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12. Rattle & Hum
59 Plays1 year ago
Ahead of our first Silver Jews album breakdown, we turn our attention to the most un-Berman of bands.
We discuss Phil Joanou’s 1988 documentary Rattle and Hum, and ponder superstardom, super fandom, and the role our favorite bands play in shaping identity.
Come for the love, stay for the hate.
Also mentioned: David Berman (holy shit didn't see that coming), Naomi Klein, Phil Elverum, Drive-By Truckers, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bernardine Dohrn, Jesse Helms, Karl Marx (whoa, slow down with the surprises there, Candy Jail!).
Intro music: Silver Jews, Candy Jail
Outro speechifying: Bono, McNichols Arena, Denver, CO, 11/8/87
Recommended
Transcript
Escaping Candy Jail
00:00:09
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to Candy Jail. Thanks for being here. Get us the fuck out, please. Every two weeks we tell you we're in jail and none of you ever do anything about it. But since we're here, we're going to have a conversation.
Revisiting 'Rattle and Hum'
00:00:24
Speaker
Last night we watched the 1988 concert documentary, Rattle and Hum.
00:00:30
Speaker
which I have seen many times, or at least I thought I had seen many times, which you, Robert, hadn't seen until last night. And we have spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about a sort of obscure figure, and we thought we'd spend a little bit of time talking about maybe the least obscure band on the planet.
00:00:58
Speaker
and we're gonna see where that takes us. So it was fascinating to rewatch that because as a U2 fan, I don't listen to them every day. I don't listen to them every month even. I go through phases, but that's true of a lot of artists that I'm a fan of. There's almost nobody that I listen to day in and day out, month in and month out. And often months might go by.
00:01:27
Speaker
while I'm like, when was the last time I listened to Jason Isbell, for instance? But in the course of the last couple years, in part because of the other podcasts I was thinking of doing, I re-listened to every U2 album. And I watched a lot of stuff that's out there on the internet. And it never occurred to me to go back and watch Rattle and Hum from start to finish.
00:01:53
Speaker
even though over the years there are parts of that movie that I've rewatched over and over and over. And there was a live album that came out that had some of the same performances from the movie.
00:02:07
Speaker
some of what I think are the best performances from the movie were not on the album.
New Perspectives on U2
00:02:12
Speaker
So when I was in high school, I ripped those onto cassette from VHS to audio tape so that I could just listen to those performances without having to watch the movie. And so watching the whole thing from start to finish last night, and especially watching it with you and sort of
00:02:34
Speaker
trying but not trying too hard to maybe see it through your eyes was just a fascinating experience. I realized that I didn't really have an adult view of that movie because I really hadn't watched the movie as an adult. I had just rewatched
00:02:54
Speaker
you know, that performance of Sunday Bloody Sunday, for instance, or that performance of Bad, which is one of my favorite songs of theirs. I'd rewatch that. And I think I've said this before, but in grad school, when I took a film class, we watched the movie for the black and white cinematography, but we only watched, you know, parts of it. Because, I mean, I don't know what you thought. I think Robert Brinkman's black and white cinematography is gorgeous in the movie.
00:03:26
Speaker
Watching it last night, I found probably about half of it ridiculous. I was shocked at the actual lack of real political content because in a lot of ways, it was you too that made me political when I was a kid, early teens. It was probably rattle and hum more than anything else about them.
00:03:54
Speaker
that made me political. And yet, rewatching it last night, there's not much actual politics in it. There's some kind of cookie cutter, pro Martin Luther King stuff. And of course, there's that performance of Sunday Bloody Sunday, which does have a particular political message. And then there's some stuff about apartheid, which I suppose
00:04:22
Speaker
You know, that's probably how I learned about apartheid as much as any other way. You know, because I was probably 12 years old when I first saw Rattle and Hum. The performances still, for the most part, amaze me. Although I definitely, some of Bono, I mean, he's so, well, I mean, I'm kind of monologuing here. So give me some of your thoughts. We can go back and do an intro after we've just kind of gotten into this a little bit.
00:04:50
Speaker
I was interested in how it opened, which, if I'm remembering correctly, really has them just sitting on their gear and talking conversationally almost bashfully because they don't really know what to say.
Intimate Moments vs. Performances
00:05:05
Speaker
It's unclear exactly what the question was that was asked of them initially.
00:05:11
Speaker
And I was pleasantly surprised that it opened that way because I was then anticipating much, much more of that, which I actually think might have served the film more if he had allowed for more of that to remain because you get an intimate view of what they're like when they're not performing.
00:05:41
Speaker
and what they're like when they're not playing rock stars. It was in some ways endearing to see them awkward, struggling to know how to be in an unscripted moment. When it cut from that into performance and the ratio between those side intimate conversational moment scenes,
00:06:10
Speaker
To the actual performance the ratio was fairly i thought even for maybe the first third of the film and then it starts to lean more and more heavily in performance until it's full blown performance and i'd say,
00:06:25
Speaker
what look like what look like was going to be a consistent fifty fifty split. Turned into more of like a twenty five seventy five situation seventy five percent of the performance which. I grew interesting actually i i mean i always i'm curious about strong reactions in myself saying more about me and some ways than whatever it is i'm consuming.
Complex Feelings Towards Bono
00:06:52
Speaker
or whatever it is that's provoking the response. But I did, I couldn't help but note a sort of growing hostility towards particularly Bono, which was interesting. I don't hate him. I don't love him. I think there's a tendency to project a hell of a lot onto these people for different reasons. But some of the reasons are
00:07:21
Speaker
Probably somewhat universal within western society just the ways that we all project things on to celebrities and the ways that we imagine ourselves as celebrities versus what actual celebrities are like and.
00:07:35
Speaker
it all gets mixed up. So I'm not sure I have a coherent critique to level at Bono. All I can say is I was tracking a increasingly negative emotional response to what I was seeing. But you don't know why.
00:07:53
Speaker
I did start to probe that a little bit over the course of the day today when I had a little more time and distance from the film I think part of what I was responding negatively to was how.
00:08:08
Speaker
dramatic the man is but i think that that's about as fair as telling a track runner to cut the running out i mean he's a performer and uh performers perform and he's clearly good at it and he has i think probably a knack for uh entering into certain roles or states on stage
00:08:37
Speaker
I think that with the Berman piece for me, I like him at least in a, I don't know if this is an abstract sense, but I like him in theory in part because he doesn't have that. And it might be unfair to then match maybe a perceived authenticity in a Berman compared to a perceived inauthenticity in a Bono because
00:09:05
Speaker
That stuff might come down to, at bottom, one person's inability to access that and another person's ability to access it in spades. And so I'm just trying to remain open to what I think I'm responding negatively to might not be exactly what I think I'm responding negatively to, if that makes sense. No, it makes total sense. I don't think I realize the extent to which
00:09:33
Speaker
I wish I could tell you the exact moment I first heard you two. I can't. And even the time in my life when they became my favorite band probably happened over about the course of a year, say between the ages of 12 and 13. And a big part of that was the album Achtung Baby.
00:09:55
Speaker
But I think the second part of that was when I went to the mall and they had Rattle and Hum there in a VHS. And I don't know that I'd ever even heard of it, but I was intrigued enough and I must've had some money with me because I bought it and I went home and put it on, not really knowing what to expect. And the way the film opens is there's the Paramount logo and you hear the crowd. And then you hear this,
00:10:22
Speaker
discordant guitar chord and then the lights come up on a stage a sparsely illuminated stage it filmed in black and white and the band launches into their cover of the Beatles song Helter Skelter and it's incredibly kinetic uh the way they move to the music the way that Bono moves um I had never seen anything like it and this viewing
00:10:51
Speaker
I did remain in awe of his voice. He is, especially at that time, an absolutely unreal singer, what he can do with his voice. And the sound of his voice, the sound of the band, but also the image of him throwing himself around stage that way,
00:11:12
Speaker
made a huge impact on me at 12, 13, 14 years old when I was obviously at that age struggling with what the fuck to do with emotion. And feeling, of course, as many teenagers do, that I was feeling more intense emotions than anybody in my life.
