The Miracle (Of Edge’s Bone Structure)—By PJ and Kelly
Sure, this microscopic attention to physical detail is a bit over the top, but we are both visually-oriented people with artistic backgrounds. We’re not musicians, obsessive collectors, or set list track-keepers. We can only play to our strengths. We love U2’s music, and we love the men who make it. The Miracle (Of *Insert Physical Asset Here*) is our attempt to explain the band’s enduring appeal to those who might question how four smallish, now-oldish individuals have the power to inspire screaming. The men don’t know, but the [middle-aged women] understand.
The Miracle (Of Edge’s Bone Structure)
PJ DeGenaro and Kelly Eddington
“I was a very cute toddler; I’ve seen the photographs. But then at around the age of five something started to happen that radically changed my appearance, inspired a certain mild alarm in adults who caught sight of me for the first time, and elicited sympathetic and vaguely disappointed looks from my parents. My head grew, quite quickly, to an unfeasibly large size. … I started to look unnervingly like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine.” —The Edge, U2 By U2, 2006 (lightly edited for maximum devastation).
Kelly: This is the kind of self-effacing statement only someone secure in his status as an enormously attractive rock star could make. From his humble beginnings as an alarming, giant-headed boy, The Edge has gone on to become a fucking swan.
Let’s get into it, Peej.
PJ: This cartoon kinda makes me cry. Look at him in his little egg-ship.
Kelly: I loved drawing that. And as someone with a big ol’ Irish melon (description copyright Conan O’Brien, 1999), I feel your pain, Edge! My hat size is stratospheric. Plus I have exceptionally big hair which you...never mind.
PJ: Having just spent a week frantically googling how to make a medical mask fit on “a child or a smaller-headed adult” (and I am not a child), cry me a river, Mr. Handsome The Edge. You big-headed celebrities (and Kelly) know that you photograph better than the rest of us. Yes, you play guitar fairly well but you’re also instantly recognizable and memorable due to the fact that you’re practically staggering around under the weight of your own cheekbones. You don’t have a forehead, you have more of a six or seven head.
Okay, okay.
Yes, Edge is the technological guitar genius who took the spare sounds of punk and post-punk and gave them an otherworldly beauty, such that he is often imitated and latterly under-appreciated. But let’s get to the important stuff.
Edge is just beautifully formed, like a modern, ultra-light suspension bridge. People need to understand this.
Kelly: Suspension bridge? Well that’s the best. We should end this thing right here. Except I have a diagram.
Kelly: The architecture of Edge’s face is a mix of fluid shapes a la Frank Gehry and straight up Brutalism: the elegant nose, the dominant brow, the deep-set eyes, the impossible cheekbones, and let’s not forget:
PJ: And she should know, having spent some time on the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge of glory.
Kelly: In terms of facial features, the U2s fall into two camps: feminine (Larry and Bono) and masculine (Adam and Edge). Adam and Edge have smaller eyes and elongated features, especially Edge, while Larry and Bono have bigger eyes and tightly-consolidated features.
PJ: I have to interrupt: Adam actually has big, sad, lovely eyes.
The only difference between Adam and the rest of the band is that his head is a normal size. When your head is a normal size, your eyes might be technically smaller, but his eyes are not small in relation to his head. (I’m gonna be out here fighting for us normal-heads, Adam. Don’t you worry.) Okay Kelly, go on.
Kelly: Point taken. Maybe it’s the wee, Ben Franklinesque glasses Adam used to wear that made me think his eyes were smaller than they actually are.
PJ: Adam’s super nearsighted, so when he wore glasses, his lenses were thick enough to make his eyes look smaller. This is another problem he and I share. It’s fine.
Kelly: The differences between these masculine/feminine factions are most easily seen in the philtrum, i.e. the zone between nose and mouth. Edge and Adam: it’s long. Think Anthony Bourdain or Lou Reed. Bono and Larry: it’s short. Think Cindy Crawford or Linda Evangelista.
