The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  The judgment refusing the request for an injunction must have come as a harsh blow, and might have been regarded by Ali and Bono – in the same year as the big Irish tax controversy – as another exception to the maxim that all publicity is good publicity. Help, as always, was at hand. Some sixteen months after this humiliating legal encounter, in February 2011, the luxurious lads at LVMH were on hand again, this time to buy a 70 per cent controlling stake in Nude.159 Ali Hewson and her original partner in the business, Irish businessman Bryan Meehan, remained the faces of the brand, but now it really was no more than a piece of a particularly gooey corporate pie.

  Still, Nude was merely supposed to be vaguely ethical – selling Nature, not global development, though confusion would be understandable. Its mirror-cousin Edun, by contrast, was meant to typify a transformative new investment and production relationship with Africa. Things went very wrong very fast for Edun, and by 2009, plagued with what was described in the press as problems in the supply chain and quality control, Edun apparel was being sold in only sixty-seven stores worldwide, down from hundreds soon after the company’s launch just a few years earlier.160 That’s where the experienced back-scratchers at LVMH stepped in, picking up 49 per cent of the company for €6 million, and, as noted above, picking up serious celebrity-endorsement power at the same time. LVMH also added its own pair of directors to the Edun board, including the boss himself, Mark Weber.161 Edun remained, nonetheless, a substantial loss-maker: $8.7 million in the red in 2009 alone, then another $10.2 million in 2010, bringing accumulated losses to more than $38 million.162 The 2011 losses were in a similar range, with the end-of-year accounts stating that the company was financed by shareholder loans totalling €28.8 million, up by nearly €10 million from 2010.163

  Sure, LVMH had a plan, including a new designer. The only trouble was, part of the recovery plan for the beleaguered Edun was to produce more clothes, most of them in China, a few in Peru – out of Africa, anyway.

  China? The world’s press could scarcely believe it. Ali conducted apologetic interviews:

  ‘I know, but their capability …’ Hewson trails off, before recounting the conversation they had with LVMH CEO Mark Weber during negotiations. ‘His thing was that if you’re a business, you’re going to have to be competitive and you have to be able to provide for demand. And deliver on time! Which was an issue before’, she admits.164

  You live and learn. Of course the beauty of being in ethical business to save Africa is that it doesn’t really matter what happens anywhere else in the world: the press is remarkably uncurious about, say, labour conditions in the company’s Chinese suppliers; merely breathing the word ‘Africa’ offers remarkable licence to do almost anything, anywhere, including trading on the continent’s reputation to market products that don’t actually provide jobs there. Hewson has insisted, just about plausibly, that Edun didn’t really reduce production in Africa, but just added capacity elsewhere, and that by 2013 fully 40 per cent of Edun’s business would be in Africa. At the time of writing, this very much remains to be seen. Edun does genuinely have, as it crows, a range of T-shirts already being entirely produced there.165

  But enough about the struggling business and its various locations. What about the aesthetic? Very African indeed. As Ali Hewson explained, Edun’s trendy Irish-born, Paris-based designer, Sharon Wauchob, worked in colours that ‘are very influenced by the dusty kind of landscapes there’ – there being, you know, ‘Africa’. ‘Even the way some of the clothes look like they’ve been worn before and sort of restitched. That’s part of her way of thinking … to incorporate the continent, in a sense. She’s very influenced by what’s going on in Africa, but she also wants to keep it modern.’166

  If you don’t think there’s already enough imperial contempt residing in the very idea of a European company and designer producing expensive clothes in China that are nonetheless ‘African’ because they look dusty and second-hand, then just dwell for a moment on the word ‘but’ in Hewson’s last sentence: influenced by Africa, but modern. The language of equality and justice doesn’t stand a chance, in the end, against the language of marketing and the legacy of colonial notions of modernity.

  We’ve already heard how Bono hates losing money. But he and Ali can well afford to shed their cash on Edun: they can intone, like Charles Foster Kane, that at the rate they’re losing money, they’ll ‘have to close this place in … sixty years’. They can insist that Edun is more than just a clothing line, that it is a company with a mission. And it so happens that, in Uganda, Edun has partnered its mission with that of the notorious American missionary charity, Invisible Children.