00:11:30
Speaker
And Bono in Rattle and Hum is the image of a man who is externalizing all of that. He looks constantly like he can't move enough, like he can't scream loud enough, like he can't sing with enough passion to get it all out. And that was, I think now, I mean, I knew that was formative, but I think it was way more formative than I've ever realized.
00:12:01
Speaker
you are responding positively to somebody who is very talented, but who's also seemingly unnatural with expressing themselves in an uninhibited fashion, not afraid to put their emotions on display and not afraid to be vulnerable in front of literally tens of thousands of people.
00:12:29
Speaker
Which again, right? Like not to play Freudian on myself, but I was listening to Mark Marin's interview with Naomi Klein that he just conducted, I think this week, maybe last week. And she, uh, confessed, which I thought was interesting to being a repressed person.
00:12:48
Speaker
And that being a public figure to some degree, not in Bono level, but more than most, um, creates some tensions. If you're somewhat repressed, I think I would self identify as somewhat repressed, but, um, and so I bring that up because again, there could be a kind of negative
00:13:13
Speaker
like not projection, but a kind of resentment, right? Like an envy, an unconscious envy where you're like, okay, what I'm responding to negatively is not in fact the histrionics of Bono. What it is is my own inability to access my own feelings that I then turned into a judgment on this rock star that seems to be able to access and express feelings totally uninhibitedly without any shame shamelessly.
00:13:45
Speaker
There could be some truth in that, right? I'm open to the possibility that there's, that's happening on some level. But I also think there's something else happening. I'm not going to let him off the hook completely. I think that what I gradually came to find myself responding to in sort of a negative way was it's so complicated, man. This is so complicated because part of me is going,
00:14:17
Speaker
The folks that can hear that is the cat scratching my furniture. I've let I've let go of my furniture long ago. I think sometimes I don't know how to put this in non mystical terms. The spirit is working through someone and there's a reason why Martin Luther King jr's I have a dream speech is.
00:14:40
Speaker
continuously and eternally referenced. In part, it is a significant and historically important historical moment in the civil rights era in the United States. But I think there's something else happening in that speech that even 16-year-olds who are jaded as they should be on some level, when they watch that and listen to him, are connecting with something that is unmistakably
00:15:10
Speaker
powerful and potent. And I think it's clear that Bono has some of that and not everyone does. And without that turning into a kind of, cause I think there's also a tendency to then place a scribe that much more value to Bono than another human being. And I fight against that.
00:15:36
Speaker
uh in myself towards others and in general like i don't think that's a healthy way to be not only not healthy i don't think it's in keeping with reality like if we if you're trying to live in an ethical way then you can't make a statement like all human beings are valuable
00:15:58
Speaker
and treat that abstractly. I think it has to be treated concretely. It has to be lived. In theory, Bono's just another guy, just like me, and just like someone on the street, like they encountered in Harlem when they listened to that guy playing music and seemed to be enjoying it, and recognizing you can be talented and a street musician,
00:16:21
Speaker
Maybe they weren't as big as he was today, but we watch this now. It's kind of incredible. Imagine Bob Dylan watching street musicians play music and respecting them as, in theory, you should.
Fame and Celebrity Culture
00:16:36
Speaker
So I guess all of that's a roundabout way of trying to get at this tension I feel in myself as I watch Bono perform in this film, where on the one hand, I'm like, what a fucking narcissist.
00:16:50
Speaker
Like what a megalomaniac to seem to have no issue with telling an entire stadium full of people his political views or even to sing songs to that many people. It's sort of just like it's so out of the realm of normal experience.
00:17:10
Speaker
It's hard to know how to relate to it. And yet there's still, I think, within so many of us, for better or worse, and I'm open to this not being a Western European exclusive, but this is the culture I know, that we are fame-obsessed and we fantasize about fame and celebrity. And so
00:17:32
Speaker
There's just a lot happening as we take these sorts of figures and these sorts of images in. And I'm not trying to also say that my experience of this is somehow a cookie cutter experience that everyone has. But I think it's safe to say that many, many Americans fantasize about being famous. And when we encounter scenes like you two playing to a stadium packed with people,
00:18:02
Speaker
there's a kind of natural wonder what it's like to be on that stage you're sort of living vicariously through these people. So there's there's like there's probably legitimate judgments legitimate critique there's envy there's confusion there's self judgment maybe where you're like why should we want this.
00:18:26
Speaker
In fact, it's become a cliche how frequently the end of the road for these folks is drug overdose or early death. So clearly it's not enough for so many. And maybe it's the wrong dream to be chasing after. But these are just the things that are swirling around in me as I watch this film.
00:18:51
Speaker
I can tell you that for me at 12 or 13, or for me at 18 or 28, or even now in the case of what still remain my favorite moments in the film, I'm not thinking about fame at all. It's like a religious experience to watch, to hear the music, to watch the movement, the
00:19:19
Speaker
adulation of the crowd, I guess, plays into it. It's part of the experience, but it's more like the roar of approval that follows the performance is itself a part of the experience. To see someone, I think you used the word awkward a minute ago, but I don't remember in what context, but what I've realized
00:19:44
Speaker
recently is how awkward Bono is when he's not on stage. Sometimes he's awkward when he's on stage. As he's gotten older, the Bono and Rattle and Hum is in his 20s. He's got this live cat-like kind of grace, I think, in the way he moves. As he got older, his movement sort of started to get clunkier on stage and some of the grace left him and
00:20:11
Speaker
That seems to have been true in his persona as well. But even in Rattle and Hum, you can see it. He's far more comfortable on stage than I think he is offstage in a lot of ways. And I envied that ability to open up and to be vulnerable in front of people.
00:20:34
Speaker
But I really don't think that thoughts of fame really entered into it at the time, after the fact maybe, and then the fame gets twisted up with it in really unhealthy ways and then the whole parasocial relationship thing developing. But you have been a teacher,
Performance and Personal Truths
00:20:52
Speaker
which is at a basic level quite performative.
00:20:56
Speaker
And so have I. And so we know what it's like to be in front of a crowd, not of 50,000, but of arguably the toughest audience most people have nightmares about. And we did it every day for years. Sun Devil Stadium has nothing on a room full of angry and tired 15-year-olds. I mean, you know, of course, there's a little hyperbole, but there's some truth in that too, actually. Like, I think for some, actually, it'd be more horrifying to do what we did.
00:21:26
Speaker
than to get in front of a thousand people and give a speech. So just out of curiosity, do you feel like you were able to, over time, because I've seen you teach and you strike me or you struck me as natural, did you feel able to be, and also like we need to keep in mind what our roles are, right? Like you're not a rock star in a classroom, you're a teacher.
00:21:54
Speaker
And you're not their friend. You're also not their parent, but you're a little closer to that than a rock star. With that being said, especially in a humanities class where you're dealing with the deepest questions of what it means to be a human being, you're going to enter into vulnerable stuff.
00:22:12
Speaker
And I think some of the most powerful educational moments are when teachers are able to let their hair down a little bit in a professional, but in a human way and speak to something true. Do you feel like you were able to do that with your students? Yes. And performance was a part of it. And you may have experienced this too, but there's a thing that happens
00:22:43
Speaker
And you can't always consciously make it happen, but sometimes you can consciously make it happen where you're in the classroom and you're teaching and you're performing. And in the performance you discover a truth and an ability to communicate that you would not have otherwise discovered. In some ways you feel as though you're transcending yourself and it makes you feel more like yourself. Definitely.
00:23:10
Speaker
But there's also an element, and this wore off for me as I got older, but especially as when I was a younger teacher, when I would realize that I was getting good at it, or when I realized I have my audience in the palm of my hand right now, yeah, you get a thrill from it. And there is a little bit of, like,
00:23:32
Speaker
especially when you can tell which students are fans of yours, because that's what it's like. When you're a student, you're- Which ones come to the front of the class? Exactly. Who's sitting at the front? Right. Yeah. The kids that linger after class to talk to you or when I was a younger teacher, I would sometimes have female students who would pretty openly flirt with me, whether just to get better grades or not, it doesn't matter. You're on the receiving end of some of the behavior,
00:24:01
Speaker
you're on the receiving end of some of the behavior that is associated with being a public figure, being a celebrity of kind. So yeah, as a teacher, if you have to think about how to balance that kind of thing, then how impossible does it become to balance
00:24:24
Speaker
when you're as big as Bono is. But at the same time, what I said about performance still stands. It's like the way that I talk about artifice or tricks in other kinds of art. The greatest writing out there is all of it, the stuff that is the most deeply true. All of it is the result of a kind of parlor trick which has been mastered.
