As a Gen-X music listener, it’s pretty hard not to be a fan of U2. At some point they caught your ear, an inescapable part of the soundtrack. Some of us picked up on the early stuff, with cassettes of Boy or Under a Blood Red Sky melting on the dashboards of our cars. A few of us held off until Achtung cracked our expectations. At the very least, The Joshua Tree pleasantly wallpapered our coming-of-age world, those years of nascent yearning and expectation, rude desire lofted by the sacramental echoes of syncopated guitar.
That being said, for the Gen-X music listener, it’s always been pretty hard to be a fan of U2. They were just too big, too everywhere. There was no way to take ownership of such a behemoth. A button or t-shirt wouldn’t serve as a secret-handshake, a shibboleth to help you find your tribe. A few cynics aside, liking U2 was just what one did. What everyone did. How could U2 be your band if they were everyone’s band?
Have a career as unique as U2 and somehow you’re not special at all.
Bono wouldn’t argue with much of that. In Surrender, his semi-chronological memoir, he wrestles with his gnawing ambition, his gambling ego that never lets well enough alone. He admits to the toll it took on bandmates and family, so often pushed to the edge while he fought to re-invent the sound, or booked another globe-hopping audition for the absent Nobel of Hearts and Minds.
The elusive trick is this: True fandom always comes down to connection. It can’t be forced upon you. It has to just happen, a serendipitous alignment between you and the band, real or imagined. It doesn’t really have much to do with quality. It has little to do with stats or virtuosity, although that can help. Fandom is a function of time and place.
An objectively mediocre band that was a staple in your college town, the forgotten folk-singer who held your broken heart, the concert where you fell for the femme fatale? All will do. Fandom glues the cracks when you showed up for the music or the music showed up for you.
Growing up Evangelical, U2 snuck through the sidedoor of our silently-sanctioned youth. Acceptable listening was simply and clearly labeled, demarcated by source. The local Christian bookstore was well-stocked with God-fearing variants of everything from pop to metal. These could be safely added to the Christmas list. A surreptitious trip to Camelot Records was a sweaty-palmed dalliance with secular temptation.
U2 became our blurred-line protest to this binary world. Cranking “Gloria” or “40” on an illicit boombox after the prayer circle disbanded was a way of claiming some space, a sonic tussle in the turf-war for teenage independence.
When pressed by the elders, a dive into the lyrics of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Pride (In the Name of Love)” was enough to get U2 a temporary pass, although with the usual warnings that activism, social justice, and its ilk were signs of mankind’s folly, sure-to-fail attempts to treat the symptoms and not the spiritual sickness. For lest ye forget, “the poor will always be among you.”
Reading Surrender, I didn’t realize just how much the guys in U2 shared our struggle. The church nearly broke up the band, with The Edge particularly heart-wrenched with the fear of serving two masters. I know those thoughts well, lied awake pondering the meager stash of treasure I’d laid up in heaven, for lo, must I surely count all else but dung?
Not to sound incredibly daft, but I kinda got the feeling that my life’s been a lot like Bono’s. Writ small, that is. Nano-scale. Microscopic.
The contours are all there: The zealotry of house-church believers who think they’ll get it right after two-thousand years of ecclesiastical failing, the unbending basement arguments over listenerless music, the quixotic forays in demo tape promotion, and the unfolding discovery that one woman’s evolving love is enough for a lifetime.
All that’s missing is the success.
Like Bono, I still wrestle with the need to break bread and wine while playing the acrobat “who talks like this and acts like that.”
Both of us have spent decades shot through with dissatisfaction until finally coming to the same conclusion, that it’s “time to learn how to be home, to be still, and surrender.”
Early in his career Bono laments, “I can change the world, but I can’t change the world in me.” By the end of the book, he has a simpler if much harder task before him, rewriting the tune as “I can’t change the world, but I can change the world in me.”
Doing that is far from easy, but it’s enough, isn’t it? Enough work for one day. It’s enough for Bono, and it’s more than enough for me.
Maybe it’s not so crazy to say I’ve got a little Bono in me. Shouldn’t we all? Dust off the boombox, dig out those old sun-warped cassettes, give Surrender a read. Think about how far you’ve come, and then remember how it felt to let go, to give in, to connect…to just be a fan.
