Kevin Holm-Hudson
University of
Kentucky
Abstract
In
one of U2’s most controversial songs, “Wake Up Dead Man,” from 1997’s Pop album, singer-lyricist
Bono seemingly portrayed a dead and powerless Jesus, unable to help a
troubled world. This interpretation assumes the song to be an autobiographical
spiritual statement, the legacy of the perceived “sincerity” of 1970s
singer-songwriters. But was Bono portraying a musical persona? Drawing upon
Edward T. Cone’s persona theory as well as the writings of C. S. Lewis, Francis
Schaeffer, N. T. Wright and Christian Kettler, “Wake Up Dead Man” is interpreted as a dialogue, rather than as a diatribe.
[1] In 1993, religion writer John
Smith began an article on U2 with the following disclaimer: “To write an
analysis of U2 for the Christian public is akin to doing a film review of
Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ:
no matter how balanced, insightful, careful, or even courageous the effort,
inevitable protest, denial, and misinterpretation will result.”[1] Risking
the same response, I would like to present a theological interpretation of one
of U2’s most philosophically challenging—and misinterpreted—songs,
“Wake Up Dead Man.” That this song comes from Bono’s
“drinking-smoking-swearing” period—that is, the period of U2 history
between 1988’s Rattle and Hum and
2001’s acclaimed “return to form” All That You Can’t Leave Behind—makes my task appear to be all the more a
fool’s errand. Nevertheless, even if I appear to make myself a fool for
Christ’s sake (I Cor. 4:9-10), I hope to show, through my analysis of this
song, that Bono’s voice—as surly and, yes, profane as it is on this
song—is a voice the Church needs to hear and consider as it reaches out
to so-called “post-Christian” culture.
[2] James advised believers that
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this. To visit the
fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from
the world” (James 1:27; NIV). Such a balance of material service and spiritual
purity is difficult to maintain. Liberal Christians tend to emphasize the first
part of the equation, whereas—at least in American Evangelical
circles—there is such an emphasis on the second part that the world seems
to be held in arm’s-length suspicion. When three of the four members of
U2—one of the most popular music groups in the world—confess to
follow Jesus Christ, then, reactions predictably differ. While the secular
media have publicized Bono’s efforts at the first part of James’s definition,
from AIDS relief to Jubilee 2000 and Amnesty International, the Christian media
have been preoccupied with examining the evidence for James’s second criterion
in the group’s work.
[3] In the neo-conservative glow of
the Reagan era, U2 were held high as Christian music’s next big hope for
converting the lost. Interestingly, the sound of U2’s early uplifting anthems
such as “Gloria” and “40” (a paraphrase of Psalm 40) persist twenty years later
in today’s contemporary worship movement—in songs such as Chris Tomlin’s
“Forever” and MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine,” for example. Nonetheless, U2
continued to evolve, both musically and spiritually; while early in their
career several group members were practicing members of Ireland’s Christian
Shalom religious community, the group ultimately chose to present their
Christian spirituality in a less literal, more socially activist context, with
mixed responses. John Smith describes this evolution:
All was quiet on the Christian
front during the days of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” when U2 sermonized “We must
finish the work Christ began on that Sunday, bloody Sunday.”
For thoughtful
evangelicals—who had a rightful place in their hearts for Martin Luther
King and Archbishop Oscar Romero’s self-giving martyrdoms—“In the Name of
Love” rang the right bells.
Shallow souls on
Christian and secular fronts totally missed the point of “I Still Haven’t Found
What I’m Looking For.” For the shallow opponents of Christianity it served as a
departure from sermonizing faith. For fundamentalists…they had betrayed the
simplistic slogan of “Jesus is the answer”. … That the song reaffirmed Christ’s
vicarious embracing of our guilt and sin and reasserted the declaration of
faith (“You know I believe it”) was overlooked in a frenzy of Sunday school
responses.[2]
[4] What was worse for the
mainstream Christian media, it appeared in recent years that as U2 took on the
world, the world won. The band began to distance itself from its image as pop
proselytizers and turned toward ironic fascination with the superficiality of
postmodern media culture, beginning with the album Achtung Baby (1991) and culminating in the group’s most
experimental effort, Pop (1997).