00:24:52
Speaker
And that does not trivialize it to me, that elevates it. And so I feel the same way about on stage performance and music in a lot of ways. It's like we've all, because I've thought about like, why do I, why do we go to live music shows, right? Like if you think about it, it's a weird, I mean, if you think about anything enough, it's a weird thing, but like we already know the songs.
00:25:20
Speaker
they're probably gonna sound better and clearer if we play them on our home stereo or in our car. We're not gonna get to hang out with the musicians that we're fans of. We're probably gonna be uncomfortable, because we're gonna be standing for a long time or we're gonna be claustrophobically surrounded by a crowd. It's gonna be hard to get to the bathroom. It's gonna be time consuming to get up and get a drink.
00:25:48
Speaker
We have no control over what songs are going to be played or how they're going to be played, and yet we love going to live shows. And I'm no exception, although I probably love it a little bit less now than I did when I was younger. And actually, I shouldn't speak for you. I know you've seen
00:26:07
Speaker
silver Jews, but I actually don't know much about your experience with going to musical shows otherwise. I mean, you just perfectly encapsulated why I don't like going to them. I find them, especially big ones, like I wound up at a three-day festival in Vegas, Vegas, which was torture for me. I fucking hated it.
00:26:29
Speaker
For different reasons but yeah i mean it's it's been very there have been very few performances that i've attended that i liked and the ones that i did tended to be more and much more intimate.
00:26:45
Speaker
And so actually, I'm not much of a concert goer for the reasons you just described. I find it almost intolerable unless it's a very special musician that I am willing to put up with all that for or a venue that surprises me, that provides a kind of environment that's not oppressive.
00:27:09
Speaker
But no, I have not been to many live shows, and those are reasons why. You did a good job. That was a good list. Thank you. I am a concert goer, although as I said, probably a little bit less of one now than I used to be, but I've been to a lot of shows in my life, big ones and small ones. And you're maybe a little bit of an exception as far as the average person goes, we seem to like this. It's a thing that we like doing.
00:27:36
Speaker
going to performances. We like going to performances in general, and I think it's because I don't think if you talk to the people who are in line outside an arena to get into a U2 show, I don't think many of them are there to see the fame of those men in person. I've been front row at a U2 concert before. I've been like six feet from Bono while he's performing.
00:28:06
Speaker
And I had moments where I would kind of step out of myself and being like, no, that's Bono right there. If you push this gate aside, you could reach out and grab his hand. He's really singing in front of you right now.
00:28:23
Speaker
I had to force myself to have those moments. Mostly what I was doing when I was six feet away from U2 was I was enjoying the performance. Because at its best performance, like I said about trickery or artifice or something in writing or in poetry, performance has the ability to get at some kind of truth that cannot be gotten at other ways and that's why we go to see performers and that's why
00:28:51
Speaker
there's probably when you're walking down the street and you linger in front of one of those street performers, that act might not be as different from going to a Bruce Springsteen concert as you think it is. See, this is the thing though. I don't know for me, and this is maybe strange, but I feel like I reached that kind of transcendence in the privacy of my home or in my car with that music. I don't feel
00:29:20
Speaker
Maybe this is a bipart of not having been to many concerts or having a natural allergy to large crowds i don't like it i don't like being in the thick of that kind of massive people.
00:29:35
Speaker
but with the exception of actually Berman at the Echoplex in 2008, I did see, what's his name, Phil Elverin play a very, very intimate venue in LA once, trying to think of any other performances that I really loved and was glad I was present for. I've seen some flamenco music played in a very intimate setting, but
00:30:04
Speaker
I don't know. I just don't, I don't feel that same. I understand. I understand. I'm not, I'm not going to play dumb at, um, uh, pretending to not get why the live performance is special.
00:30:19
Speaker
compared to a recording. But I don't know. I don't pine after a live performance, even with the musicians I love. I mean, of course, if Berman were alive today and I found out he was playing in Albuquerque tomorrow, if I had all kinds of things going on tomorrow, I would figure out how to get there, for sure.
00:30:43
Speaker
Um, but it's just so private for me, like my relationship to the music I love that, um, I, I relish the connection as a private intimate thing, which I don't know. That's just me, but I've never really, I've never really had an issue with cultivating that relationship, uh, through my speakers, if that makes sense.
00:31:14
Speaker
It does, although I do feel like I should point out, it's still a performance that you're enjoying. Definitely. Oh, I'm with you there. I'm with you there. And for my part, because I am very similar in a lot of ways, and a lot of my most profound and memorable experiences with music have been made by myself either
00:31:38
Speaker
sprawled on a floor with headphones on or maybe in my car with the music turned up really loud. And yet I am still drawn to go and see these performers and hear the music live. And I wonder if there is something in the communal aspect of it that even a sort of solipsistic sort of person like me
00:32:08
Speaker
Maybe I get some kind of contact high off of that, that kind of environment. I don't know. Well, it's interesting. I mean.
00:32:20
Speaker
there's gotta be a lot of people that either struggle so much with the crowd thing that they don't go to shows themselves, or a lot of people that actually struggle with the crowd thing would push through that because they care so much about being there for that musician or for that band to witness that performance. And I think on some level it must feel good actually to turn to your left and your right in front of and behind you and go, okay,
00:32:49
Speaker
I might not get along with most of these people in many ways, and I probably wouldn't want them as my friends and vice versa, not for any smug reason, just because it's not that simple. But there's a little bit of pleasure or a little bit of, I think, community, right, that is there, where you're like, okay, we all are here at least, at the very least, because we all like this music.
00:33:18
Speaker
And that does bind us together in a way that is special and maybe not superficial. Although I do remember like, I don't know if you ever had this experience. It can be kind of strange to be at a concert venue, turn to your left and your right, turn in front of and behind you, see people mouthing words to songs, you know, as well to the level of memorizing them.
00:33:42
Speaker
and be like, these are the folks that like this music, because sometimes they're not exactly who you expect. I don't know if I'm expecting to see myself multiplied 1,000 times. That sounds horrifying. But there have been a couple moments where I'm like, this is very strange and a little bizarre to realize how disparate the music demographics can be that all love the same band.
00:34:12
Speaker
Yeah, and it also can be alarming when that comes from, I'm a big fan of the band, The Drive-By Truckers, who are very political band, very left-leaning political band. And that has been clear in their, they've been around for a long time, over 20 years.
00:34:32
Speaker
and those political inclinations have been clear in their music pretty much from the beginning. And if anything, they've gotten more and more explicit as the years have gone on. I mean, their stage backdrop was a Black Lives Matter banner long before that became trendy.
Political Messages in Music
00:34:51
Speaker
And yet, I've seen shows where Patterson Hood, one of the lead singers,
00:35:01
Speaker
will have to tell the Republican hecklers to knock it off. You're a Republican, and you're coming to a drive-by trucker show, and you think you're not gonna hear left-wing politics? Have you never listened to their music before, or are you just so dumb that you don't understand what their songs are about? And those people are never a majority at a trucker show, but they're there. And then you think, God, these people are writing
00:35:31
Speaker
these songs with these humanistic political messages and people are out there grooving to them and they're not getting it at all. So for all that we can go on and on about like the transcendent truth of performance and any given audience, there's a fraction of it that is not getting what's happening at all.
00:35:57
Speaker
Yeah, I struggle with this too because looking at like the musicians from the 1960s that I would say if there were ever a moment, right? I mean, arguably without even, I mean, how many times have you heard people your dad's age that were in there?
00:36:14
Speaker
late teens, early 20s at the peak of that musical apex saying, and probably rightly so, it was the best fucking moment in American music history, certainly in rock history, and we'll probably never get back there. And even I can listen with all the gaps in my knowledge to the Alzheimer's and nod my head and go, yeah, they're right. This is fucking unmistakably excellent.
