What else is a man of taste to do, other than look at Bono and U2 with a snivelling haughtiness? Sure, the guitars used to be good, and in the late 1980s the group might have found their way. But now Bono is too earnest, his politics are undergrad, his sound unoriginal and his general vibe just so goddamn cringe. If Emmanuel Macron, Mark Carney, Leo Varadkar and Justin Trudeau started a band it would look a lot like U2; Croke Park traded for the big stage at Davos. I – the clever, perceptive, enlightened critic – can see this. You – the credulous midwit – never will.
Enough! All of that might rank among the most asinine cultural criticism of this century. But Bono has the unique ability to scramble the minds of otherwise sensible people – who hold him aloft as both a risible loser and a malign elitist. Since his more explicitly political turn, the right find Bono to be a preachy establishment shill in bed with pointless supranationals like the World Health Organisation and “Bill Gates”. The left find his bland liberalism as insulting – as dangerous – as any of the “fascism” they detect elsewhere in the political culture. For now, everyone else has got over the sneering and the centre is ready to give Bono a chance. And what’s less cool than that?
The band’s new EP won’t do much to help. Days of Ash is a six-track protest “album” trying to respond, in real time, to the politics of the moment. “Six postcards from the present ... We wish we weren’t here” so goes the subtitle. And of the songs? Well there’s the spoken word poetry interlude (Wildpeace) which you can skip; the opening American Obituary which is about the fatal shooting of Renée Good by Ice in Minneapolis; the designed-for-radio collab with Ed Sheeran Yours Eternally; and the standout track Tears of Things (featuring an arresting mention of Mussolini).
It is of a piece with the rest of Bono’s palatable liberalism. And lyrically it emerges from the same brain that wrote One (“One life, with each other, sisters, brothers”) rather than, say, the somewhat more ambitious With or Without You or City of Blinding Lights. But I am not sure if it warranted the treatment it received at the hands of one op-ed in the Sunday Independent: “pitiful doggerel” unbecoming of a “65-year-old multimillionaire who lives in a mansion” (I am not sure what the mansion has to do with any of this). In fact, this album is so bad, the writer insists, it amounts to “verbal slop” of “fatuous inanity”.
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Harsh – but I know where that kind of reaction comes from. I am also sick of art burdened by politics. Novels that read like 80,000 word long opinion columns (ever read anything by Jonathan Coe?); films that plumb new depths of sanctimony (Don’t Look Up in 2021 nearly made me swear off the medium altogether); paintings that should have just been a mallet to the face (anything by Goya). And then there is the political universe as expounded by the Hollywood class: speeches about immigrants delivered at award shows, tuxedo lapels with tiny anti-Ice pins, Instagram posts about unity, togetherness and all that pap.
To borrow an overused phrase: the vibe has shifted. And the visceral turn in the culture against political art is just evidence of that. People are over it – no one wants to know what Dua Lipa thinks about Black Lives Matters any more. I am happy about this for the most part. I also do not want to know what Dua Lipa thinks about Black Lives Matters, or Jonathan Coe about Brexit or Ed Sheeran about anything. I do not think that moment in the late 2010s when everything had to be inflected with a righteous political motive, or message, was conducive to a healthy artistic realm. It was certainly conducive to a boring one.
But need I remind anyone that what we are talking about here is a protest album. Something that is necessarily and definitionally at the meeting point of art and politics – you may ask U2 not to make a protest album at all, call it unfashionable, call it wearying. In that instance, you might as well just ask Bono and U2 not to exist at all. But you cannot will it to be devoid of politics altogether. When it comes to assessing things on their own terms, you would have to be a dreadful cynic – a competitively apathetic person – to find much to dislike in Days of Ash at all.
Here you have a band ageing into a new style, with new ambitions and motivations, sitting in a studio and finally after nearly a decade making new music. Yes the lyrics sound like Bono – Bono has always sounded like Bono, what with all that earnest religiosity and allegory. But if art is going to aspire to the political (and most of the time I wish it wouldn’t) is this not how it ought to be? Honest about its intentions, uncomplicated in its message and sanctimonious about something that really does warrant sanctimony? That’s how you marry art with argument. If you must.