  Invisible Children exists, by its own account, to encourage US military intervention in eastern and central Africa to destroy the Lord’s Resistance Army, a paramilitary ‘child army’ led by the hated Joseph Kony. But Invisible Children has its own presence on the ground in Uganda, and Edun has joined forces with it for an agricultural training programme called the Cotton Conservation Initiative. Incredibly, the Edun website describes Invisible Children as ‘a non-profit organization that develops social programs principally in North West Uganda … [Its] role is to implement the CCIU social programs, which are savings and loan schemes, adult literacy programs, and building water holes.’167

  Was there really no one better to dig holes in Uganda than Invisible Children, a US-based NGO with right-wing and homophobic evangelical links and a cult-like social-media presence devoted to distorting the reality of African politics?168 A group that has taken in tens of millions of dollars in donations, mostly in the United States, but that is, according to its own mission statement, far more concerned with raising money by making glossy ‘consciousness-raising’ videos than with social justice in Africa? A group whose videos, its raison d’être, have been credibly accused, even before they gained unavoidable attention in 2012, of manipulating facts and painting an image of feral African violence like something out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?169

  Apparently not, in the world of Bono and Ali and Edun. In the wake of Invisible Children’s viral Kony 2012 video, made by the idiosyncratic Invisible Children film-maker and spokesman Jason Russell – widely watched for its horrible depiction of the African warlord, but also widely discredited170 – Bono jumped happily to the organisation’s defence. His support was blogged on the website of his ONE campaign. ‘Having just been in Gulu with Edun … this is particularly pertinent for me [Kony had not in fact been in Gulu or anywhere else in Uganda for six years.] … Spreading like wildfire, and sparking a heated, fascinating, much needed debate, this is brilliant campaigning … Is there an Oscar for this kind of direction? Jason Russell deserves it.’171

  Bono includes too the pro-forma language about the need for ‘solutions owned and directed by the people of the region’ (a belief hardly reflected in Edun’s relocation of production to China), but the conclusion could scarcely be clearer. Twenty-seven years after he first went to Africa with the evangelical World Vision, twelve years after he first charmed the racist, homophobic, imperialist Christian Jesse Helms, Bono and his organisations were working on the ground and in the media to support an American right-wing, militarist agenda in Africa. It’s no wonder that the company name is a misspelling of Eden.

  3 THE WORLD

  BEAUTIFUL DAY: KISSING CORPORATE ASS

  Wherever two or three of the world’s rich and powerful are gathered, there too shall you find Bono, telling them how good they are. But Bono does more than schmooze at places like Davos: he launches projects, he presents plans, he promotes causes – it’s a lot of work being the world’s leading humanitarian, but he makes sure he’s there on merit.

  Sometimes he does have to give way a little to the upstarts of the good-doing realm. Thus in the summer of 2006, when Rupert Murdoch held his annual three-day get-together for top News Corporation executives, in Pebble Beach, California, Tony Blair spoke on the first night, effectively presenting his credentials for the post-prime-minister
ial career that he would officially kick off the following year; Bill Clinton gave the closing speech; and Bono had to squeeze his ‘keynote’ on ‘The Power of One’ somewhere in between. But he knew how to upstage the politicians: instead of speaking at the usual glass-and-steel venue, like the unimaginative Blair and Clinton, Bono dragged his Murdochian congregation to the old Mission church in nearby Carmel.1

  Such is Bono’s special status among the elite globalist sets of Bilderbergers and Trilateralists that he has, inevitably, come to the attention of American conspiracy theorists, who incoherently (even by their standards) paint him as a knowing ‘frontman for genocide’ through his connection to an obscure but deadly eugenics agenda that appears to be run by Bill Gates.2 As usual, such ravings distract from serious consideration of Bono’s place in the world and the service he provides to the powerful by dressing their work, individually and collectively, in humanitarian garb – a relationship that is right out in the open and can be viewed clearly without resort to conspiracy.