00:36:43
Speaker
And there's a lot of reasons for it that are both, I think, explicitly, what would you say, self-evident and ones that are more mysterious and will probably forever remain somewhat mysterious. But, you know, I listened to The Grateful Dead, which, as we both know, you certainly more than I, the hardcore dead heads. I mean, that's a level of religiosity. And I mean that with
00:37:13
Speaker
With admiration, really, I don't have any issue with this.
00:37:17
Speaker
the extent of the knowledge base going from not just recorded but to concert albums and all these other ephemeral, esoteric things that you're gonna get into if you're gonna get deep down a deadhead rabbit hole. You say Cornell 77 and think that you sound cool and they look at you like you just mentioned that you're a fan of Britney Spears. Yeah, there you go. And I don't even know what that, I mean, you're clearly 10 layers
00:37:44
Speaker
Deeper than i've ever gotten but ok so many reveal my the the the what would you call this.
00:37:53
Speaker
What's the name of that when you, when you're so shitty in math and you go to college and they make you take remedial. This is remedial deadhead shit. I was listening to just the classic recording, master recording of ripple. Although I should probably not even say master recording or someone's going to be like, well, which one or, you know, which version? No, I think, I think you can ripples it's, it's pretty safe. So there's this, there's the line in ripple that says, let there be songs to fill the air.
00:38:20
Speaker
And in and i interpret that as a non child of the sixties or twenty something in the sixties as a beautiful life. Like yeah if there were more songs like ripple when i'm singing along to ripple.
00:38:35
Speaker
maybe we wouldn't be fucking getting involved in wars. And maybe this would stand a chance at chipping away at bigotry and racism and some of the poisons that are in our society. And I think they have actually, although it's hard to quantify that, right? But yeah, then there's another side of me that goes, give me a fucking break. You know, like,
00:38:57
Speaker
It didn't work and it hasn't worked. And my cynical side goes, you could make a million ripples and they could be equally brilliant. And we're still going to fuck this up because we do. And maybe that's me when I'm grumpy, right? But.
00:39:13
Speaker
It's an interesting question, like back to Rattle and Hum. Which bandmate was it that said this distinction or this statement that music should not mess with politics or that music shouldn't be political? Adam. Okay, and he said it was a drummer, right? Basist. Basist, sorry. Basist. And then he follows it up with, that's fucking bullshit.
00:39:36
Speaker
I agree with him. I think that is bullshit. It's a ridiculous line to draw. There's no reason why music can't be political. And I think we have evidence, even if it's not quantitative, that music can change minds, change people's hearts, impact their behavior, maybe do a little bit in making the world a more humane place. But
00:40:04
Speaker
music is not going to save us. There's a little part of me that wishes that we're true or still wants to believe that that's possible somehow, as naive as that sounds, that you could just hit enough people right in the heart with incredible music that is humane and transcendent that we're going to
00:40:28
Speaker
we're gonna root this shit out of ourselves, but- No, there's conservative dead heads. Of course there are, there's any kind of person you can think of exists, of course, but they're not an extreme minority and there are noted figures on the right who are vocal admirers of the dead. And
00:40:50
Speaker
I'm picturing major Bitcoin transactions being made while Ripple's playing in the background. That's probably a totally fair image to have in your head. On some level, it's not that the dead songs are political, they're not. I can't really think of a single political grateful dead song off the top of my head.
00:41:12
Speaker
Obviously, these people are not voting for Donald Trump and watching Tucker Carlson. Although Jerry Rubin did become a Wall Street investor. Yeah, and God knows what happened to Eldridge Cleaver and on and on it goes. It's cognitive dissonance on some level, but if you can go to dead shows and actually be a part of that culture and listen to that music,
00:41:41
Speaker
that music that is so fundamentally non-aggressive, right? There's nothing remotely aggressive in the Grateful Dead's music. And still insist that your conservative interpretation of the world is correct and also congruous or congruent with the Grateful Dead's vision of the world, then there is no hope for you.
00:42:07
Speaker
You know, there is a simple, I think, but obvious part of this that we overlooked that we should at least touch on briefly, which is just that there's a lot of joy in watching somebody do something well. I remember I have no idea what the best concert I ever saw was, but if you asked me to pick one, I would usually say Leonard Cohen. And I saw him in 08 or 09, kind of at the beginning of his epic
00:42:36
Speaker
world tour that lasted for so much of his later years. And I went because my dad bought me a ticket. They were expensive and I probably wouldn't have gone on my own because I wouldn't have had any expectation that Leonard Cohen at that age would have been a particularly good performer. And so it was the best possible scenario because I walked into it with relatively low expectations, but
00:43:03
Speaker
unspoken hopes I guess and then I was absolutely just gobsmacked by the performance that he gave and he did that night after night and it's you know it's captured on the the records from that tour but part of the time I think I was just experiencing the thrill of watching him be really good at what he was doing even though so many of these were songs that I knew so many of these were songs that meant a lot to me
00:43:33
Speaker
songs that I'd grown up with. But that joy extended also to the songs that I wasn't familiar with. And just watching him and his band be so good at what they were doing, there's a kind of joy in that that maybe bypasses some of the other stuff we've been talking about.
00:43:55
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like without having been to a Cohen concert myself, because I like his music so much that I would have connected in much the same way you're describing.
00:44:09
Speaker
I just can't, I'm gonna be honest, I don't like you too. I can't connect with that music. So again, as much as I'm willing to fairly or unfairly psychoanalyze myself to try to take some of the heat off of perhaps unfairly harsh critiques of Bono,
00:44:36
Speaker
And I do think it does wind up being directed pretty much exclusively towards Bono. I just can't stand him, man. I can't stand him. I don't know what it, that's a little harsh. I can, I can stand him, but I almost can't. It's right on the line. It, it, it, it vacillates. Like at the beginning, I was actually changing my
00:45:00
Speaker
orientation towards him in part because of those unscripted intimate moments between him and the band. Where i got to see a different side of them that i liked. There's something about the performing bono that i don't like. And i don't think i'm i would be fair to myself.
00:45:24
Speaker
If I made it all about some kind of latent self-loathing because I don't think that's all that's going on. I think what's going on is I'm reacting to something that's.
00:45:35
Speaker
bothering me in him. And I don't think it's just unhealthy. I think there's something legit that I'm responding to that I don't like. And I need to spend a little more time with what that is exactly. And I don't want that to feel personal. I hope you don't feel like that's a personal thing. Not remotely. Okay, good.
00:46:02
Speaker
You fucking ass, you know, this stuff is very I know very into no it no it is and get how that work No, no, I know I I was kidding. Yeah. Yeah, I get how that works You know what I think it is to be honest I mean if I have if I'm gonna do like a quick off the cuff, here's what bothers me with bottom-up
00:46:24
Speaker
And it's the performer. I really want to make that clear. It's the performing Bono, not necessarily the private Bono, as we came to know him, however little we could possibly glean from the intimate unscripted stuff.
00:46:40
Speaker
I don't do well with this kind of maximum confidence shit. I struggle with it. I like underdogs. I like, even if they themselves are kind of underdogs, because you gave me some of the biographical background about everyone other than Edge actually coming from pretty humble backgrounds. And I've got utmost respect.
00:47:05
Speaker
for the stratospherically difficult task of you don't get there without a lot of luck, but also a tremendous amount of talent. And that is unmistakable. I can't take that away from them. No one can. And if they don't, I'm sure they know that for themselves. And if they don't, there's no saving those folks because I think they must know. But there's something with the Bono hyperconfidence. It's the same issue I have with Bernadine Dorn.
00:47:35
Speaker
You know, there's a moment in the, and maybe there's actually performance in those communiques, right? Like, is that actually Bernadine Dorn or is that Bernadine Dorn as she thinks she needs to be?
00:47:49
Speaker
in this particular moment as a political radical, as a revolutionary. This is what a revolutionary does. This is how a revolutionary speaks. This is in spite of how Bernadine feels inside what Bernadine must say on Mike in order to make sure that the left that needs cohesion and a feeling of being emboldened maintains cohesion and confidence. Who knows, right?
00:48:19
Speaker
but I just don't relate well to that kind of, I don't know. There's a little, I don't know if it's like I need someone with a chip on their shoulder, but I need someone, I don't know, that's a little more wounded. And I know it's tricky cause like he's doing some very vulnerable things.
