actually playing the songs on it on tour, rather than just leaning on nostalgia. Bono is not only Not One of Us, he is Better Than Us, and we hate him for it.

It's hard to remember a day when Bono was not the world's biggest rock star/annoyance, but such a day did exist. The evolution of his image sounds like Europe, divided into pre- and post-War. When U2 released its first three albums — Boy, October and War — between 1980 and 1983, the band was a revelation, a bullshit-cutter through a particularly bullshitty period of pop music. You get the idea from watching VH1 that most early 1980s pop was insincere, synth-driven blips and bloops. In that environment, U2's fiery, punk-inspired guitar rock grabbed you by the throat and shook you like little else could, or would. Punk itself had retreated into reactionary hardcore; U2's music demanded your attention, touching your heart and demanding that you, the listener, at least feel something. Like the best music — whether the God/devil conflict of rockabilly, the outright Satanism of some heavy metal or the alternately dreamy and angry Rastafarian vibe of early reggae — U2 had an outsider spirituality, with three of the four members being non-Catholic Christians from a country dominated by Catholicism.

That sort of stuff plays well when you're a young — at the time, the members of U2 were in their early 20s — and relatively unknown band; after you become a big hit, a lot of stuff comes off as so much lecturing and hectoring. A key moment was 1985's Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, organized by Bob Geldof for Ethiopian famine victims. U2 got started on its climb to worldwide stardom with its extended version of "Bad," from The Unforgettable Fire, aided by the visual of the extremely mullet-headed Bono jumping into the crowd, dancing with a woman and hugging her during the song's long instrumental break. At that moment, and from then on, people found Bono to be either a sincere and heartfelt person, or a royal, posing pain-in-the-ass.

Two things didn't help him. First, that he had no idea how he was viewed, leading to such montrosities as the movie Rattle and Hum, U2's epic journey to rediscover the American musical roots the band really didn't have. Second was that he eventually did figure out how he was viewed, leading to sometimes leaden, intentional parodies of himself on record and on stage for much of the 1990s. The band's supposedly ironic use of a Manhattan Kmart to announce its ghastly (even, now, by the band's own admission) tour for Pop in 1996 came off as merely patronizing.

In each of these times, U2 appeared headed for a fall, yet it never really went away. Its latest reinvention — the back-to-the-apparent-basics approach of All You Can't Leave Behind — in light of Bono's recent nonmusical forays such as his tour of Africa with then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and his Midwest tour to appeal for AIDS funding appears less as a pose than as a sincere middle-age rediscovery.

Chicago Sun-Times religion reporter Cathleen Falsani nailed this as she followed Bono during his Midwest tour. She wrote about how Bono was again becoming more forthright about his Chrisitianty, which calls on its followers to do exactly what Bono is doing — try to save the world from itself, even if that means holding yourself to the world's ridicule.

In that light, Bono is giving rock fans a visceral connection to another form of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, one in which he can take the personal risk of looking like a pompous ass for the things he believes in. Other rock stars think they're Better Than Us but don't make a point of telling of us that; Bono doesn't believe he's Better Than Us but shows us that anyway. If only Bono seemed more human, more fallible, maybe we'd like him better. Bono's crime is that he knows he has a special place in the world and doesn't pretend otherwise. Bono himself seems not to care about our feelings of annoyance, and maybe he shouldn't.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.