  It is not just in Davos and Pebble Beach that Bono is a big draw, obviously. The exalted place of Bono and U2 in the rock ’n’ roll pantheon has not been in doubt, at least in the United States, for at least a quarter-century. But it was interesting that, on the night that status was officially underlined at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a leading American musician, making the induction speech, casually mocked Bono’s famous role in the wider world and presented him, albeit jokingly, as a ‘shyster’. Bruce Springsteen was supposed to be returning the favour that Bono had done for him six years earlier, when ‘the Boss’ was inducted – Bono made a very good if unexceptional speech in 1999 – and Springsteen in 2005 produced a veritable tour de force of backhanded compliments and faint praise, slyly capturing something of the special qualities of the U2 singer.3

  The Springsteen speech was not at all overtly hostile, and paid plenty of blush-inducing compliments, especially to U2’s ‘sonic architecture’ and spirituality: Springsteen and Bono, indeed, are known to be friendly.4 But whereas, for example, Edge was ‘a rare and true guitar original and one of the subtlest guitar heroes of all time’, Bono was merely ‘one of the great frontmen of the past twenty years’5 – not a time-frame that presents the very toughest competition. And while he didn’t stint when describing some of Bono’s performing qualities, Springsteen disposed of all the Irishman’s humanitarian work in one vague, overcooked sentence about ‘ideals’ and ‘connection’, and instead concentrated on Bono as huckster:

  Bono … where do I begin? Jeans designer, soon-to-be World Bank operator [there were rumours at the time that President Bush might appoint Bono to the World Bank], just plain operator, seller of the Brooklyn Bridge – oh hold up, he played under the Brooklyn Bridge, that’s right. Soon-to-be mastermind operator of the Bono burger franchise, where more than one million stories will be told by a crazy Irishman. Now I realize that it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it, but don’t quit your day job yet, my friend.6

  Springsteen went on: ‘Shaman, shyster, one of the greatest and most endearingly naked messianic complexes in rock and roll.’ (Then he had the decency to add: ‘It takes one to know one, of course.’) Springsteen, well known for eschewing commercial endorsements, moved to the climax of his speech with a devastating and funny story about how he had discovered, the previous year, that U2 had teamed up with Apple to make an iPod advertisement:

  Well … there I was sitting down on the couch in my pyjamas with my eldest son. He was watching TV. I was doing one of my favorite things – I was tallying up all the money I passed up in endorsements over the years and thinking of all the fun I could have had with it. Suddenly I hear ‘Uno, dos, tres, catorce!’ [the opening of ‘Vertigo’] I look up. But instead of the silhouettes of the hippie wannabes bouncing around in the iPod commercial, I see my boys! Oh, my God! They sold out!7

  Springsteen then joked about his own ‘insanely expensive lifestyle … I burn money, and that calls for huge amounts of cash flow. But I also have a ludicrous image of myself that keeps me from truly cashing in.’ He recounted how he phoned his manager Jon Landau the next morning to find out how U2, also previously supposed to be above all that, had pulled off this stroke.

  ‘They didn’t take any money?! … Smart, wily Irish guys.’ Anybody … anybody … can do an ad and take the money. But to do the ad and not take the money … that’s smart. That’s wily. I say, ‘Jon, I want you to call up Bill Gates or whoever is behind this thing and float this: a red, white, and blue iPod signed by Bruce “the Boss” Springsteen. Now remember, no matter how much money he offers, don’t take it!’8

  The Boss iPod has yet to appear, of course. Springsteen’s portrait of himself as a naif who didn’t know his Gates from his Jobs was clearly a joke, but his decision to wind up his speech with a story that portrayed U2 as smart and wily corporate operators who had gone where he himself refused to go was a pointed one. Springsteen didn’t need to spell it out: we were invited to consider the wiles of men who publicly proclaimed that no cash had changed hands for this ad, while at the same time getting their new record featured in a global advertising campaign that someone else was paying for. Then there was the special U2-branded iPod itself: it turns out that the band and Apple were sharing profits from that product.9 Indeed, any arrangement whereby U2 weren’t profiting from this arrangement would have been absurd and exploitative; but they managed to hide the simple business facts of how they were ‘cashing in’ behind their aura of cool integrity.