00:48:42
Speaker
I mean, as you talked about with, I mean, when we watch Sunday, Bloody Sunday, I think there's an argument to be made that's valid, that you can't actually access those kinds of emotions on stage if there's not a leaning into vulnerability. But there's some weird combo with him where it's like, the vulnerability is combined with a kind of hyperconfidence that
00:49:04
Speaker
I find unpalatable. That's about as good as I can do right now. I was with you up until your comment about chip on the shoulder and being wounded. I think one of the biggest critiques that's been leveled at Bono over the years is that he has a chip on his shoulder the size of the Grand Canyon. Interesting. And I think he's obviously deeply wounded person. Interesting.
00:49:32
Speaker
that part of that woundedness is what drew me to the music, his voice the very first time that I heard it. There may be no accounting for that, but when you were talking about, okay, it's the same thing that you feel about Bernadine Dorn, the first thing I thought was, what about Malcolm X? What about Fred Hampton?
00:49:54
Speaker
I mean, these guys were in control at all moments of everything they were saying and the way they were saying it, and it was very, very conscious. Yeah, yeah. All right, I got the next one for you. Maybe you help me get at it, although I'm suspicious of this word.
00:50:10
Speaker
Um, because I think just like Berman's line in nights that won't happen, uh, what's the line is something like, uh, and as much as we might want to seek the real and hit rewind something like that. And I read the real or I'd, or I'd retranslate the real as authenticity. There's a cult that we built around authenticity.
00:50:40
Speaker
on the left, but I think in general where
00:50:45
Speaker
we distinguish or we make these distinctions that are seemingly clean cut between the authentic and the inauthentic. And we're always striving after the authentic, whether that be in consumption or in our own true selves, you know, back to when
Authenticity in Performance?
00:51:04
Speaker
you hear this, this sort of the existential agony of just be yourself, man. And you're like, go fuck yourself. What does that even fucking mean?
00:51:15
Speaker
But I think at bottom there's a little bit of like be authentic. Be who you really are. When I watch Malcolm X give his speeches, when I watch, when I watch, who's the other person you mentioned? Hampton. Hampton give his speeches. I actually do, I am convinced as the audience member that that is, there's something authentic happening there. It's real.
00:51:44
Speaker
I might have a bit of doubt with Bono, where I'm like, the performance is so perform-yish. I don't know what the word is, but there's something else happening in that for me where I'm not doubting for a second, even if, as you put it, there's a parlor trick at all times with performance, no matter what.
00:52:06
Speaker
I don't doubt for a second when I watch Malcolm X or when I listen to Fred Hampton that that is the real deal happening. And there were I don't know what's going on with me with bono where there is a flicker of like is this really what this is or is this.
00:52:23
Speaker
kind of halfway real and halfway something else. There's some kind of internal antennae, right? That gets fuzzy in a way that it doesn't with the others. And that could, and it's so fucking subjective.
00:52:39
Speaker
So i have no idea i'm not here pretending to be the. Objective measuring rod of authenticity but for me there's something in him in the bono persona in the bono performance that rubs me wrong in a way that malcolm x and hampton never did. So one of the most interesting things watching the film last night.
00:53:09
Speaker
was that I started to wonder if I've become less of a U2 fan than I used to be. There are moments in the movie that struck me as ridiculous, that probably when I was younger, they struck me as ridiculous, but in a way that I was able to just gloss over. Like endearing almost. Yeah.
00:53:32
Speaker
that watching now like his speech during Bullet the Blue Sky, I can't tell the difference between ABC News, Hill Street Blues, and a preacher from the old time gospel hour stealing money from the sick and the old. Well, the God I believe is in short a cash mister. And I feel a long way from the hills of San Salvador, I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, man. But it wasn't that I thought it was insincere.
00:53:58
Speaker
It was that I thought it was facile. Naive, even. Naive, yes. Yeah. And even then, I mean, they're like 26 years old. There's nothing wrong with being naive at that age, you know? Sure, sure. But. Shallow. Yeah, shallow. There's a surprising lack of depth.
00:54:19
Speaker
in, I think, sometimes the lyrics that he thinks are his deepest. I don't think there's a surprising lack of depth in his lyrics in general. And in fact, one of the most charming moments, I think you even chuckled at this, was when they're hanging out with BB King and they're going over the lyrics to When Love Comes to Town and BB King says, you're mighty young to be writing such heavy lyrics. Yeah, that was great. That was great. And then a little while later, he says, a lot of emotion there, young man, a lot of emotion, that's okay.
00:54:44
Speaker
I couldn't help also but think we saw B.B. King on General Hospital in the Oakland Dram House where we stayed, Dallas from Silver Juice Song. Silver Juice Song references B.B. King. Oh, right, right. Okay, sorry. Yes, it does. Nice. Yes, very nice tie-in.
00:55:04
Speaker
there was something that just as an older man wasn't doing it for me. And yet at the same time, so after we watched the movie, you went to bed, I stayed up for a while. And I was thinking through this, like, am I finally becoming less of a U2 fan? But at the same time that I was thinking that I had a song stuck in my head,
00:55:28
Speaker
it was not a song from the movie, but it was a U2 song from their last album, Songs of Experience, which I want to say was 2018, thereabouts, song called 13, there is a light, just this gorgeous song. And I hadn't listened to it in ages, but it was in my head last night. So I had this fascinating moment of being like,
00:55:53
Speaker
Am I kind of turning against Bono finally after all these years while one of his songs is in my head in a good way, right? And I always remember this scene and I think once or twice we've mentioned Salinger on this podcast and very, very, very problematic human being, very good writer.
00:56:18
Speaker
Well, Christ, Franny and Zoey or Ray's High the Roof Beam carpenters, he tells the story of a snobbish music listener who is full of absolute dismissiveness about popular music and then
00:56:37
Speaker
leaves work in a really good mood and walks home down the street whistling a pop song without even realizing that he's doing it. So I felt a little bit like that guy and I've always aspired at the same time not to be that guy.
00:56:56
Speaker
I spent part of my life poring over the librettos to Bach oratorios, and I can talk to you about the development of polyphony in Western music during the Renaissance and talk to you about motets by an obscure Flemish composer that nobody's ever heard of anymore.
00:57:16
Speaker
But I'm also a U2 fan, right? I've always tried to distance myself from that kind of like- Snobbishness. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But having said that, I understood why watching Rattle and Hum, I still think it never got enough credit for the quality of the performances in it. I still think those are most of those, not all of them, but most of those or many of them are amazing to watch.
00:57:44
Speaker
I was very impressed with, is it The Edge or just Edge? Well, I mean, it was a childhood nickname. Technically, I think it's The Edge, but usually people just call him Edge. You wouldn't be like, hey, The Edge, although Bono sometimes makes the point of doing that. Well, I don't think we ever saw The Edge in any moment actually get edgy, which I was impressed by for real. There was something, I mean, clearly stoic about him.
00:58:13
Speaker
I would even say deeply introverted, but you could also read a, there was a clear discipline there. And I think I commented to you at one point. They're in there. They're in there.
00:58:29
Speaker
uh, RV, you know, before the San Francisco concert. Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen enough documentaries on huge musical acts that before starting the show, those same, uh, what are they called? The talent RVs. What's the actual term for those things? I feel like there's a fricking, there's a name for this anyway, whatever.
00:58:55
Speaker
They're all partying in the other films. I mean, not all, but it's like, it's a cliche, but it's true. Like, it's like, holy shit, it's astounding any of these people last six months when they reach this level of fame. But you go into that one, as we saw it, and they're literally just looking over their lyric sheets. They're having totally just matter of fact discussions about how to proceed.
00:59:22
Speaker
I think Eternia was like, this is crazy. They're stone cold sober and they're just focused. I was impressed by that and I do think Edge as I know nothing about them. I don't know anything about the lore or the facts or the bios, but he struck me as one of those just like I'm working and things are not going to get in the way of my work and I definitely respected that. It's obvious just how
00:59:52
Speaker
insanely talented he is at playing his instrument. That said, I did understand why when Rattle and Hum came out, it was largely dismissed, even by critics who liked U2 a lot. And even among U2 fans, I don't know that it would be fair to say that it has a cult following. There are people who love it, but then people who are largely indifferent to it.
