ome of you know Mike Gentry and to the rest of you, my condolences. At Sarahhepola.com, we owe Mike a lot -- he's the one who set us up on this website and the person we whine to when things like archives don't work and the person who actually tries to solve that archive problem while Sarahhepola is sunning herself, surrounded by bubbles and balloons. Mike Gentry also keeps his own Weblog at edromia.com, and when you click on it to read more things by Mike Gentry, make sure to read his fiction pieces. Those are our favorite parts.
So anyway yesterday, Mike Gentry wrote us something about Bono, whose coolness we were half-musing about somewhere in the bowels of our last entry. We liked what Mike wrote and even learned some things (hookers? boa constrictor?), so asked if we could publish it today. A kind of guest column. "Open Mike Night" we call it, because we are tickled by bad puns like that.
The question is: Why is Bono so cool?

"This is why Bono is cool:

The man underwent an honest-to-god redemption play, a complete spiritual transformation ("in the classic sense"), and he recorded the entire process on CD.

Yeah, he was all smug and political when he was a young punk, I suppose. I never really understood the whole "posturing" accusation, to be honest -- if that's posturing, then what was his Mephistopheles persona supposed to be? -- you can't fault him for not being sincere in his convictions. But I guess there's such a thing as being overeager. And so you've got this young, smug, political Bono who wears the sort of silly hats that used to get us gamer geeks beat up a lot in high school, and he's reached the point where he's pretty much begging to be taken down a notch.

Then Rattle & Hum comes out, and it's sort of cool and also sort of lame, the R&B schtick just isn't that convincing, and you're wondering maybe he really has pushed this image just about as far as it can reasonably go, and the "posturing" -- which I guess is what I'm going to call it because that's what everyone wants to call it -- collapses. U2 kind of dies out for a while.

So then Bono goes and does Achtung Baby, which is essentially an adolescent tantrum coming 25 years too late. All the political baggage goes out the window -- the most widely played song on the album has no lyrical content whatsoever. It gets used in Coke commercials. And it's HUGE. Bono is praised from every quarter for "dropping all the pretense." Can you imagine that? He wrote "Sunday Bloody Sunday," and people are calling it pretense, and congratulating him for finally dropping it.

Bono starts to get weird. We start to hear disturbing stories on MTV about Bono waking up in a trashed hotel room with no memories, two hookers, and a live boa constrictor around his chest. Bono puts out Zooropa. Bono embraces the thing that everyone apparently thinks he should have been all along, and becomes it. The, uh, whatever it was he was doing with his image in AB -- we can't call it "posturing" because that's what he was doing when he was being sincere -- the affected lassitude and nonchalance becomes a weapon, and he digs it into his own belly, just to prove a point. What he used to say by being pretentious and sincere, now he says by sneering and licking the cocaine off the end of his nose.

And then finally he does POP. Pop is that one fucking guy who keeps jumping around and drinking and trashing your apartment after everyone else has gotten tired and gone home. Pop is the person who keeps calling you wanting to go out and RAGE, MAN, months after everyone's moved on and gotten jobs. Pop is a brilliant fucking album. Pop is clinging to an image that we've all gotten tired of, and it knows we're tired of it, and if you listen to it, I mean really listen to it, man, you can hear Bono way down in there. He's saying: "I don't like being here anymore, but I don't know how to get out." And it's on purpose. Both parts, the loud part and the quiet part, are there on purpose. It's hard to listen to, sometimes.

All That You Can't Leave Behind is just about my favorite album in the world, because it's the Story of How Bono Got Out. Every song on it is about redemption, rebirth, renewal. It's about dumping the cynicism that seemed like such a great idea for the last 10 years until it finally destroyed even its own ability to say anything meaningful, and embracing the "new sincerity." The smug posturing is gone, the painted-up nihilism is gone, and what's left is . . . wisdom. Bono has achieved Buddhahood.

I'm a fanboy and an armchair critic, but I believe you can see this without ever reading a single biographical fact about Bono. I believe it's all there on the albums. The meaning comes out like light. He wrote down every step of the journey and sold it as music.

That's why Bono is so damn cool."