Those wishing to observe Lent this year have the standard habits to choose to go without. But instead of depriving yourself of cigarettes, red meat or, God forbid, sex, I hazard to suggest an alternative: This year, for a single month, abstain from Bono.
It will be challenging. Bono's decision to cross the artistic fourth wall into politics over the issue of African debt relief has proved to be worth the risk, and whether or not Africans have reaped much benefit from his solicitude, he has certainly been rewarded. Time's Persons of the Year are with us forever (even Newt Gingrich), and that cover shot of Bulgari-ed Bono all but crowding out the unctuous, non-famous face of Melinda Gates is sealed in our cultural shrine. U2's clean-up at the Grammy's was pure anticlimax in comparison.
How does a rock singer get so big? Well, there are all those hits, of course, which still sound great 20 years later. But does that explain it—couldn't it be that a higher power is at work? Bono, when asked about his fame, has said that he often feels like a dazzled fan on the outside, so enormous has U2 and his image become. This is intended as self-effacement, but notice it implies that his stature has grown greater than mortal hands could craft. "Not what I will, but what You will," said Jesus, and no doubt Bono feels a closer kinship to the Gospels than the preachment on vanities in Ecclesiastes. But beware the artist who suspects he's been appointed to help the world: He's liable to give his pop album such a name as How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. (The reaction to this title was interesting. All the world knew it to be fatuous affectation, and all the world inclined to praise U2 for it anyway. Is our interest in nuclear disarmament so unreal that we could admire someone for blowing hot air about it?)
Of course there have been many hopeful cultural icons to spring from pop music and the present contender is unquestionably Coldplay's Chris Martin. Martin's songwriting was never deep, exactly, but the lyrics on Coldplay's excellent first two albums have a romantic abandon and lovelorn pathos that are pretty damn charming when rendered in boyish falsetto. So I was unprepared for the case of the willies I experienced listening to X&Y. A brief sampling: "You'll tell anyone who'll listen but you feel ignored / And nothing's really making any sense at all / Let's talk." "You see no meaning in your life / You should try." "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too." For this is the new Martin—Oxfam spokesman, husband of Gwyneth, megastar—and he too has been called upon to save us, in a style that creepily combines Jesus, L. Ron Hubbard and Anthony Robbins. The single "Fix You" begins with a cathedral organ and builds to the catchy hook:
Lights will guide you homeAnd ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you
The modesty of "try" is overwhelmed by the positively transfigurational image that precedes it.
"The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me," sang John Lennon, who, for all of his proselytizing at least could ridicule the messiah complex as it formed around him. Bono and Martin are too in awe of it to dare make jokes. And to some degree we shouldn't blame them—how can 50 million fans be wrong? We're all numbingly familiar with seeing fame confused as intelligence (Donald Trump), as rebellion (Madonna, 50 Cent), as beauty (Paris Hilton!), but this incarnation—fame confused as virtue—is the most disturbing because it highlights the bottomless credulity of the human race. No kidding cults succeed, if people actually want Chris Martin, singer of rock songs, to fix them. I do hold out some faith, however, and believe that no one, not the least self-aware among us, want Bono anywhere near a nuke. At least not until he rises on Easter.