01:00:17
Speaker
watching it straight through from start to finish. As a movie, it does not work at all. And that is not their fault. That's the fault of the filmmaker who I think couldn't quite figure out where he was going to go with this. The band wanted it to be one thing and it kind of grew out of their hands. And I think that scene early on where he's Phil Joannou is asking them questions and they cannot answer them and they're being really self-conscious.
01:00:43
Speaker
He says, I knew this would ever work. But then that's it. Then the movie like drops that afterwards. It's like that was, well, we tried that one time and you guys aren't really good at this. So we're going to go in a different direction. And the movie really suffers because of that. And there's these really facile touches that I don't think the band is responsible for. Like Bono sings a song. You don't know it from the lyrics, but it's called MLK. That's the sleep tonight. And may your dreams be realized. Really simple little song.
01:01:09
Speaker
It's just Bono singing it, but then the film cuts to this image of MLK's face. I just rolled my eyes when that happened.
01:01:19
Speaker
It's also interesting, right? Irish bandmates. I know this has clearly been done to death, but like Irish bandmates making sense of and like and and sort of giving their weird rendition of American history through their music. Like as they understand American culture, American history, there is something very sort of bizarre about it, actually. That was actually the biggest criticism of Rattle and Home when it came out was that people said it's like,
01:01:50
Speaker
They're explaining the blues to America. And I understand how you could read it that way. I do not, even now, I don't read it that way. They were Irish. They were young. Ireland is a very different place than America. And they didn't grow up with the blues. They grew up with punk and opera and Irish folk music.
01:02:17
Speaker
And their music, if you listen to their early records, you can hear there's no, they're not like the Rolling Stones or the Clash or something. They didn't start out playing blues-based songs, right? So when they did finally turn their attention to America, I find it kind of delightful, because there's that press conference that we see one minute of, where a reporter is asking them about, what's it like being an American, being around American music?
01:02:47
Speaker
Bono's like, I have to tell you about this. We went to Sun Studios and it was a barbershop and it was this and it was that, but the original recording, we went in there and we recorded a bunch of songs. Bono's saying it because he's like a kid. He's like, this is really fucking cool, man. It's easy as an American to be like, yeah, we know. We know Sun Studios is still there.
01:03:11
Speaker
Although I suspect, in fact, a lot of people probably did not know that. A lot of Americans are probably learning that as well, watching that. But I understand why people could react that way. Like, oh, they're not satisfied with having conquered the world with their music. Now they're going to come over here to American, explain American music to Americans, or they're going to hook up with Black artists like they think they're Black or whatever, even though, again, Irishness and whiteness has a really interesting and complicated history.
01:03:40
Speaker
And Bono writes a song about Billy Holiday and he manages to throw in John Coltrane and Miles Davis and he puts Birdland on the wrong street in Manhattan. And I get it, it's still a really fun song and totally reverent. Yeah, I mean, okay, two things. One is, I actually didn't even know what he's talking about when he's talking about the, what was the thing with the cowboy hat? He goes on this big monologue about
01:04:10
Speaker
What was that not a cowboy cowboy jack clement. No no he's wearing a cowboy hat in multiple scenes yes i'm referring to yes he was cosplaying america at the time yes right but what was the whole monologue you went on that you had mentioned previously in this conversation. Where he's saying where you you know maybe thought even at eighteen this is fairly ridiculous but he's trying to make a political statement here.
01:04:39
Speaker
I can't tell the difference between ABC News- Yeah, that whole thing. What do you make of that whole, what's going on in that monologue? The song is Bullet the Blue Sky. Okay. Okay, and what it's actually about is US intervention in Central America. Okay. Okay, specifically in El Salvador.
01:05:00
Speaker
If you listen to the lyrics of Bullet the Blue Sky, you might or might not be able to piece that together. It's kind of like a stream of consciousness kind of song, like one minute you seem to be in a place that's being bombed, but the next minute there's a man with a saxophone. So the lyrics are kind of elliptical, right? But that's what it's about, is US intervention in Central America. And part of the monologue is the song when he says,
01:05:27
Speaker
see the sky ripped open, see the rain pouring through the gaping wound pelting the women and children. That's part of the song. But he leads into it with this monologue about a televangelist, how he was in his hotel room and everything that's on TV, whether it's the news or whether it's the cop show, Hill Street Blues, or whether it's a preacher is all the same shit. And that the preacher then is taking advantage of people, you know, the God I believe isn't short of cash.
01:05:55
Speaker
So doesn't really fit together there's another problem right in this to me actually might really actually you have helped me figure out what exactly it is that bothers me with him. As he's criticizing self interested self serving preachers he's preaching.
01:06:16
Speaker
It's obnoxious. He is a preachy dude. And maybe that's what I don't like, is there's a preachy quality to him that rubs me the wrong way. And he seems to be convinced of his own truth-saying abilities. And in being so taken in by his own performance, he ceases to register the irony
01:06:43
Speaker
that he's preaching about inauthentic preachers. I think he's constantly aware of the irony. Oh, is he? Yeah. Okay. It didn't seem that way. At one point in the film, he cuts himself off in the middle of the actually a much, much better monologue in the song silver and gold. He says, am I bugging you? I don't mean to bug you. And then he cuts himself off and tells edge to play the guitar solo. And he's, his lines, his lyrics are full of lines like, um,
01:07:11
Speaker
It's hard to listen while you preach. I thought I heard the captain's voice, but it's hard to listen while you preach. He's constantly doing stuff like that. You don't see that though as like, I mean, it could be the same stuff, like the stuff we were told as children that has truth to it, which is the very thing you're reacting most negatively to is the thing that you despise most in yourself. No, I think there is truth in that.
01:07:38
Speaker
And maybe, and I don't know how I, it's very hard for me, but fascinating for me as an adult now to try to speak from adult me, not just adult me, but adult me in this moment in my life, but also 12 year old me who contributed to me being adult me, you know? And so it's very hard for me to sort of combine all those perspectives, but I think part of what drew me to him
01:08:06
Speaker
was the fact that he seemed compelled to say it anyway. And I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea that, okay, sure, some of what makes us angriest is the stuff that we see in ourselves, right? And there is truth in that to a point
01:08:35
Speaker
But when I think about rape, for instance, someone violently sexually abusing someone else and I get so mad, do I think it's because I see that in myself? I really don't think that's what it is. What about like, I mean, I don't know enough about
01:08:59
Speaker
Whichever politicians he's befriended. All of them? He's friends with Obama, right? Probably. I don't know. I don't want to then misspeak. You don't know. Oh, no, he's probably friends with Obama. I'd be surprised if he was not friends with Obama.
01:09:17
Speaker
Do you happen to know if they interacted just period cuz i don't want it i do know that they interacted okay so if she's willing to be in a room with someone who. Apparently ramped up drone strikes more than any other president and wound up with however many number of untold civilian casualties as a result.
01:09:39
Speaker
And at twenty six he's railing against whatever it is he's railing against the u.s. imperialism and. I don't know what to do with that other than scratch my head and go well of course. No one is we change and that's fine and it's actually the way it has to be we're not it would be.
01:10:07
Speaker
uh... maybe more disturbing sometimes i actually feel like i don't remember watching the bernie campaign commercials but they use this um... this not a trick but they use this uh... technique to drive home the point that bernie's consistent in ways that these other politicians are which is showed footage of him like
01:10:28
Speaker
1983 1985 and it's yeah and he's like railing in front of the legislature and he's giving the same goddamn speech every time there's a part of me that's like right the fuck that's impressive and there's another part of me that's like Jesus Christ I don't know if I've ever encountered a
01:10:45
Speaker
an actual human that maintained the same narrative for 50 fucking years. I understand you could keep the fundamentals and remain consistent, but to be that consistent was a little shocking. But this is very different from the Bono at 26 who's talking about US bombs dropping in El Salvador. Or is it El Salvador? I don't know. San Salvador is the capital of El Salvador.