The philtrum is one key to understanding why some people consider Larry and Bono to be “the cute ones” while Edge and Adam are “the acquired tastes.” (But have you even tried The Edge? He’s delicious.)
PJ: Of late, Bono’s cute, short philtrum is obscured by stubble. From a distance, it’s like, what philtrum? I would never tell him to shave or anything but I do miss his upper lip.
Kelly: I miss Bono’s upper lip as well, but let’s get back to King Philtrum.
It took a while for Edge to grow into his face, and any fan who witnessed the band’s rise can recall photographic evidence of his awkwardness (except he is undeniably beautiful in the above gif). But here was a young man who was busy discovering and unleashing his considerable musical gifts while being forced into occasional male modeling stints, where he fell victim to numerous fashion mistakes. The band’s stylist must have taken one look at open-minded, slim-framed Edge and thought, “Oh honey, I’m gonna have fun with you.”
PJ: It was abuse, even by 1987 standards. Although things improved tremendously when someone suggested he go for the pirate-style bandanna, open shirts, and lots of silver neck hardware. Dread Pirate Edge is rrowwww. But I digress. Kelly?
Kelly: Even worse, he was forced to pose for photos with three other people—one of whom was the face of the group and whose looks clearly took precedence—in a pre-Photoshop era. Is Bono giving an A+ face in a picture while Edge is more like a B-? Doesn’t matter, Edge. That is the photo they’re gonna use. All of this culminated in the following throwaway scene from Rattle & Hum, where pretty boy Larry teases Edge this way: “If I had a head like yours, I’d bleedin’ bury it.”
To be fair, Edge started it, but It’s stuff like this that must have motivated Edge to achieve his ultimate vengeance: from Achtung Baby on, he has experienced minimal-if-any health problems and has become the aforementioned fucking swan. (Sidebar: today marks the first time that I have ever used the F-word on Achtoon Baby. And look, I just used it again!)
PJ: Whoever encouraged Edge to landscape his eyebrows a bit in the early 90s should get an award for revealing that OMG he’s the actually the handsomest guy in the band calm, sage-like quality we’ve all come to know and love.
Kelly: Edge’s style is easily emulated by a certain kind of guy, but I’ve always believed that he doesn’t resemble anyone else on the planet. However, a couple of weeks ago I saw one of those YouTube music-reaction videos, hosted by the kind of vacant-eyed, terrifying girl who would have asked me to make signs for the homecoming float because “you’re like so artistic.” While watching the video for “Pride (In The Name Of Love),” she took a quick glance at Edge during his solo and deadpanned, “He looks like Adam Levine.”
I was stunned. This is the equivalent of people saying Bono reminds them of Robin Williams. Maroon 5’s Adam Levine looks like a police sketch of Edge, where the witness kind of shrugged and said, “Uh, close enough, I think? I didn’t get a good look at him. I dunno, whatever, it’s fine, I guess.” I mean, yeah, I can see what you’re saying, terrifying girl, kind of. If you erased fifty of Edge’s I.Q. points, if you dipped him into a sort of douche glaze, if you gave him a mouth that looks like a 12 year-old girl’s drawing of lips, if you replaced Edge’s perfect egg-shaped skull with a brick and forgot what eyebrows can do, then sure. Edge looks like Adam Levine.
PJ: I keep telling Kelly not to do speed before she writes about Edge’s face, but she is really passionate about this topic.
Kelly: For the record, I don’t do speed. I don’t drink, and I don’t do drugs. I don’t even do caffeine. I don’t do anything. Except this [gestures wildly at the entire website].
PJ: Kelly is obviously a little worked up about this. I don’t think she’s saying that Adam Levine looks like the kind of guy who’d throw a frat party with the express purpose of spreading the bubonic plague around campus, or that if he appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy as part of a tag team with Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath they would probably still be crushed by the guys from Hootie and the Blowfish. She’s just saying his resemblance to Edge is purely superficial.
Kelly: PJ and I use the Moai emoji as shorthand for Edge.
And you can see why, can’t you? Those Easter Island guys remind me of Edge more than Adam Levine does, anyway.
