Song of Freedom and Resilience

As Bono explained, the band purposely revived the enduring Crowded House classic for its inspirational essence:

"The idea is to record something special to honour Alexei Navalny's widow, Yulia, who is continuing the fight against Vladimir Putin" Bono told the audience.

"It's a song about freedom, that's the truth."

The iconic New Zealander gave his full blessing, feeling honoured that his uplifting lyrics carry such a powerful message.

"The other day, we got a beautiful e-mail from Neil Finn who wrote this bewilderingly beautiful song" said Bono.

"Attached to the e-mail was a version of the song he said we could play whenever we wanted.

"It's a new version that he did, and we're going to try and record it. Neither party has spoken to our record label [about releasing this], so this might be the only recording that might ever exist.

"Please take your phones and send it to whoever loves freedom you know.

"Maybe send it to people that don't. There's a few of them around."

With that, the band kicked off the song's recording, which featured Finn singing the verses, thereby allowing U2 and their fans to sing the chorus.

Unsurprisingly, the crowd was happy to participate, resulting in an emotion-filled collaboration.

Poignant words that resonate

The soaring 1986 hit has resonated across generations with its message to keep persisting through struggles:

"Don't dream it's over, 'cause every night I will lie awake..."

For Navalny's wife Yulia, continuing her husband's democracy movement requires resilience.

Trailblazing virtual collaboration

The collaboration took place on March 3rd during the final night of U2's Las Vegas residency.

Finn told RNZ's Culture 101 that he was grateful for the enduring popularity of Don't Dream It's Over.

"I just see it as a great privilege for it to communicate so much to so many people."

Finn's mother, a devout Catholic, moved to New Zealand from Ireland at the age of two. She maintained a religious influence over the family.

Speaking of Catholicism, Finn stated "It's a great fertile ground for pulling lyrics out.

"[There's] lots of good stuff going on in there, good rituals and imagery and lots of guilt. It's a very potent combination.

"I think you're blessed, really, to be brought up with some kind of weird dogma like that."

Finn and his brother Tim were educated at Sacred Heart College, Auckland and Te Awamutu College in Te Awamutu, Waikato, New Zealand.

Sources

• RNZ
• Wikipedia
• Qthemusic

The U2 frontman told reporters he met privately with Francis on Wednesday to sign an agreement between his charity, ONE, and the Scholas Occurentes educational charity supported by Francis.

"We haven't figured out what we are going to do together," Bono said, "but we sort of have a crush on each other."

ONE is a campaign and advocacy effort working to end extreme poverty, especially in Africa.

Bono says one of its current focuses is education for girls and young women.

About "130 million girls around the world do not go to school, because they are girls," he said.

"Poverty is sexist" is the ONE campaign slogan.

Scholas began in Francis' Buenos Aires Archdiocese, supporting education in poor neighbourhoods by pairing local schools with private schools and institutions in wealthier neighbourhoods.

The organisation has grown to other countries and supports a variety of exchange programmes aimed at promoting education, encouraging creativity and teaching young people about respect, tolerance and peace.

Besides signing the ONE/Scholas agreement, Bono said hen and Francis also discussed a number of topics including "the wild beast that is capitalism," sustainable development and sex abuse.

Francis is "aghast" about sex abuse in the Catholic Church, Bono said. "I thought he was sincere."

He said when he told Francis that in Ireland "it looks as though the abusers are being more protected than the victims, "you could see the pain in his face."

Source

• America Magazine
• AP News
• Image: KFGO.com

It is odd to imagine a celebrity icon millionaire presumably so close to the heart of rock and roll speaking so wistfully of thwarted ambition, as if he once had a dream and is now resigned to the reigning system that forbids its fulfilment because these are the rules, so to speak.

What's to stop the lead singer of the Rolling Stones from auditioning for a role in a play somewhere remote or funding a production of "King Lear," casting himself, and putting it on Youtube?

And who are "they" exactly?

Are "they" real or an abstraction, a phantom, a dagger of the mind?

Housed within our sacred traditions, we find many a healing mantra of redirection for this neurosis: The true jihad is the inner jihad.