01:11:15
Speaker
And discussing, I actually don't know much about the IRA, and I don't want to misspeak because my knowledge is literally zilch, right? But these are like impassioned political outbursts that are purportedly of the leftist variety.
01:11:33
Speaker
And flash forward to an older jet setting bottle and you are literally cozying up with neoliberals who are using drones to drop bombs on civilians so.
01:11:48
Speaker
That's a different situation than a Bernie Sanders thing, right? In that where there might be a little bit of poking fun at him for how little he changed, I think there might be reason to critique Bono for how much he's changed. I think that's absolutely right. And it was a transition that was very confusing and painful for me as a U2 fan to watch, although I think I have more insight about it now than I did then. And I think
01:12:18
Speaker
I think what he realized at some point was that his speechifying on stage wasn't doing a damn bit of good, and he realized that he had access to politicians. The way that a lot of it started, from what I understand, was he was lobbying for debt relief and the availability of anti-HIV drugs in sub-Saharan Africa.
01:12:48
Speaker
and which was a cause that was personal for him. And he found a lot of receptive audience members in the US Congress, but his biggest holdout was, I almost misspoke and said Strom Thurmond, but not Strom Thurmond. What's his fuck? Jesse Pinkman, Eisenberg,
01:13:14
Speaker
Old, long dead now. Old Republican piece of shit. Yeah, you know, this isn't ringing a bell for you. Jesse Helms. Yeah, I thought it was Helms. All right. Yeah. I believe this was Jesse Helms. It could have been Strom Thurmond. It doesn't matter for the purposes of the conversation. Deeply homophobic. AIDS is a punishment for this, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Bono went in there.
01:13:42
Speaker
and talked to the man and literally had him in tears. And he agreed to support the bill and the bill passed. And that's a testament to Bono's skills as a one-on-one persuasive person or charismatic person. And I think that
01:14:00
Speaker
had experiences like that where he realized that he could actually affect change if he worked within the system instead of shit-talking the system from without, which is a perpetual dilemma for the left, right? The purity test, too. Yes, the purity test.
Bono's Political Engagement
01:14:18
Speaker
Definitely. And I think that at some point that took over
01:14:23
Speaker
the way that he saw the world at the same time that his wealth was meaning that he was going to move in those social circles anyway, and what better way to justify that to yourself than by telling yourself that you're fighting the good fight by continuing to work within the system.
01:14:43
Speaker
I do know that it was a huge problem within the band that the Edge was furious with him for meeting with George W. Bush, for instance. And I think it very nearly caused the breakup of the band and at some point they sort of reached an agreement which was like,
01:14:59
Speaker
you stop going over to George Bush's house for play dates. Well, I think it was like, we're going to let you go over to George Bush's house for play dates, but we're not going to be a part of that. We are going to be the band that is on the stage playing the song. If you want to do that in your free time, then you can go do that.
01:15:20
Speaker
So I'm not, but I'm not going to defend Bono palling around with George Bush or Barack Obama, or I think the last U2 show I was at, I think Nancy Pelosi was there and I think he called her out, like, hi, Nancy, kind of a deal. Which is so hypocritical at a certain point if you are, for instance, I don't know much about this, nor do I care. This is for People magazine, not for our podcast.
01:15:46
Speaker
if you are making millions of dollars, maybe on the daily.
01:15:54
Speaker
And with that kind of money, you have money managers that are figuring out how to make sure you keep as much of it as possible with all kinds of tax loopholes and breaks. Yes. As you're calling out Nancy Pelosi at your show, you've surrendered your integrity in my mind. You know what? And I'm not going to argue with you about that.
01:16:21
Speaker
I could push back a little bit because ultimately at the end of the day, I don't think Bono is narcissistic. I think he's a bit of a megalomaniac and I think he's someone with a lot of money and power and that very rarely does anything good for anybody's moral compass. But I hear you and my objections are not significant enough to push back.
01:16:47
Speaker
Just for those kinds of callouts, like fine man, if you want to be like, there's nothing, be a cigar smoking, a cigar chomping capitalist, right? It's fine. Like Bob Dylan has not given all his money away. He's also not going to the White House and trying to hob not with politicians to change the world or pretend like he's doing that. And so
01:17:14
Speaker
I'm not really saying, I don't want this to turn into a purity discussion of he's sold out. It's not really what I'm after here. It's more like you don't get to be on stage pointing fingers for the very things you're now complicit in on some level. That is a problem. I agree with that. The last time that I saw them was in 2018,
01:17:42
Speaker
I enjoyed the show and I got to see them do Acrobat, which means nothing to you, but I certainly never thought I would ever get to see you two do Acrobat in concert. But it's 2018's fucking Trump administration, man. There was a lot of explicitly anti-Trump stuff in the show, but wow, how politically perceptive of you to be anti-Trump. I'm not going to fucking pat you in the back for that.
01:18:10
Speaker
But then he went off on this compromise kind of speech at one point, which became his favorite word somewhere around the time of the Good Friday Accords. Compromise? Yeah. Well, it's because of the Good Friday Accords in 1998. I'm not going to get into that, but he went off in his compromise speech and I was just standing there in the audience and I was just rolling my eyes and I think I was on Twitter at the time. I think I actually tweeted at the band after the show.
01:18:38
Speaker
pointlessly, but whatever, I was probably a little bit drunk, but it was a compromise. Really, really, really. Trump is the president. Trump is the president, right? And the Republicans love him. They are sucking his dick on a daily basis. They're locking up children in cages.
01:19:01
Speaker
they've thrown away the racist dog whistles in favor of racist tubas. They've got a goddamn racist marching band coming down fucking Pennsylvania Avenue. And you want to talk about compromise? Suck my dick. And then I tried to move on from that and just enjoy the performance of the songs for the rest of the show. But
01:19:29
Speaker
that disillusionment has not gone away and probably never will. That said, I'll probably go to bed tonight with that song from Songs of Experience in my head again, you know? I struggle with this because, you know, you get to, like, Marx's early writings, which let's not get into the fascinating on some level. On other levels, like, God, I'm tired of hearing about
01:19:59
Speaker
the French structuralists who claim that early Marx had this going on and late Marx had that going on and they're separate in the end, but no, they're not separate yet. Put it all away. We know that the early Marx had the famous statement that I'm going to misquote, but something along the lines of, you know, in a, in a post capitalist society and a communist society, there's no reason why I can't fish in the morning, read in the afternoon.
01:20:28
Speaker
Philosophize in the evening etc etc right we can do and be many things for creative beings and i love that if there is an explicit definition or willingness to define human nature and marx is entire,
01:20:45
Speaker
Corpus and if that's as close as we're gonna get which is that humans at their most fundamental level. Are intrinsically creative creatures and we are at our best when we have the we have we are in an environment in which we get to.
01:21:06
Speaker
attempt to express our creativity to the max. That's an incredible way of conceiving of humanity. I love it. I think I subscribe to it. So there's no reason why Bono shouldn't be able to play guitar in the morning and philosophize in the afternoon and play politics in the evening, right?
01:21:31
Speaker
I want to resist the stay in your lane, Bono. But if I have to look at how Dylan has done things versus Bono, this is, again, someone who's made as much as he's made. I don't know what it is, but some astronomical sum that hasn't been given away to charities and without comment.
01:21:59
Speaker
I think he does kind of have a sense of who he is, what his role is, not what his lane is, but kind of what his function is as a poet, and as a world class poet, and as a world class poet that became, I would argue, world historical in that
01:22:17
Speaker
Show me a history of the united states really show me a history of the nineteen sixties that doesn't wind up dealing with dylan explicitly and his music and the importance of that music in the larger framework of all the other musicians but he's named every fucking time.
01:22:35
Speaker
It's unmistakable how significant in terms of a cultural zeitgeist contribution dylan has made and maybe history will prove that you too is neck and neck i don't know. My god tells me probably not but maybe there's big deal that they've they've moved millions of people. I don't think that dylan said i'm gonna stay in my lane i think it was a kind of genuine,
01:23:04
Speaker
self knowledge about what he was put on this earth to do. And he understood it and he understood it in all of its expansiveness and he understood it in some of its limitations. I wonder if some of this is not a stay in your lane, Bono, but like you're just fucking not. That wasn't your thing, man.
