Tebow, Bono, & Jesus

After skidding to an 8-8 regular season record and enduring mass media scrutiny from Saturday Night Live comedians to sports statisticians, Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos were expected to fall hard at home in the Wild Card round of the NFL playoffs. Everyone predicted them to be bloody Bronco meat, losing at the feet of defending AFC champion Pittsburgh Steelers. Instead, Tebow, the Denver Broncos, and their legion of fans are praising God after reaching the mountaintop of a another mile high miracle in a 29-23 overtime triumph.

Some seven months ago, the rock band U2 inhabited the same Invesco Field, resisted leaving earth at the predicted rapture, and shared time backstage with the up-and-coming quarterback Tebow. The likes of Tebow and Bono hang out—and we get to speculate about the connection between religion, football, and rock n roll.

Tebow and Bono have their celebrity in common, but more importantly and perhaps most controversially, they utilize the “platforms” (to use Tebow’s phrase) of football and rock n roll respectively to profess their faith in a higher power, in particular confessing allegiance to the God-incarnate carpenter-prophet of western religion known to many as their messiah-savior, Jesus Christ.

While U2 have never been ashamed of their devout Christian faith and their lyrics boast biblical imagery on every record, the bandmates were once shy about the kind of high-profile fundamentalist praise-riffing that a player like Tebow employs before, during, and after every football game. Fans surely remember Bono mocking television preachers back-in-the-day, lambasting fans to remember that God isn’t short of cash. Coming from a Catholic-Protestant “mixed marriage” in Ireland, the formerly-known-as Paul Hewson is all-too-familiar with the darker, violent side of religiosity.

But when his anti-poverty work with DATA then ONE then RED intensified around the turn-of-the-century, Bono made friends with many in the US evangelical Christian community, worked closely with CCM artists, and could be seen in high-profile meetings with people like the Pope and Billy Graham. In interviews, he became increasingly outspoken about how his faith in Christ charged him to identify with the poor even as his own wealth increased.

On the DVD filmed in Boston and released after the 2001 Elevation tour, at the top of “Where The Streets Have No Name,” a chorus from “40” precedes the track, with Bono’s head tilted toward heaven, and then, as the familiar epic opening of Streets sends chills through arena, Bono takes a knee. Yes, Bono takes a knee and recites a few lines from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Psalm 116 (the version of the Good Book promoted by Bono and known as The Message): “What can I give back to God for the blessings he’s poured out on me? I’ll lift high the cup of salvation as a toast to our Father.”

I don’t know how many times—or in how many shows—U2’s beloved and hated singer has taken a knee, but I bet he does it often, and from watching that Boston clip a few times over and again, it’s self-evident that Bono was “tebowing” a decade before Tebowmania, around the time Tim Tebow hit adolescence. Of course, most people just call it praying, but the quarterback’s dramatic and prostrate piety has captured the imagination of our nation.

Both Tebow and Bono love Jesus, use celebrity to promote an unlikely blend of popular culture and Christology, frequently reminding folks that there are topics more important in our world than football or rock n roll. But the secular backlash has been acute, often from a left or liberal perspective, such as seen in the work of Edge of Sports writer Dave Zirin. (The objections that writers like Dave Zirin raise about Tebowmania do have legitimate gripes, and I encourage folks to read and understand them. A spiritual path that’s a source of comfort and compassion for many is sometimes aligned with a social perspective that’s a source of alienation and anger for others.)

To be bothered by conservative politicians like Rick Perry or Michelle Bachman claiming Tebow as their own inadvertently cedes Christ to the Republicans (even if Tebow himself leans to the right). Painting Jesus as the property of the right or left is a problem that people of a deep and genuine sense of unity and ecumenism and inclusivity have been combatting long before Tebow or the Tea Party came along, but perhaps we just want to say once and for all that Christianity is about a Vision that transcends your (or my) version of it.