Consider whether the light in you is not darkness.

Everything seen by the eyes is burning.

But the one I hear in my head when I get to worrying over who might not be on my side comes as a tune: "There is no them."

It's a sneakily straightforward four-word phrase that could easily be a bit of graffiti, harmless-seeming enough, but if we apply it to the partisan divide relentlessly asserted by a split screen in a 24-hour news cycle, it's about as countercultural as it gets.

Bring "There is no them" to bear upon the concept of international borders or, say, the difference between an American soldier and an Afghan civilian, or a police officer and a black human being suddenly decreed a suspect, and you might upset someone.

Express this article of faith out loud in certain contexts and you might even discover a degree of aggression projected upon yourself. As is the case with so many other lyrical one-liners

• "We get to carry each other";
• "What you thought was freedom was just greed";
• "Can't you see what love has done?";
• "Dream up the world you want to live in."

"There is no them" arises in my mind unbidden out of the everlasting opus of U2, those four alarmingly thoughtful Irishman who have banded together to create, record and perform music for over 40 years.

What to do with U2?

They are admittedly millionaires.

From the very beginning, there have been those who find them insufferable, as if their earnestness is an embarrassment to us all. What's that about?

Well, Jagger's observation might prove helpful here.

We like to know where to put people.

The placeholders are mind-numbingly familiar.

Keep religion out of politics (or vice versa).

Are you an artist or an activist?

Sacred or secular?

These divisions doubtless serve someone's marketing scheme quite well, but we know - our hearts and minds tell us - that it does not really work this way.

We love what we love.

One revelation speaks to another.

Our alleged boundaries dissolve upon contact with the way our consciousness really operates.

I know this feelingly.

As a native of Nashville, I would like to pretend that the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the beloved community that fostered him entered my radar through my judicious study of civil rights history and culture.

This would be a lie.

It was MTV and U2's decision to craft and promote what proved to be a radio hit called "Pride (In the Name of Love)," commemorating King as one more pioneer of human seriousness (one more in the name of love) along a trajectory of individuals who chose to give their lives as gifts to others, an international parade of conscience.

At 14, I still loved Duran Duran, but now I would stand in a grocery aisle reading Rolling Stone and learning about Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy as Bono name-dropped them in an interview.

Something new was getting through by way of this Irish arts collective.

My own country was coming alive to me.

In time, U2 would turn me on to Leonard Peltier and Desmond Tutu and Edna O'Brien and, in no small way, the fact of the rest of the world.

They are indeed ageing rock stars.

But they are also a mass media movement of thoughtfulness, artfulness, candour and curation. Continue reading

"I would love if this conversation would inspire people who are writing these beautiful… gospel songs, write a song about their bad marriage.

Write a song about how they're pissed off at the government. Because that's what God wants from you," Bono said.

"Why I am suspicious of Christians is because of this lack of realism." Continue reading

I listened to hundreds of hymns on Spotify; I interviewed a bunch of hymn experts.

What, I asked them, was the most successful contemporary hymn—the modern successor to "Morning Has Broken" or "Amazing Grace"?

Some cited recently written traditional church hymns; others mentioned songs by popular Christian musicians.

But one scholar pointed in a different direction: "If you're willing to construe the term ‘hymn' liberally, then the most heard, most successful hymn of the last few decades could be ‘I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,' by U2."

Most people think of U2 as a wildly popular rock band.

Actually, they're a wildly popular, semi-secretly Christian rock band.

In some ways, this seems obvious: a song on one recent album was called "Yahweh," and where else would the streets have no name?

But even critics and fans who say that they know about U2's Christianity often underestimate how important it is to the band's music, and to the U2 phenomenon.

The result has been a divide that's unusual in pop culture.

While secular listeners tend to think of U2's religiosity as preachy window dressing, religious listeners see faith as central to the band's identity.

To some people, Bono's lyrics are treacly platitudes, verging on nonsense; to others, they're thoughtful, searching, and profound meditations on faith. Continue reading

Source

• Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker's archive editor.