U2 has been vaguely supportive of the new movement, though it's

[274]

Not hard to sense in Bono and company a subtle resentment that Seattle bands who are essentially re-creating styles of the 1970s are being hailed by critics as progressive, while U2—who has worked so hard on their last two albums to take rock into fresh territory—is often lumped in with the established superstar acts against whom the grunge bands are supposed to be rebelling.

In my conversations with them, Bono and Edge have both expressed enthusiasm for the experimental industrial pop of Nine Inch Nails, while maintaining a sort of polite skepticism about the Seattle bands. Bono often repeats his observation that poor black kids have no trouble staying on the cutting edge of technology and art, figuring out ways to make new music with computers and samplers, abandoning one style to innovate another, while middle-class white kids regurgitate the same musical cliches over and over and think they've discovered the lightbulb.

David Grohl, Nirvana's drummer, came to a U2 show during the first leg of the Zoo tour to visit the opening act, the Pixies. Bono invited him in for a talk. Bono mimicks Grohl chewing gum and saying, "Hey, man, nothing against you, but I don't know why the Pixies would do this." Bono asked if Grohl didn't think it was brave of the Pixies to try opening for U2 in arenas. Grohl didn't buy it. "We'll never play big places," he said of Nirvana. "We're just a punk band. All this success is a fluke. Tomorrow I could be somewhere else."

Bono told him to never say never: "You don't know what you'll want to do in five or ten years. It was all new to us, we had to learn it too. Why paint yourself into a corner?"

"Nah, man," Grohl said. "We're just a punk band." The next thing Bono knew Grohl was quoted in NME saying that Bono tried to con­vince Nirvana to change but they wouldn't do it. "Definitely not the brains of the group," Bono mutters.

"Recently I saw them on TV. Now they're playing big places. And the interviewer said, 'You told me a year ago you'd never do that,' and Kurt Cobain said, 'I changed my mind.' " Bono laughs. "See, that's the gift Kurt has, Sinead has. To declare one thing one day and the next day announce the exact opposite with no self-consciousness at all. I think Eddie Vedder is a bit more honest than that. He can remember what he said the day before. He's a very soulful guy and very troubled by it. He talks about how he only wants to play clubs." Bono thinks about it and then adds, "But he's not actually playing clubs, is he?"

[275]

What he really wants, I say, is to be as happy and excited as he was when he was playing clubs, when he'd just quit his job in the gas station to join Pearl Jam and was suddenly singing to packed bars and the audience loved it and the record companies were coming around. That's what he really misses—not the clubs but the happiness.

"It's a terrible thing," Bono says, "to get something before you desire it. We've been lucky. We've generally desired something just before we got it. But then, it's also a mind-fuck to get everything you want."

"Rather than what you need," Edge says.

Anyway, all these media-hyped notions of Us vs. Them, Mainstream vs. Underground, Hip vs. Square are a vestige of Cold War "generation gap" thinking. Cultural polarities were important to the World War II generation and to their baby boom offspring, who in middle age have become their parents' mirror image. One of the big confusions for the baby boomers is that the next generation doesn't want to play that game. ("Okay, now I'll say how much better things were twenty years ago and you rebel. Okay? All right? Hey, where are you going?") These days such polarities are projected as marketing hooks. The publisher of an alterna­tive rock magazine told me recently that he had cracked the Detroit auto market and now Madison Avenue advertising would be rolling into his bank account. I asked how he did it and he said by hiring "the market­ing woman who discovered Generation X."

Zooropa is being released this weekend and the early reviews are ec­static, the best of U2's career. That goes a way toward assuaging any sore feelings that U2 might have about being lumped on the wrong side of musical progress.

"The scene that they come out of has a lot of rules, actually," Bono says of Pearl Jam. "There's quite a code. Like with a lot of clubs, that can be quite rigid. If you try to break out of it, even if you just want to see what's across the road or around the corner, you can't do it. I do think that Pearl Jam are transcendant of their scene, but their scene is to me incredibly old-fashioned. It's an aftertaste of the sixties countercul­ture, which suits a certain white middle-class collegiate lifestyle. But I don't want to dis it because in Pearl Jam's case it's a place of conviction and a place where they put the music first. Who am I to comment on it? As a fan of rock & roll I have to say what I think, but in the end if the music's great it doesn't matter."