Another problem that’s prickled critics of the Tebow-as-miracle-working-chosen-one fantasy is the idea that God could take sides in a football contest, anointing this quarterback or condemning that cornerback, based somehow on the piety or impropriety of either.  The God of the universe is not some kind of back-pocket genie, some rabbit’s-foot-talisman that you can back into your gear bag on the way to the stadium, and if you do the proper hocus-pocus, then poof, your team wins. But as silly and dangerous as that kind of thinking might be, it’s equally sketchy in my estimation to claim that God couldn’t possibly care about football (or rock n roll) or to suggest that a lifestyle rooted in prayer and meditation, in clean living and a positive moral-mental attitude might not contribute to solid, successful play on the field (or excellent singing at a U2 show).

When I visited Michigan for Christmas, my Dad and I (both U2 fans, football fans, and Christians who lean to the left on most social/political issues) confessed our shared respect for Tebow and his expressions of faith. It was a strangely reassuring moment. But does God care about football?

When I ran track and cross-country in high school, I was obsessed with the runners’ movie Chariots of Fire. In the flick, the devout Christian sprinter Eric Liddell remarks, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” In our times, sport and music are such sources of communal human joy, it’s hard to imagine God not taking pleasure in a good U2 concert or in a particular Denver Broncos underdog upset victory where a passionately religious quarterback throws an epic winning pass at the top of the overtime period.

It’s probably not fair to imply that God cares about football or rock n roll the same way that God cares about peace and love and grace or about the poor, the hungry, or those in prison. But I am grateful to Tebow and Bono for telling us as much and more whenever we wave an interviewer’s microphone their way, and they have the chance to remind us that it’s not all about Tebow and Bono or about football or rock n roll but about love and peace and grace and the poor and the hungry and those in prison; that is, to these celebrities, it’s actually all about Jesus, and if it is, it’s really about the things that Jesus cares about.

Even yet, I experience a profound if passing joy hearing Bono sing and watching Tebow win. And I am not ashamed to say I imagine that God does too.  –Andrew William Smith, Editor

Holiday Message: Love Rescue Me

Edtior’s note: We were thrilled to stumble across this Christmas Day tribute to the song “Love Rescue Me,” reprinted here by permission of the author and blogger Joshua M. Brown.

I’m going to tell you an amazing story today. It’s a story about art and collaboration, a story about youth and innocence, influence and homage. It spans decades and takes place around the world. But most of all, it’s a story about love…

It is the middle of the 1970’s and we’re looking in on a tiny bedroom in Northern Dublin, Ireland. Its teenaged inhabitant calls this bedroom “the box.” The boy who lives in this room is called Paul Hewson but you will come to know him later as Bono, lead singer of the band U2. He is trapped in “the box” in body only, because his mind is set free when he is listening to music. And of all the music he listens to, nothing has quite the liberating effect, he will later tell interviewers, than the songs and lyrics of Bob Dylan. He calls Dylan an artist who paints the kind of images “you can’t see with your eyes.”

The Dylan influence will set Bono up for all sorts of folk music, eventually leading him to John Lennon and the idea that rock and roll can, in fact, change the world. The first song Bono learns for acoustic guitar is If I Had a Hammer which clearly sets the tone for the artist’s activism at an early age.

Paul is a terrible student in school and can’t concentrate on anything but music. Listening to Bob Dylan and The Who and the Kinks and the Beatles is his only ticket out of the grayness that surrounds him.

***

It’s 1987, and the band U2 has transformed from a Dublin-based post-punk curiosity to the biggest rock and roll band in the world. Bono is no longer a kid obsessing over 60’ s rock and folk music, he is now an internationally-known rockstar himself. The band is touring here in support of their monster record The Joshua Tree while simultaneously recording tracks for a follow-up album. America is enamored with U2, and it is a two-way love affair.

Bono and Company traipse across the country in cowboy hats, seeking out America’ s roots music wherever they can find it – they are in search of the blues, gospel, country & western, and soul. They cut a track with B.B. King at Sun Studios in Memphis, the legendary recording studio that gave birth to the early work of Johnny Cash, Elvis and Roy Orbison. They head to Harlem to do a gospel version of “I Still Haven’ t Found What I’ m Looking For” with the New Voices of Freedom choir.

Bono is staying at guitarist The Edge’s house in Los Angeles that fall. This is the same house that the Menendez Brothers will murder their Beverly Hills parents in a couple of years later coincidentally, but for now it is base camp for one of the greatest singer-guitarist duos in rock history. Bono wakes up one morning in mid-November with a melody and some words running through his head—he is stuck on a song title: “Prisoner of Love.” It just so happens that he has a lunch date with one of his idols and biggest influences that day, Bob Dylan.