  Reports of their prior purity were also somewhat exaggerated. While U2 music hadn’t been used previously in product advertising, there were a number of commercial and charitable bodies that got licences: ‘Beautiful Day’, for example, was used as an opening theme for soccer-highlights shows in Britain and Denmark – it was quite an effective adrenalin hit when played over fast-moving clips of goals, saves and tackles – and the same song was used by the US TV network CBS to plug its autumn 2002 season, part of an arrangement by which CBS also screened a U2 concert film; the American ABC network had done something similar to the 2002 CBS arrangement, with varying music, back in 1997; U2’s Super Bowl appearance in 2002 meant Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV and the National Football League could use the band’s songs to promote the game; ‘Electrical Storm’ introduced the America’s Cup yacht-racing on New Zealand tele­vision; and Bono’s old child-sponsoring friends in World Vision used ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ in Australian TV advertising.10

  The October 2004 Apple arrangement, with the U2 iPod as its centrepiece and a couple of nice sweeteners – the release of ‘Vertigo’, and an unprecedented ‘Complete U2 digital box-set’ at a mere $149, exclusively on the iTunes store – was a key moment for both U2 and the tech company. The iPod was just three years old, the iTunes store barely eighteen months, and U2 were helping Apple ease an older demographic of potential customers into its vice-like grip: it was and is notoriously difficult for people who begin to use the Apple hardware and software to purchase, manage and listen to their music ever to escape to other companies’ products. But both brands, U2 and Apple, had also managed to imbue themselves with aesthetic and moral properties that seemed to place them above such grubby market considerations.

  Steve Jobs – who the previous year had sold a duplex apartment on Central Park West to Bono – made the iPod deal sound like an extension of fandom: ‘U2 is one of the greatest bands in the world and we are floored to be working with them.’ Bono, as is his wont, found the emotional connection, the feeling, in this moment: ‘We want our audience to have a more intimate online relationship with the band, and Apple can help us do that. With iPod and iTunes, Apple has created a crossroads of art, commerce and technology which feels good for both musicians and fans.’ The Edge chimed in with music to corporate ears: ‘iPod and iTunes look like the future to me and it’s good for everybody involved in music.’11

  The iPod and iTunes were indeed ‘the future’, and surely that would have been
the case with or without U2. But at a time when artists and consumers were beginning to question all sorts of things about iTunes in particular – its pricing structure, the digital-rights management it used to lock up the songs people purchased, the way it sustained and reproduced the old record-company relationships that painfully squeezed artists, the massive cut Apple took from every 99-cent song, the roughly 11 cents left for acts if they were lucky – here was the most ethical band in the business arriving on the scene to tell us very loudly that it ‘feels good’, it is good, for musicians, fans, everyone.

  The reference to the way it ‘feels’ was presumably at least partly an indirect way of alluding to how bummed-out consumers were supposed to be feeling about illegally downloading music. (See pp. 117–120 for more on the file-sharing issue.) As the anti-industry activist group Downhill Battle put it in a parody ad: ‘With iTunes I don’t feel guilty when I download music – Apple and the record labels handle the screw job for me.’12

  Bono, in fact, had endorsed iTunes on its fanfare-filled launch on Windows operating systems in 2003. He appeared behind Steve Jobs live on the big screen and declared, ‘I’d like to teach the world to iTunes.’ Calling Jobs ‘the Dalai Lama of integration’, Bono said: That’s why I’m here, to kiss the corporate ass, and I don’t kiss every corporate ass.’13 (Even as of 2013, the number of corporate asses Bono has publicly kissed remains in the low double-digits, so he is indeed not especially promiscuous.)

  Bono and U2 had a choice, and they made it. While other artists were fighting the labels and building alternative ways of reaching their audiences, one of the biggest acts in the business, with one of the most loyal followings, almost unparalleled resources and a reputation for idealistic innovation, chose to lend its support to a highly centralised, closed-source corporate system of delivering music that was using new technology to recapitulate the sins of the old. And they were well rewarded for kissing the corporate ass, both by Apple and by a largely compliant media that viewed the move as placing the band somewhere in the vicinity of the cutting edge – technologically and culturally, at least, if not musically. The decades-deep integration of the traditional mainstream media with the record companies’ way of doing business, and rewarding journalists, shouldn’t be underestimated in evaluating the media’s love-affair with the industry and its apparent saviour, Apple, with U2 by its side.