It took years, but I finally renewed my subscription to The Nation. And now that I’m back to getting my weekly dose of progressive insight, I realized something else. I could finally track down that fun little letter to the editor that I wrote years ago.
Berkeley, Calif.
■ Kudos for publishing Salman Rushdie’s
reflections on U2. In doing so, you have tapped
into that most vital market segment: the 20-
somethings of America. Within moments of
reading the piece, this 25-year-old jumped on
his DSL line and alerted a fellow 20-something
U2 fan (and Nation reader) in Los Angeles. I
expect the e-mail chain to continue.
While I applaud this careful surfing of pop
culture, a warning: If you publish a Christopher
Hitchens thought piece on the Back Street Boys
or Britney Spears, I will cancel my subscription.
How quickly Internet language dates itself. “…jumped on his DSL line?” “E-mail chain?” “E-mail?” Who hyphenates email?
Perhaps, though, the original essay would be of greater interest. Here it is — Salman Rushdie’s musings on Bono and U2:
The Nation
July 9th, 2001
The Ground Beneath My Feet
SALMAN RUSHDIE
In the summer of 1986 I was traveling in
Nicaragua, working on the book of reportage that
was published six months later as The Jaguar Smile.
It was the seventh anniversary of the Sandinista
revolution, and the war against the US backed
contra forces was intensifying almost daily. I
was accompanied by my interpreter, Margarita, an
improbably glamorous and high-spirited blonde with
more than a passing resemblance to Jayne Mansfield.
Our days were filled with evidence of hardship
and struggle: the scarcity of produce in the
markets of Managua, the bomb crater on a country
road where a school bus had been blown up by a
contra mine. One morning, however, Margarita
seemed unusually excited.
“Bono’s coming!” she cried, bright-eyed as any
fan, and then added, without any change in vocal
inflection or dulling of ocular glitter, “Tell me:
Who is Bono?” In a way, the question was as vivid a
demonstration of her country’s beleaguered
isolation as anything I heard or saw in the
frontline villages, the destitute Atlantic
Coast bayous or the quake-ravaged city
streets. In July 1986, the release of U2’s
monster album The Joshua Tree was still
eight months away, but they were already,
after all, the masters of War. Who was
Bono? He was the fellow who sang, “I
can’t believe the news today, I can’t close
my eyes and make it go away.” And Nicaragua
was one of the places where the
news had become unbelievable, and you
couldn’t shut your eyes to it, and so of
course he was there.
I didn’t meet Bono in Nicaragua, but
he did read The Jaguar Smile. Five years
later, when I was involved in some difficulties
of my own, my friend the composer
Michael Berkeley asked if I wanted to go
to a U2 Achtung Baby gig, with its hanging
psychedelic Trabants. In those days it
was hard for me to go most places, but I
said yes and was touched by the enthusiasm
with which the request was greeted by
U2’s people. And so there I was at Earl’s
Court, standing in the shadows, listening.
Backstage, after the show, I was shown
into a mobile home full of sandwiches and
children. There were no groupies at U2
gigs; just crèches. Bono came in and was
instantly festooned with daughters. My
memory of that first chat is that I wanted to
talk about music and he was keen to talk
politics—Nicaragua, an upcoming protest
against unsafe nuclear waste disposal at
Sellafield in northern England, his support
for me and my work. We didn’t spend long
together, but we both enjoyed it. Bono was
less taken with Michael Berkeley, however.
Years afterward he told me he’d felt
condescended to by the classical composer.
My own view is that there was a misunderstanding—
Michael isn’t a condescending
man, but a high culture/low culture rift had
opened, and that was that.
Two years later, when the giant Zooropa
tour arrived at Wembley Stadium,
Bono called to ask if I’d like to come
out on stage. U2 wanted to make a
gesture of solidarity, and this was the
biggest one they could think of. When I
told my then–14-year-old son about the
plan, he said, “Just don’t sing, Dad. If you
sing, I’ll have to kill myself.” There was no
question of my being allowed to sing—U2
aren’t stupid people—but I did go out there
and feel, for a moment, what it’s like to
have 80,000 fans cheering you on. The
audience at the average book reading is a
little smaller. Girls tend not to climb onto
their boyfriends’ shoulders during them,
and stage-diving is discouraged. Even at
the very best book readings, there are only
one or two supermodels dancing by the mixing
desk. Anton Corbijn took a photograph that
day for which he persuaded Bono and me to e
xchange glasses. There I am looking godlike in
Bono’s wraparound Fly shades, while he peers
benignly over my uncool literary specs. There
could be no more graphic expression of the
difference between our two worlds.
It was inevitable that both U2 and I
would be criticized in Britain in bringing
these two worlds together. They have been
accused of trying to acquire some borrowed
intellectual “cred,” and I of course
am supposedly star-struck. None of this
matters very much. I’ve been crossing
frontiers all my life—physical, social, intellectual,
artistic borderlines—and I spotted,
in Bono and Edge, whom I’ve come
to know better than the others so far, an
equal hunger for the new, for whatever
nourishes. I think, too, that the band’s involvement
in religion—as inescapable a
subject in Ireland as it is in India—gave
us, when we first met, a subject and an
enemy (fanaticism) in common.