Of Vedder, Bono says, "He's not a rock & roll animal, he's come up

[276]

from a different place, a place that I prefer. But he's in a rock & roll band and has to protect himself. He probably doesn't think he's got a mask, and so he might not have figured the various masks of Zoo TV. But he has a mask, and that's okay, because the important place not to be wearing masks is in the songs. That's where I live, and I think that's where he lives. Maybe they're going through what we went through in the eighties, which is running away from the bullshit. I'm sure they'll find their own way of doing it. Exactly what I didn't like about our position in the eighties was that we were running away rather than just kind of laughing in its face, which is more where we're at right now." Bono thinks about it and decides, "He [Eddie] is an odd character. I like him a lot, actually."

When I walk into Paul McGuinness's backstage hospitality room, two scraggly-looking visitors jump up from the couch and come toward me with eyes wide and mouths moving. There are TV lights set up, and a portable camera on a tripod. I've come to the wrong place—I was looking for the cold cuts. It turns out I've walked into two visitors from Bosnia who have crossed the war zone, the Adriatic Sea, and the concert security apparatus in the hope of interviewing Bono for Sarajevo televi­sion. Bill Carter is a Californian, long-haired and good-looking, who is trying to make a documentary about how people in Sarajevo are coping with the Serbian seige. Jason Aplon, dark and brooding, is a friend of Carter's who runs the International Rescue Committee's office in Split, in Bosnia.

Last week U2 got a fax on the stationery of Radio Televizija Bosne I Hercegovina that read, "Bosnian television, based in Sarajevo, is very interested in doing an interview with the members of U2. We under­stand that the group will be in Verona, Italy, July 3, and think this is the perfect opportunity to do this interview. Verona is the one concert in Europe that will have the largest ex-Yugoslavia crowd due to the fact that it is the only concert tickets are being sold for. . . . Sarajevo, in former Yugoslavia, was the center of its art and rock and roll culture. It still has an art scene trying to survive, but it lacks creative input due to obvious physical and information restraints."

The letter went on to say that they understood that U2 had helped raise money for Bosnian relief, and perhaps the band would agree to an interview exclusively for Bosnian TV to be shown "when the electricity

[277]

comes back on." It further explained that no Bosnian citizens would be able to make it through the Serbian checkpoints, so if U2 agreed they would send to Verona "our foreign associate Bill Carter."

Principle sent a message back that Bono would be happy to give them an interview before going onstage in Verona. Carter and his friend Aplon journeyed for two days, crossing the sea that divides Italy and Yugoslavia on a boat crowded with refugees and U2 fans. When they arrived at the venue, the ticket office said it had no passes for them or any information about them, and security tried to throw them out. But Carter was persistent and finally snuck backstage, where he was made welcome and given a place to set up his camera. Now he is nervous about meeting Bono—a nervousness that seems inappropriate to me in a man who's been ducking bullets for several months.

Bono arrives, decked out in his leather stage suit, shakes hands with the visitors, and takes a seat on the couch. After some initial questions about Zoo TV, Carter asks Bono why, in spite of the lessons of history, people keep returning to the barbarism of war.

"It's the subject of a lot of our songs," Bono says a little awkwardly. "I come from Ireland. Ireland is also divided. Again, they say it's reli­gion, but you know it's not religion. See, the human heart is very greedy. It seeks many excuses for that. Religion is a convenient one, color is a convenient one. I've been through various different stages in working this out. One must be political at times, but sometimes you have to look beyond that to just the state of the human spirit. I guess that's where I'm at right now. I'm examining my own hypocrisy, I'm examining my own greed. I've stopped even pointing at politicians." He laughs. "I've found there's enough subject matter in my heart to keep me going.

"I was very inspired by Martin Luther King. He was a character in the middle of a very dangerous situation—civil rights for African Amer­icans in the sixties. It could have gone very wrong. . . . The word peace is like bullshit a lot of the time, it's like flowers-in-the-hair hippie talk, but he held on to a much stronger idea, a much more concrete idea about peace and respect, and he just kept on to it, he just kept pummeling it. The idea was that he'd live for his country but he didn't want to die for it and he would never kill for it. And he did die for it. It's a hard thing to hold on to. There must be an incredible urge . . . People deserve the right to defend themselves against evil and they must decide how to do that. But if there's any other alternative, obviously you've got

[278]

to seek it. I know that's what you guys have been trying and you haven't been allowed, and I'm really, really sorry to hear about that. And I understand any reaction. But I just hope that even in the middle of that you don't have to become like the animals attacking you. Dignity. Self-respect. These are things that people can't take away. And humor. Humor is the evidence of freedom."

⇐ Предыдущая73747576777879808182Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: