Sometimes, you Just Fucking Love Someone—By PJ
Sometimes, You Just Fucking Love Someone
PJ DeGenaro
During my brief stint as a writer for AtU2, it was necessary for me to curb my enthusiasm and to watch my language. If you read my small, four-essay archive here, you’ll see that it’s an archive of…not quite my own. (I’ll assume you understand that reference.)
Wherever you are in the world, you know that the last few years have been unsettling, and that 2020 in particular has felt like the slow rollout of the apocalypse. Today, I feel like I can just about see a light at the end of the tunnel. I hope you—our legions of readers—feel the same. Anyway, hello and welcome. Here’s a little something I wrote during the North American leg of the eXPERIENCE+iNNOCENCE tour. Let it stand as my fan-manifesto.
Or my fanifesto, if you will.
Fanifphisto? Yeah, that.
This morning I had the distinct pleasure of getting into scraps with two people—both men, at least by appearance—one of whom was pissed off because U2 is too political, the other because U2 isn’t political enough. The first guy turned out to be a basic wingnut, and there’s no point in wasting breath or keystrokes on someone who believes U2 is bankrolled by George Soros.
The other guy was pedantic—meaning that he tried to teach poor little me about U2’s glorious past—so he’s the one I want to write about.
Pedantic Guy’s knickers were in a twist because, at this absolutely abysmal point in U.S. history, Bono has demonstrated the cognitive dissonance to make part of each e+i show about “his mom” and about “falling off a bike.”
I didn’t attack the guy for his failure to read any recent U2 interviews or reviews of Songs Of Experience before opening his yap. The last thing I wanted to do was bring up Bono’s more recent life-or-death issues, because I feel protective toward Bono, and I hate the idea of presenting him as fragile to some random crank.
But I did say that many of us enjoy the blend of the personal and the political in a U2 show, not only because we care about the band as human beings, but because we hear their songs as human beings as well. We are all human beings with parents, partners, children, and friends, and sometimes we just need a song that we can sing in our own company—as a parent, or a partner, or a friend, or a child.
Any U2 fan who has ever had to confront their own mortality could find resonance in Songs of Experience, even when they (hopefully) emerged on the proper end of the telescope. If you ever find yourself in fear for your own life, politics tend to take a back seat. That has to be okay.
Pedantic Guy went on to say that he missed the old, more confrontational U2. He can’t get behind Bono asking him to compromise with the right wing.
Okay, listen: I agree! The right—in this country, at this time—is so massively fucked-up that I do not feel compromise is possible. That’s me. That’s probably a lot of us. But that’s not Bono. Bono has his real, lived experience of bringing Republicans on board to tackle debt relief in developing nations and to start a fund for the eradication of AIDS. These are not goals we normally associate with Republicans, and of course the GOP may disassociate themselves from such in the future. But maybe Bono still has a shred of optimism. Maybe he thinks you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure he knows better than I do, because he’s done it.
But what Pedantic Guy really needs to consider is this: SOMETIMES, YOU JUST FUCKING LOVE SOMEONE. Sometimes you love a band because you love them, even if they’re not the band they were thirty or forty years ago. Sometimes you love a band (or a person) even more once you’ve seen them fuck up, or once you’ve seen that they can fuck up and move on, or once you’ve seen their imperfection and their vulnerability laid bare. These days, I’m more interested in the fact that I’ve seen Bono take multiple beatings and get right back up than I am in his politics.
That’s one way that love works, I think.