An association with U2 is good for one’s
anecdote stock. Some of these anecdotes are
risibly apocryphal: A couple of years ago,
for example, a front-page Irish press report
confidently announced that I had been living
in “the folly”—the guest house with a
spectacular view of Killiney Bay that stands
in the garden of Bono’s Dublin home—for
four whole years! Apparently I arrived and
departed at dead of night in a helicopter that
landed on the beach below the house. Other
stories that sound apocryphal are unfortunately
true. It is true, for example, that I once
danced—or, to be precise, pogoed—with
Van Morrison in Bono’s living room. It is
also true that in the small hours of the following
morning I was treated to the rough
end of the great man’s tongue. (Van Morrison
has been known to get a little grumpy
toward the end of a long evening. It’s possible
that my pogoing wasn’t up to his exacting
standards.)
Over the years U2 and I discussed collaborating
on various projects. Bono mentioned
an idea he had for a stage musical,
but my imagination failed to spark.
There was another long Dublin night (a
bottle of Jameson’s was involved) during
which the film director Neil Jordan, Bono
and I conspired to make a film of my novel
Haroun and the Sea of Stories. To my great
regret this never came to anything either.
Then, in 1999, I published my novel
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which
the Orpheus myth winds through a story
set in the world of rock music. Orpheus is
the defining myth for singers and writers—
for the Greeks, he was the greatest singer
as well as the greatest poet—and it was my
Orphic tale that finally made possible the
collaboration we’d been kicking around.
It happened, like many good things,
without being planned. I sent Bono and
U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, prepublication
copies of the novel in typescript,
hoping they would tell me if the
thing worked or not. Bono said afterward
that he had been very worried on my behalf,
believing that I had taken on an impossible
task, and that he began reading the
book in the spirit of a “policeman”—that
is, to save me from my mistakes. Fortunately,
the novel passed the test. Deep inside
it is the lyric of what Bono called the
novel’s “title track,” a sad elegy written by
the novel’s main male character about the
woman he loved, who has been swallowed
up in an earthquake: a contemporary Orpheus’
lament for his lost Eurydice.
Bono called me. “I’ve written this melody
for your words, and I think it might
be one of the best things I’ve done.” I was
astonished. One of the novel’s principal
images is that of the permeable frontier
between the world of the imagination and
the one we inhabit, and here was an imaginary
song crossing that frontier. I went
to McGuinness’s place near Dublin to
hear it. Bono took me away from everyone
else and played the demo CD to me
in his car. Only when he was sure that I
liked it—and I liked it right away—did
we go back indoors and play it for the assembled
company.
There wasn’t much after that that one
would properly call “collaboration.” There
was a long afternoon when Daniel Lanois,
who was producing the song, brought his
guitar and sat down with me to work out the
lyrical structure. And there was the Day of
the Lost Words, when I was called urgently
by a woman from Principle Management,
which looks after U2. “They’re in the
studio and they can’t find the lyrics. Could
you fax them over?” Otherwise, silence,
until the song was ready.
I wasn’t expecting it to happen, but I’m
proud of it. It’s called “The Ground Beneath
Her Feet.” For U2, too, it was a departure.
They haven’t often used anyone’s
lyrics but their own, and they don’t usually
start with the lyrics; typically, the words
come at the very end. But somehow it all
worked out. I suggested facetiously that
they might consider renaming the band
U2+1, or, even better, Me2, but I think
they’d heard all those gags before.
There was a long al fresco lunch in
Killiney at which the film director Wim
Wenders startlingly announced that artists
must no longer use irony. Plain speaking,
he argued, was necessary now: Communication
should be direct, and anything
that might create confusion should be
eschewed. Irony, in the rock world, has
acquired a special meaning. The multimedia
self-consciousness of U2’s Achtung
Baby-Zooropa phase, which simultaneously
embraced and debunked the mythology
and gobbledygook of rock stardom,
capitalism and power, and of which Bono’s
white-faced, gold-lamé-suited, red-velvethorned
MacPhisto incarnation was the
emblem, is what Wenders was criticizing.
Characteristically, U2 responded by taking
this approach even further, pushing
it further than it would bear, in the lesswell-
received POP-Mart tour. After that,
it seems, they took Wenders’s advice. The
new album, and the Elevation tour, is the
spare, impressive result.
There was a lot riding on this album,
this tour. If things hadn’t gone well it
might have been the end of U2. They certainly
discussed that possibility, and the
album was much delayed as they agonized
over it. Extracurricular activities, mainly
Bono’s, also slowed them down, but since
these included getting David Trimble and
John Hume to shake hands on a public
stage and reducing Jesse Helms—Jesse
Helms!—to tears, winning his support
for the campaign against Third World
debt, it’s hard to argue that these were
self-indulgent irrelevances. At any event,
All That You Can’t Leave Behind turned
out to be a strong album, a renewal of
creative force and, as Bono put it, there’s
a lot of good will flowing toward the band
right now.
I’ve seen them three times this year: in
the “secret” pre-tour gig in London’s little
Astoria Theatre and then twice in America,
in San Diego and Anaheim. They’ve come
down out of the giant stadiums to play
arena-sized venues that seem tiny after the
gigantism of their recent past. The act has
been stripped bare; essentially, it’s just the
four of them out there, playing their instruments
and singing their songs. For a
person of my age, who remembers when
rock music was always like this, the show
feels simultaneously nostalgic and innovative.
In the age of choreographed, instrumentless
little-boy and little-girl bands (yes,
I know the Supremes didn’t play guitars,
but they were the Supremes!) it’s exhilarating
to watch a great, grown-up quartet
do the fine, simple things so well. Direct
communication, as Wim Wenders said.
It works.
And they’re playing my song.