PJ: I can draw a tiny bit but I’m no Kelly Eddington. If I’m going to rhapsodize over someone’s looks I have to use words. (Too many words, some say, but they are wrong!)
When I was a kid we had a set of World Book Encyclopedias that was outdated even by 1970s standards, but they must be the source of an image that recently drifted up out of the garbage bin of my memory: an illustration of a Tatar chieftain riding across the Siberian Plain. The Tatar wears a fur hat. His horse is sturdy, and he sits tall and straight in the saddle. He is bearded, and his almond eyes are almost obscured by his high, jutting cheekbones. This is Edge in another lifetime, I’ve decided. Some kind of fair-minded, egalitarian potentate. Noble.
This is The Edge!
Kelly: I SEE IT. Even his horse kind of looks like Edge.
PJ: A bit! But in profile, Edge’s features are so finely drawn that they look die-cut.
I mean, it’s ridiculous. You could drop a plumb line from the tip of his nose to his chin. You could use his face as a level. He is just very, very easy to look at.
Kelly: He’s absolutely otherworldly. Come on, people.
PJ: The weird thing is that when Edge smiles, he suddenly reveals pouchy-squirrel cheeks. Where does he keep them when he’s not smiling? Do they just kind of fold away neatly under his exquisite, heartbreaking cheekbones?
Kelly: Come with me, won’t you, to the art history corner. When he’s not revealing his pouchy-squirrel cheeks, Edge exhibits resting melancholy face (RMF).
I believe this is because the downward slope of his eyebrows is parallel to the line of his upper eyelids (and his beanie, see that diagram way up there). These eye lines convey a slight sadness but also a soulfulness that Renaissance artists Donatello and El Greco would have loved to sculpt and paint as much as I do.
(Is Edge the true messianic figure of U2?)
PJ: Here is some other stuff I’ve said about Edge (because as should be obvious by now, we stan an Edge around here):
Older, gray-bearded Edge is a pagan god of winter who really ought to be crowned with mistletoe.
Younger Edge is a marble angel; a beautiful, serene Della Robbia boy.
And as far as I’m concerned, Edge won the U2 Drag Race. Of the four, he came closest to not merely looking like a dude in a dress. This might not quite jibe with Kelly’s masculine/feminine features analysis, but we’re U2 fans. We don’t have to be consistent. Gaze upon Edge’s daintiness and tremble.
Kelly: As far as I’m concerned, we the fans won the U2 Drag Race, and I urge them to revisit this photo shoot as we celebrate its 30-year anniversary. I’m on Team Bono, though.
Rarely one to make “rock faces,” even when he’s playing his solos for “The Fly” or “Bullet The Blue Sky,” Edge’s zen serenity makes him a perfect visual foil for Bono, whose face is never not doing The Most.
(Except for the first one, all of the gifs in this—whatever this is—came from Jo D’s great gif vault. Visit her Edge gifs for all the relaxing, meditative images anyone could want. )
PJ: Nowadays, when he’s on stage, Edge looks like some kind of science fiction time-traveling barbarian with one slightly crazy, all-seeing eye, and technology obscuring his mouth and cheek, but he still has that warm-looking fuzz-chest of love on which a self-insert Mary Sue heroine could rest her weary head.
Kelly: Edge’s intelligence shines through his eyes. It’s undeniable. He’s the brains of the operation and the kid in the group project at school who is carrying the others. He has a tendency to dress more casually than the rest of U2. At the 2003 Academy Awards, he was comfortable and somehow elegant in jeans and a t-shirt.
His propensity for casual and sometimes even childlike clothing occasionally clashes with his towering intellect. But put him in a suit and the effect is jarring.
I can’t really explain it very well, but my notes for this photo simply say sorcerer vibes, so let’s just go with that.
In summation:
GAHHHHHH.
Postscript: As PJ and I were working on this, the U2southamerica Instagram account hit us with the following photo, credited to someone named Maurice (Linnane, I’m guessing?). And as usual, it left us shaking our heads and saying, “What even is he?”
