Bono, as Megan anticipated Friday, made his first appearance in yesterday’s New York Times as a guest columnist. Rather than filing the piece we probably all expected (a global poverty/AIDS activist’s rallying cry), Bono did it his way and wrote about “malt joy and ginger despair” in a Dublin pub and Frank Sinatra and “sentimentality” and “duality.”
Is it, to quote two of the many online comments on the column, “poetry” or “a load of pomp?” (I can see a bit of both in the column, but more of the former, context and company considered).
UPDATE: So, would you pay 99 cents (or pay, at all) for a newspaper with Bono’s byline? In today’s Times, David Carr calls on someone to “Please Invent iTunes for Newspapers.” (And: ready, set, react!)
I agree, Liz. Reading the Bono column literally angered me. Musical talent alone, obviously, doesn't merit a Times column; the only reason the erstwhile Mr. Hewson was given the powerful platform--as the paper pretty much said in its press release on the matter--was his (commendable) work fighting AIDS and global poverty. Bono had a fantastic opportunity to keep those woefully undercovered issues in the news--and in the hearts and minds of Times readers, a group in a better position than most to do something about them--with his column. Instead, he indulged the babbling stream of his own consciousness in a style of writing that may charitably be described as "James Joyce gone stupid." The whole thing struck me as massively self-indulgent...and, considering what it might have been--had Bono considered his column to be a public service, rather than a public version of a diary entry--pretty shameful.
#1 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Mon 12 Jan 2009 at 10:47 AM