He sheepishly lays out the song idea and some of the lyrics he’s come up with for Bob on the off-chance that perhaps it was already a Dylan song that Bono subconsciously rewrote in his own head. Dylan says no, it wasn’t his song, and he agrees to work with Bono to write it and even lay down a vocal track. Dylan joins U2 back in Sun Studios in Memphis to record the song, only it’s no longer called “Prisoner of Love,” it is now called “Love Rescue Me.” Some of the original lyrics don’t make it into the final version although they are still printed in the liner notes on the album’s inside jacket.

“Cowboy” Jack Clements, the original engineer who worked with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, is brought in to work on the recording, he breaks out old microphones and mixing equipment that hasn’ t seen the light of day since the 1960’s. The band is in disbelief at their good fortune – they are recording at Sun Studios with Bob Dylan, B.B. King and the legendary Memphis Horns brass section using the original equipment and engineers that laid the very foundation of Rock and Roll.

 

The six-minute “Love Rescue Me” becomes the eleventh track on the new album, now titled Rattle and Hum. that will be released in 1988. It is accompanied by a feature film that follows the band on their Joshua Tree tour and incorporates both their stage performances and their downtime, which was spent writing and recording around America. Rattle and Hum is a hit with fans; it sells 14 million copies and hits number one around the world.

But the critics hate it. The mix of live tracks, covers of classics (like “All Along the Watch Tower” and “Helter Skelter”) and originals like “Desire” and “Love Rescue Me” is seen as pretentious, unfocused, and overly bombastic. The album suffers both from having to follow the beloved Joshua Tree and from being seen as a companion to the disappointing film, which is also universally panned.

It is not until years later that the music separates itself from the movie and begins to get its due.

***

It is August 13th, 1998—ten years after the release of “Love Rescue Me” on U2’ s Rattle and Hum.

All is quiet on Lower Market Street in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh. A stolen maroon Vauxhall Cavalier is driven up the street and parked in front of a clothing shop. Two men get out of the car and melt into the crowd. The car is packed with 500 pounds of a fertilizer-based explosive. There are three bomb threat calls placed to various law enforcement personnel but they end up evacuating the area in front of the Omagh courthouse rather than clearing the area where the car bomb is parked. At ten minutes after three in the afternoon, it explodes, killing 21 people immediately and injuring more than 220 people (eight more will die of their wounds in the hospital).

It is the worst single terrorist atrocity in the history of the conflict. Protestants are killed in the blast as are Catholics. A woman pregnant with twins is killed as are six children and two tourists from Spain. The carnage is inexplicable. Sinn Fein and the IRA themselves are appalled, they condemn the fringe group—the RIRA—and many believe that the atrocity brings the two sides of the conflict closer to a peaceful resolution, the exact opposite of the attack’s intention.

The world is shocked and the town of Omagh will never be the same.

But out of this tragedy, one man has a vision and an idea to take the horrific event and turn it into something with the power to heal and bring people together. In October 1998, two months after the bombing, music student Daryl Simpson forms the Omagh Community Youth Choir. He assembles the choir with both Protestant and Catholic children, some of whom were personally affected by the bombing that summer. They become a beacon of hope and unity and a symbol for the war-torn region that cooperation is possible between the two sides.

***

It is ten years after the Omagh Community Youth Choir is formed in the wake of the bombing and twenty years after U2 releases “Love Rescue Me.”

Music producer Mark Johnson is working on an incredible project called Playing For Change that will spawn both a documentary and an album. Johnson is inspired by the street musicians here in the US and the world musicians around the globe, each so authentic and unique when performing for the love of music on their own. His idea is to travel around the world sampling their playing and singing in order to incorporate them all together into a greater whole.

He will record singers and guitarists on the streets of New Orleans and Santa Monica. He will record the Twin Eagles Drum Group, a Zuni, New Mexico-based Native American organization with roots that stretch back 60,000 years. He will record string instrumentalists in Russia and vocalists in Africa and the Netherlands. Singers and players from all regions of the world are recorded alone in their local environments but brought together through the genius of Mark Johnson and his project.