01:23:29
Speaker
and you kind of muddy the waters by, maybe you would have, maybe I would have been a fan. I'm not sure, I don't think so. But I certainly don't like the extra musical optics of it all. I think that's probably,
01:23:50
Speaker
a good place to stop. I agree with what some of you just said. I disagree with a little bit of it, but part of what I disagree with has to do with Dylan. And if I respond to you...
01:24:00
Speaker
This will be a four hour long episode that turns into yet another podcast about Bob Dylan. And I think we should probably save that for later. And I might have a rose tinted view of Dylan. One final thing that I want to say, we don't have to pursue it now, but I'm curious because your ancestors are Irish, right? My name is Irish. I feel at home when I go to Ireland,
01:24:30
Speaker
I recently took a DNA test and found out that far more of my ancestors are German than they are Irish, which I'm still working through. I'm sorry. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. I say this as someone with German ancestors. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. The sympathy is what helps me get through, believe me. Yeah, just don't sympathize with the devil. He's the only one I sympathize with anymore.
01:24:56
Speaker
But yeah, that's for the sake of the argument. What I wanted to say about this was part of, I think, my really connecting with Berman beyond the music. But in a way, it is connected to the music, even with the name of their band, Silver Jews.
01:25:14
Speaker
And he has gone on the record a different point and been evasive about where that name came from he gave this sort of myth making legend that he was cleaning up as a janitor in a in a business in an office building.
01:25:30
Speaker
Look out the window there's a billboard for silver jewelry it was cut off and it said silver jew boom that was his name but he's made other comments that i think reveal that that was a fiction show the statement that he finally coughed up that i think is the truth was. That he chose silver jew or silver jews because of the fact that.
01:25:55
Speaker
He is Jewish on his father's side. It's patrilineal. Exactly. And in the Jewish tradition, if you're not Jewish on your mother's side, you're basically not Jewish. Right. However, right. Back to Germany and that glorious fucking aberration that graced the world stage from 33 to 45. Sir Adolf Hitler certainly made clear patrilineal, matrilineal didn't much matter to them.
01:26:25
Speaker
you were a Jew. So then you're in a double bind if you're a patrilineal Jew post-World War II because, well actually pre or post, but certainly post with that inflection because you're not only not really Jewish
01:26:43
Speaker
in potentially your own self-conception, but even if you wanted to self-identify as Jewish, you don't get acknowledged as Jewish by the real, in quotes, Jews who are maybe matrilineal at the least or both.
01:26:59
Speaker
And so the silver comes as like, you're not only, you're not a golden, a golden Jew would be both sides. Silver is like, it's like the second position of an already minority position. I believe his phrase was the outsiders to the outsiders. The outsiders to the outsiders. And so I can relate to that. I mean, I'm Jewish on both sides, Jewish on my parents' side.
01:27:25
Speaker
But I was raised secular. I was hunting Easter eggs without understanding what that all really meant in my particular familial context. I wouldn't worry about that too much. I was raised Christian and I was also hunting Easter eggs without having any idea what the fuck that meant. All right. That would have been more interesting though if you were like celebrating Hanukkah. Yes.
01:27:49
Speaker
Yes, so there was a part of me that's like, okay, not the same kind of the outsider, the outsider, as he was defining it, but I get it in that my family was so non-observant, completely secular, more or less totally assimilated in that regard, that
01:28:10
Speaker
When I started to cultivate an interest in this, even for historical reasons, but what would become still not religious, but personal, he was a beacon for me where I'm like, okay, I can wear a silver Jew shirt and feel totally at home in that in a way that I never can and haven't ever been able to inside of a synagogue.
01:28:34
Speaker
or in a genuine Jewish community. So in a way, he helped me connect in a totally bizarre and out of left field way to a Jewish identity that is inescapable, but depending on where you are from and how you're raised, maybe quite foreign. Did any aspect of the Irish ancestry and how that connected to you too for you, does this resonate at all from that end for you?
01:29:03
Speaker
with those variables? That's an incredible question, man. And the answer is yes, but I want to be very clear that I don't want to compare anything about my experience to yours. That is, there's Jewishness and the burden that comes with that identity and the history that comes with that identity is not something that I experienced and I don't mean to claim that I went through something similar.
01:29:34
Speaker
But I did grow up feeling as though I had no real identity. I lived in a suburb that was equally between two major cities. My parents both had worked to get rid of the accents that they had been raised with. We lived in a suburb that had been created out of farmland about 10 years before I was born.
01:30:02
Speaker
We lived in a part of the state that didn't have mountains or beaches or deserts or anything that was in any way geographically distinctive. I felt very much in limbo that I had no cultural roots. And at the time, as far as we knew, our ancestry was mostly Irish, although we were wrong about that. But certainly the Irish is there.
01:30:31
Speaker
And so to connect with U2 as an Irish band, even to the point that I did not understand really what he was talking about, what the situation was with the Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and the IRA and the UDA and all that kind of thing, I felt like on some level these were my people.
01:30:56
Speaker
And then these people that I identified with as my people come to my country and then criticize my country, which I'm always down to hear people criticize my country because I spend a lot of time doing it myself. So I'm really glad you asked that actually. Yeah, I had that. I sort of sparked on that as we were watching yesterday. I wondered if there was the
01:31:19
Speaker
Irish ancestry connection that you felt was being maybe cultivated in a positive sense, developing a positive connection to through this band in the way that a kind of idiosyncratic Jewish identity was cultivated for me, or I found a place for it a little more
01:31:42
Speaker
that felt true to me through Berman's music and through just identifying with him and with the band and with the sentiments. But I think further, you know, you hear this cliche, friends of the family we choose.
01:32:00
Speaker
Music is also kind of the family we choose. Or to put it a little differently, music is part of the identity we get to choose. And it's very intimate. Very intimate. And it almost can't be... I'm trying to find the right word here.
01:32:24
Speaker
You can't underestimate the potency of this stuff and how people make sense of themselves to themselves based on the music that they choose to bring closest to them, make closest to them.
01:32:40
Speaker
And i guess it's tricky cuz sometimes it chooses us i think it's both but certainly as americans nation of immigrants. Certainly those of us who are not indigenous that i think do struggle maybe profoundly and i don't want to speak for indigenous communities and claiming to understand what identity. Navigating identity is like.
01:33:09
Speaker
for people in those communities, but I can speak for myself. I can speak for my friends that are non-indigenous and have ancestral roots outside the continent, right?
01:33:22
Speaker
Think back to go dollars breathless you know these characters build themselves up off of movies they model themselves after actors they take on the gestures of gangsters as played in american films i think for better or worse when we,
01:33:42
Speaker
are untethered from an actual ancestral cultural background or environment, you're left with the mountain of culture, both the garbage and the treasure. And you are, as the suburban kid, or myself as the Easter egg hunting Jew,
01:34:06
Speaker
trying to figure out well no one has provided me with a script so i guess we have to write one for ourselves and i think part of that cobbling together process is in large part achieved through the cultural products that we bring closest to us.
01:34:24
Speaker
And there's a sadness in that. There's also immense freedom in it. It's a confusing mess. And I don't want to say cultural product, because that sounds like a commodification, although we are in a commodified reality. But it's deeper than that, right? I don't think you'd ever refer to U2 music as a cultural product. It would be something in this that is helping you connect with yourself.
01:34:55
Speaker
We're all on that quest, I think. Back to authenticity, as much as I understand why it is healthy to resist the mystified notions that surround this term now. There is still truth in the quest for landing on or working towards our truest selves. And the music that we love helps us get there, I think.
01:35:25
Speaker
Good night, everybody. We'll see you next time on Candy Jail. Well, here we are, the Irish in America. The Irish have been coming to America for years. Going back to the great famine when the Irish were on the run from starvation and a British government that couldn't care less. Right up to today, you know, there are more.
01:35:54
Speaker
Irish immigrants here in America today than ever, some illegal, some legal. A lot of them are just running from high unemployment, some run from the troubles in Northern Ireland, from the hatred of the H blocks, from torture, others from wild acts of terrorism, like we had today in a town called Innes Gillen, where 11 people died dead,
01:36:24
Speaker
many more injured on a Sunday, bloody Sunday.