Regarding the latter album one reviewer notes, “If
you listened closely…you could hear the band's last few remaining unalienated
evangelical Christian fans quietly slipping out the door.”[3] It didn’t help matters for the group’s defenders that Bono told Spin’s Ann Powers as Pop was being recorded: “I enjoy the test of trying to
keep hold of what’s sacred, and still being awake. … It’s one thing being in
that holy huddle; it’s another thing taking yourself out there into the world.”[4]
[5] For conservative Evangelicals,
this would appear to be a dangerous gamble indeed; for some, Bono was not only
taking himself out into the world but wallowing in it. Even the band’s more
secular-minded fans had had enough of the stylistic experimentation and the
apparent crass materialism: the album and tour for Pop were both commercial disappointments, and secular
rock critic Dave Marsh used words such as “crashed,” “bombed,” and “tanked”
with barely concealed glee.[5]
[6] Gone were the uplifting anthems
to draw one’s attention to higher things; instead, Bono told Powers “we wanted
to make a record that would actually feel like your life.”[6] Pop resounds with discordant electronic sounds;
feedback-drenched guitars; and references to name-brand commercial products,
corrupt televangelists, and the death of Bono’s mother when he was a teenager.
It does feel like life in a post-Christian, media-driven world, and it is not
meant to be comfortable.
[7] Pop’s closing song, “Wake Up Dead Man,” particularly agitated
the Christian community. Even four years later, a review that celebrated the
return to anthemic form in Pop’s
follow-up, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, began with a reference to the song:
When we last left U2, at the climax of 1997's polarizing Pop album, Bono was busy needling a Certain Someone. The
titular command of the final song, “Wake Up Dead Man,” was rather impudently
directed at Christ, as if the singer were literally and figuratively trying to
get a rise out of Him. “Jesus, I'm waiting here, boss/I know you're looking out
for us/But maybe your hands aren't free,” he taunted, lamenting some
unexplained tragedy. Was he mocking the supposed omnipotence of the Almighty?
Or just trying out some tough love on Him?[7]
[8] The theme of “Wake Up Dead Man”
is nothing new, however. It is as old as Job’s lamentations and also stated,
perhaps more articulately than Bono, by C. S. Lewis: “‘If God were good, He
would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He
would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore
God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in
its simplest form.”[8] A more contemporary critique by N. T.
Wright points out that despite such recent paradigm-shifting events as
Auschwitz, the human suffering following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the terrorist attacks of September 11,
society fails to grasp the supernatural import of such cataclysmic events by
its continued adherence to the Enlightenment-era social philosophy of
“automatic progress.” This results in an inaccurately positive view of
humanity, in which any misfortune is seen as the “price of progress”; according
to Wright, the result is that “first, we ignore evil when it doesn’t hit us in
the face. Second, we are surprised by evil when it does. Third, we act in
immature and dangerous ways as a result.”[9] Wright responds to this
conundrum by constructing a carefully nuanced “long-range” perspective of the
problem of evil, demonstrating that the Old Testament may be viewed as a history
of God’s unfolding strategies for containing supernatural, individual and
political evil; he then shows how in the life and atoning death of Christ all
of these threads are brought to a magnificent resolution.