The resulting album, Playing For Change, is a masterpiece of collaboration. The opening track, a world music version of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” features 35 different musicians, none of whom had ever met each other, playing in perfect harmony and syncopation. On the album there is a cover version of the classic protest anthem “Biko,” there is also a version of Bob Marley’ s “War/No More Trouble” that features musicians from around the world and includes vocals by Bono himself.

But the most beautiful track on the entire Playing For Change album is the Omagh Community Youth Choir’s version of U2’s “Love Rescue Me.” It tranforms from roots-rock, Dylanesque dirge to angelic hymnal in the voices of the kids from Omagh. Daryl Simpson accompanies his choir on piano as they elevate Bono and Bob Dylan’s “Love Rescue Me” to something much bigger—something somehow greater—than what the rockers had originally intended two decades ago. I don’t know how Playing For Change’s Mark Johnson came across the choir or chose their version of this song for inclusion, but it becomes the standout track upon the very first listen.

And so a song inspired by the teenaged Bono listening to Bob Dylan in his bedroom in Northern Dublin became a recording between the men at the legendary Sun Studios in the American Rock and Roll heartland. And this song, in turn, became part of the healing process for a community that has learned to carry on after suffering through the unimaginable together.

And now I’d like to share it with you, in the ethereal iteration performed by the Omagh Community Youth Choir that would eventually appear on Playing For Change.

Love Rescue Me

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and may love rescue you this New Year. –Joshua M. Brown

This piece originally appeared at:

http://www.thefastertimes.com/wallstreet/2011/12/25/love-rescue-me/

and

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2011/12/25/love-rescue-me/

Bono Announces the Beginning of the End of AIDS

Bono finally made an appearance on the Daily Show, but it wasn’t to talk about the Achtung Baby rerelease. For World AIDS Day this year, we couldn’t turn on our television without seeing Bono on a variety of programs, on just about every channel. Collaborating with celebrities, corporate leaders, and the last three US presidents under the umbrellas of the ONE and (Red) campaigns, Bono announced what he’s calling the beginning of the end of AIDS.

Bono explained the moment to CNN, “Thirty years, 30 million funerals later, on the 30th anniversary, we just have the end in sight if people – if people want to go next leg.”

The singer-activist celebrated what he sees as the United States’ role in ushering us closer to an AIDS-free generation. He remarked, “The United States has saved five million lives by getting them these drugs that were once thought impossible to get to rural areas in far-away places.”

And he recognized that the roots of AIDS activism began here decades ago: “And it’s worth, on World AIDS Day, to remember heroes of the domestic AIDS fights. You know, from – both from the gay community and the straight community, from regular folks to people like sports stars like Magic Johnson. Where would we be without Magic Johnson?”

Any mention of U2 on this day only touched on how our fan community has been outspoken and integral to the overlapping movements to end poverty and disease.

As he has done since the 1990s when he got involved in the Jubilee 2000 efforts, Bono connected his activism to themes central to his spirituality, to how he was willing to reach out to conservatives like George Bush:

“Christ only speaks of judgment once and it is not about your sexuality, it is not about your bad behavior.  It’s about how you treat the poor, Matthew: 25.  I spoke to him [Bush] and as a person of faith – it might be a bad example of it – to him who was a believer and he was moved by that because we’re so judgmental. This is what happens. This started in the United States in the gay community. People didn’t want to go there, and the gay community had to be bold and they showed incredible leadership and said this is not just about us, you know.”

Quotes from CNN.com. Photos from various newswires. Please check out joinred.com and one.org for more information.

More Real Than The Better Thing: Of Achtung Baby Myths & Meanings

“And this of course is at the heart of the idea of redemption: to begin again. . . . I wish to begin again on a daily basis. To be born again every day is something that I try to do. And I’m deadly serious about that.” – Bono, in conversation with Michka Assayas

That the album Acthung Baby and the subsequent Zoo TV tour marked epic early-to-mid-career turning points for U2 offers an historic-creative truth that fans and critics still like to ponder and pontificate on. That wrestling with fame, fortune, and their reflections in the media mirror gave U2 a swift kick into the millennial postmodern future remains a recurring meme that’s still larger than life.

