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A Century Apart: The Personality Performances of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and U2's Bono in the 1990s

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03007760802217584

1740-1712

Lynn Ramert,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Abstract This paper adds Bono, the lead singer of U2, to a list of dandies, or personality performers, in the tradition of Oscar Wilde. The paper focuses on Bono in the early 1990s, during the band's Zoo TV concert tour, and considers Bono and Wilde's Irish and aesthetic connections. Bono deserves to be counted among notorious personality performers, and Wilde deserves to be taken seriously as Bono is today, due to the solemn turn his life took near its end. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people for their advice and comments on drafts of this article: Susan Maher, Ed Madden, Gary Burns, Dora Gerding, Lisa Kellerby, and the anonymous reviewer from this publication. Notes 1. "All art is quite useless" is from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (48). "Punctuality is the thief of time" is from The Picture of Dorian Gray (81). "Religion is the fashionable substitute for Belief" is from The Picture of Dorian Gray (193). "Art has never once told us the truth" is from The Decay of Lying (236). The U2 lyric, "Every artist is a cannibal; every poet is a thief," is from "The Fly" on the 1991 album Achtung Baby! 2. Mercier Mercier, Vivian. 1962. Irish Comic Tradition, Oxford: Oxford UP. [Google Scholar] (1). The priest who prepared Bono for his first communion at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin told me in 2001 that Bono was "a clever boy, but not brilliant." Even before adulthood, Bono became the frontman of U2, and his formal education ended with secondary school. Wilde, on the other hand, attended the prestigious Oxford University. This difference in level of education may help explain Bono's broad, impressionistic style of writing as opposed to Wilde's disciplined, intellectual style. 3. Stokes Stokes, Niall. 1996. Into the Heart: The Story behind Every U2 Song, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. [Google Scholar] (12). Mick Wall Wall, Mick. 2005. Bono: In the Name of Love, London: Deutsch. [Google Scholar] explains that Bono's group of friends growing up all "resolved to become 'born again' by choosing new identities for themselves" (39). A few of them include: Guggi (born Peter Rowen), Gavin Friday (Fionan Hanvey), and the Edge (Dave Evans, U2 guitarist) (39). "Bono" came from "Bonovox," meaning "good voice"; it came from the name of a hearing aid shop on O'Connell Street in Dublin. 4. The song is "Show Me the Way to Go Home" by Irving King. 5. Qtd in Lane Lane, Christopher. 1994. "The Drama of the Impostor: Dandyism and Its Double.". Cultural Critique, 28: 29–52. [Google Scholar] (35). Lane Lane, Christopher. 1994. "The Drama of the Impostor: Dandyism and Its Double.". Cultural Critique, 28: 29–52. [Google Scholar] quotes Charles Baudelaire Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, New York: De Capo. 1846. Ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne [Google Scholar] from the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. 6. This paraphrases U2's hit song "With or Without You" from 1987's The Joshua Tree, in which Bono repeats, "And you give yourself away." Explaining the line, Bono says he often feels "exposed" in the band and that in being "too open," he causes damage to his personal life and to the band (Stokes Stokes, Niall. 1996. Into the Heart: The Story behind Every U2 Song, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. [Google Scholar] 66). 7. This was not a new concern for Bono. In the live version of "Bullet the Blue Sky" on Rattle and Hum, Bono, talking about television, declares, "I can't tell the difference between ABC news, Hill Street Blues, and a preacher on the old time gospel hour, stealing money from the sick and the old. Well, the God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister." 8. Noel McLaughlin McLaughlin, Noel. 2000. "Rock, Fashion and Performativity.". In Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Edited by: Bruzzi, Stella and Gibson, Pamela Church. 264–85. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar] uses the term "antifashion" or "normal" dress to describe the mainstream that makes fashion "other" (265). 9. In one, the men wear dresses, but no make‐up, and have their normal hairstyles. In the other two, the men wear dresses, full make‐up and wigs. 10. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. is not married, but has been with his partner and mother of his children for many years. The one band member who has neither children nor a long‐term female partner is bassist Adam Clayton. However, during this era, he had a highly publicized romance and short‐lived engagement to supermodel Naomi Campbell, securing his public image as heterosexual. 11. The Trabant, which was made from compressed cardboard and cost about $300, was "the People's Car of East Germany" (Gittins Gittins, Ian, ed. 2003. U2: The Best of Propaganda, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. [Google Scholar] 167). The cars featured in the Zoo TV tour, decorated with artwork or covered in pieces of mirror and hanging from the ceiling, as well as in one of the "One" videos. 12. For example, Wilde embarked on his extensive lecture tour of the United States to espouse his aesthetic philosophies before he had published any of his notable works. 13. The soapbox critique continues to be leveled at U2, and Bono in particular. See, for example, Dave Marsh's comments on Bono's celebrity politicking in Rap & Rock Confidential. 14. Wall Wall, Mick. 2005. Bono: In the Name of Love, London: Deutsch. [Google Scholar] (175). This was one epigrammatic line that was cut from "The Fly." 15. On U2's 1997–98 tour supporting the album Pop, Popmart, one piece of the stage set was a gigantic mirror‐ball lemon from which the band emerged. This extravagance—the scale of the tour and the set—led critics to accuse the Popmart tour of going too far over the top. The lemon has been a symbol that the band has used since writing the song "Lemon," on Zooropa, which is about Bono's mother.