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“They only want you to be the one thing,” Mick Jagger once told the novelist William Gibson. He was referring to his own acting career.
It is odd to imagine a celebrity icon millionaire presumably so close to the heart of rock and roll speaking so wistfully of thwarted ambition, as if he once had a dream and is now resigned to the reigning system that forbids its fulfilment because these are the rules, so to speak.
What’s to stop the lead singer of the Rolling Stones from auditioning for a role in a play somewhere remote or funding a production of “King Lear,” casting himself, and putting it on Youtube?
And who are “they” exactly?
Are “they” real or an abstraction, a phantom, a dagger of the mind?
Housed within our sacred traditions, we find many a healing mantra of redirection for this neurosis: The true jihad is the inner jihad.
Consider whether the light in you is not darkness.
Everything seen by the eyes is burning.
But the one I hear in my head when I get to worrying over who might not be on my side comes as a tune: “There is no them.”
It’s a sneakily straightforward four-word phrase that could easily be a bit of graffiti, harmless-seeming enough, but if we apply it to the partisan divide relentlessly asserted by a split screen in a 24-hour news cycle, it’s about as countercultural as it gets.
Bring “There is no them” to bear upon the concept of international borders or, say, the difference between an American soldier and an Afghan civilian, or a police officer and a black human being suddenly decreed a suspect, and you might upset someone.
Express this article of faith out loud in certain contexts and you might even discover a degree of aggression projected upon yourself. As is the case with so many other lyrical one-liners
- “We get to carry each other”;
- “What you thought was freedom was just greed”;
- “Can’t you see what love has done?”;
- “Dream up the world you want to live in.”
“There is no them” arises in my mind unbidden out of the everlasting opus of U2, those four alarmingly thoughtful Irishman who have banded together to create, record and perform music for over 40 years.
What to do with U2?
They are admittedly millionaires.
From the very beginning, there have been those who find them insufferable, as if their earnestness is an embarrassment to us all. What’s that about?
Well, Jagger’s observation might prove helpful here.
We like to know where to put people.
The placeholders are mind-numbingly familiar.
Keep religion out of politics (or vice versa).
Are you an artist or an activist?
Sacred or secular?
These divisions doubtless serve someone’s marketing scheme quite well, but we know – our hearts and minds tell us – that it does not really work this way.
We love what we love.
One revelation speaks to another.
Our alleged boundaries dissolve upon contact with the way our consciousness really operates.
I know this feelingly.
As a native of Nashville, I would like to pretend that the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the beloved community that fostered him entered my radar through my judicious study of civil rights history and culture.
This would be a lie.
It was MTV and U2’s decision to craft and promote what proved to be a radio hit called “Pride (In the Name of Love),” commemorating King as one more pioneer of human seriousness (one more in the name of love) along a trajectory of individuals who chose to give their lives as gifts to others, an international parade of conscience.
At 14, I still loved Duran Duran, but now I would stand in a grocery aisle reading Rolling Stone and learning about Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy as Bono name-dropped them in an interview.
Something new was getting through by way of this Irish arts collective.
My own country was coming alive to me.
In time, U2 would turn me on to Leonard Peltier and Desmond Tutu and Edna O’Brien and, in no small way, the fact of the rest of the world.
They are indeed ageing rock stars.
But they are also a mass media movement of thoughtfulness, artfulness, candour and curation. Continue reading
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