As the Rattle And Hum backlash refracted, U2 reacted by getting born again in 1991. And in 2011, fans and critics are once again celebrating and reevaluating on the occasion of multiple Acthung Baby anniversary re-release editions and box sets, the Davis Guggenheim documentary From The Sky Down, and the Ǎhk-toong Bāy-Bi covers album, first released with Q magazine and now available on iTunes as a benefit for the humanitarian charity Concern Worldwide for the East Africa food crisis.

As the story goes, late 1980s shadows of seriousness and sepia-toned savior complexes soured as the decade ended and then seeded the prevailing myths that have reigned since Acthung Baby first dolled U2 up in dayglo and drag. While Guggenheim’s great documentary poignantly widens the lens on the band’s internal crises and creative processes, it breaks no major new ground that the 1990s made-for-TV documentaries weren’t already delving into.

With three decades in the rearview mirror, critical fandom might have a clear enough retrospective vision to rewrite the myth and find even greater meaning in U2’s pivotal moment. U2’s unlikely and meteoric rise to stardom reclaimed the moral integrity of mass-produced rock and roll at a time when the commercial vitality of the medium threatened to implode of its own obsolescent inanity. U2’s simultaneously idealistic and ironic embrace of postmodern technique tantalized millions then and continued all the way through the 360 tour, with the band and its organization functioning as a corporate organism concocting shimmering sonic spectacles with sacred reverberations.

The startling success of 1990s U2 does not come from killing 1980s U2—for this band’s ambition biting the nails of its own success survives on a metaphysical fuel that’s the antithesis of rock’s suicidal tendencies. No trees got chopped down except as a convenient soundbyte to engineer the tactical charade of a total makeover. Interestingly, U2’s religious fervor doesn’t deny its source or make any deals with any devils to survive the end of the last century, even as the band moves away from a white flag waving a Martin Luther King Jr. honoring, and a bullet in the blue sky flying.

The Bono that was “bugging us” in Rattle And Hum channeled the voice of an old testament prophet as he pestered Americans about apartheid in South Africa or war in Central America, about hypocrisy among TV preachers or Irish-Americans. That God isn’t short of cash or that revolutions are not worth killing for—challenging and controversial statements made boldly and bravely from the big screen in the megaplex of middle America—got drowned out by middle-aged critics complaining about U2’s attitude in the movie, insisting that Americans already knew everything there was to know about the blues and Elvis.

What the super-nerdy rock and film critics failed to admit or acknowledge, of course, was that due to pervasive cultural amnesia, some young Americans reared on MTV and commercial radio in the 1980s needed the kind of self-discovery of America’s rich cultural and activist roots that U2 were providing – and we didn’t even resent that U2 “aren’t from here.” As fans, some of us were a few years younger than U2 and craved to be connected to rock’s deeply radical lineage of Hendrix, Beatles, Dylan, and Stones in precisely the ways that this band provided on Rattle And Hum.

Rattle And Hum remains a much better movie than many will admit, and the new tracks that came out on the album are some of the band’s best ever. And late-late 80s Lovetown-era U2 is a charming and wonderful lost period in the band’s history. They lost their innocence, sure, but somehow, they never got swallowed by the beast they created. Acthung Baby didn’t damn the vibrant legacy of classic U2; it merely confronted the critics and slayed the demons of self-doubt.

Whereas 1980s U2 got ransacked in the dailies and the monthlies (this is still before blogs, mind you) for being so pious that they became pompous, 1990s U2 retorted, “You want pompous? We’ll give you pompous.” U2’s resulting over-the-top treatment of themselves in the Zoo and Pop periods only revealed through self-examination and self-parody an even better piety, spirituality, and overall sincerity in the songcraft itself.

In the 2005 booklength interview with Michka Assayas, Bono admits that the Zoo period represented “a crisis of strategy more than a crisis of faith” and “a new way to express old idealism.” This “judo” of “hard juxtapositions” (as Bono would describe it) reveals the band’s debt to the great counterculture art movements of the 20^th century—for there would not have been a Zoo TV expression without the radical inroads into the collective psyche pioneered by the likes of the Beats and Merry Pranksters in America or by the Surrealists or Situationists in Europe.

In all the booze, cigarette smoke, and flashing lights affiliated with this period of U2, it would be easy to suggest that they’d turned from the Light. While most would categorize U2 as politically liberal, the band’s passionate embrace of Christianity could easily be seen as evangelical. On one surface, Achtung Baby responds to the Fall of Communism in Berlin, but on another deeper level, it probes the Fall of Man, from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane to the urban and suburban gardens in our hearts and minds.

The fire and faith that once stood strong in a stark American desert get tested in a unified Europe, a global soundtrack under the blinking signs of towering technological temptations. It would be easy to suggest that if the medium is the message of Zoo period U2, then the message is wrong, that surreal media masturbation is even better than the real thing of a moral life lived by an ethic of hard work and authentic religious hunger.

But U2 points in one direction in order for us to discover that we need turn away from all that, away from certainty, to go further than surface assumptions about not only this band but about the meaning of life itself. By embracing doubt, the band looks even deeper for the divine. Fame and fashion were more the lepers in the head than faith and God, but only a faith scrutinized under postmodern media microscopes could survive and even get purified by the fire of fame.

1980s U2 tried to walk in the light of the moral patriarchs, in a masculine mood of the mountaintop. The switch that gets flipped for the last decade of the 20^th century plumbs a valley of the erotic, hypnotic, and fiercely feminine, where the only light is electrified to illuminate late-night wrestling with the carnal circumstances of bodily limits.

The mysterious way of this record, though, does rip U2 from itself. Strip away the narratives of the documentaries, and we might admit that the old U2 is reborn even more than a new U2 is rebooted. The daily reality behind this catharsis crawls towards maturity; the real thing involves marriage and divorce, parenting and responsibility, addiction and recovery, celebrity and charity. Yet the hard realities of growing up in public never sounded so groovy.

Discovering more and more God in Judas Iscariot, in broken or tested marriages, in the AIDS crisis, in media surrealism, in hyperconsumerism, and in the mysterious ways of women might seem counterintuitive to some, but this visionary judo is exactly what happens with the poetry and music of Achtung Baby, at least one sparkling pinnacle within U2’s overarching artistic, commercial, and mystical triumphs. When Bono’s cosmic heart reconnects with the band’s high-wired brain for twelve tracks of holy wax, all of our hearts and minds are won again, made one again, by waxed eloquence.  –Andrew William Smith, Editor

Bono Envy And The Box Office

Editor’s Note: In addition to making its rounds on DVD, online, and on pay-per-view TV, the new film Killing Bono, based in part on the writing of Neil McCormick, is enjoying a limited US theatrical release. You can check your local listings for more details.

Don’t talk about Rattle and Hum. Don’t talk about your Spidey sense and SciFi musicals. The history of our Bono and clear success at movie or theatre box offices are a mixed bag.

Unrivaled at selling out rock concerts? Yes. Concert DVDs doing well in the 2000s? Yes. But this doesn’t mean that a movie that frames you as a minor character will be a big hit.

Killing Bono bases itself on the frustrated truth of growing up in the shadow of giants. From a plot made with a jolt of rockstar-caliber jealousy, Killing Bono tries to be many things to different people, but a typically nerdy rock biopic for the hardcore U2 fans it’s not. Even though the work of Neil McCormick as journalist and tweeter are well-loved among U2 fans, many of us are not sure what to make of Killing Bono.

The early parts of the flick feature all the members of U2 as characters, with some choice footage from their roots at school, complete with (formerly known as) The Hype’s first gig and a hilarious scene when when Paul and Dave adopt their stage names at the same time they drop “The Hype” for the hype-yet-to -come in U2. But does this film work as an Irish Almost Famous? Is this movie a faithful rendering of McCormick’s prose?

The American drop of Killing Bono coincides with the epic onslaught of Achtung Baby rerelease options. Was this intentional? Surely, this saturated market manages to appease the post-360-tour blues among fans willing to pay to stay engaged with their favorite band.

But pit the mixed-up comedy mostly-about-the-band’s-mates against the garden harvest of DVDs and documentaries, and most U2 fans are going to be perfectly pleased to dig deeper into their new Uber and Super box sets and may end up ignoring Killing Bono. Maybe we prefer Bono admiration to Bono envy.  –Andrew William Smith, Editor
 

Next Page »