[9] At the same time, Christian
Kettler points out,
A christocentric
theology demands that we take existential issues in humanity seriously. Too
often the concern of theology has been about the precise relationship between
the deity and the humanity of Christ without delving deeply into the radical
implications of the Word that became flesh for the world of despair, guilt,
shame, weakness, loneliness, anxiety, and doubt. Popular theology such as in
the Left Behind novels still reflect the
kind of theological mindset that obsesses over the time of the Great
Tribulation at the end of the world and ignores our own personal “tribulations”
of loneliness, despair, and doubt.[10]
[10] When such personal despairs
are acknowledged in Christian media, they are often “overcome” dramatically,
and rather simply, through an embracing of faith that often precludes further
struggles with doubt or challenges to belief. Perhaps if Bono had stated the
“problem of pain” in his song in the form of a third-person syllogism or a
methodical philosophical argument for the transcendent intervening justice of a
personal God, and concluded with a “happy ending”—or at least an
answer—he could have avoided interpretations such as that of Jason Ewert,
reviewing the Pop album for the Christian music web site cMusicWeb.com:
U2's frustration is directed towards God, a common thing
for people who feel like they're in a dead end. And when you feel this way,
your initial reaction is to shift the blame from yourself and onto someone
else. Often, that “someone else” is God. “Why does uncertainty abound? Why does
pain fill my life? Why doesn't God make life happy?” Though the answer may be
right in front of you, it is difficult to believe in these situations.
Throughout Pop U2
attempts to ignore this predicament by searching for salvation in other areas.[11]
[11] As
the album reaches its conclusion, Ewert writes, “U2 is left broken and
shattered. As one final desperate plea, they call on God to reveal Himself in
‘Wake Up Dead Man’. Though they know that there is nothing else to turn to, U2
is defiant to the last, unwilling to give in.”[12] Ewert concludes:
For U2 fans this album leaves questions unanswered. Are
they falling away from the Christianity they professed in the 1980’s? Have they
been corrupted by fame? The answers can only be found on their next album.
Until then, Pop serves as a reminder of
the joylessness of life without God. As Bono said, the world is a messed up
place when Jesus is simply a dead man. But if you recognize Him as Lord and
Savior, you're looking at a whole new landscape. And that should be our prayer:
that the eyes of U2 would be opened, and instead of looking to save themselves,
they would proclaim Jesus as their Master.[13]
[12] Apparently Ewert has
interpreted “Wake Up Dead Man”—if not the entire Pop album—to be autobiographical, a kind of
dispatch of Where U2 Are Now Spiritually. Such an interpretation—the
first-person pop-singer voice as confessional—brings up the issue of what
Edward T. Cone identified as a song’s persona.
[13] Cone applies the concept of
the persona originally to the poetic voice, which is given characterization by
the composer’s musical setting. This characterization is further transformed in
performance, so that “the poetic persona is transformed into … the vocal
persona: a character in a kind of monodramatic opera, who sings the original
poem as his part.”[14] Cone calls such a vocal persona “the protagonist of a song.”[15] Significantly, Cone
argues that the listener must be mindful of the barriers that are to be erected
among the various personae:
There could be no
drama if we did not accept what we know in fact to be false: that the actors are the characters, who are living their parts and
making up their lines as they go along. More than that: the principle that some
form of dramatic impersonation underlies all literature means that all modes of
imaginative writing are united in implying a basic simulation. The lyric
pretends that its persona is composing the poem; the novel pretends that its
narrator is telling the story. The reader must go along with the pretense, else
he cannot derive emotional satisfaction from the poem or enjoy the suspense of
the story.
If we take the art of
song seriously, we must accord the same faith to the characters portrayed by
singers. … We admittedly connive at this pretense when we watch an opera, but
we should realize that a similar situation must obtain if we really attend to a
performance of a Schubert lied. For if we try to follow words as well as music,
we must accept the song, no less than the opera, as a dramatic presentation.[16]
[14] John Smith decries “the
problem of general Christian—and secular—ignorance of art forms,
symbolism, and media techniques,”[17] resulting in “a literal
interpretation of symbolism.”[18] Hence, Bono’s “MacPhisto” character
on the Zooropa tour—a Vegas-style
Satan inspired by C. S. Lewis’s use of a first-person Devil in The
Screwtape Letters—was widely
misinterpreted: “U2’s satire is perceived as embracing rather than exposing the
demonic.”[19] Of course, no one reading The
Screwtape Letters would conclude that C. S.
Lewis was a nom de plume for
Lucifer, just as critic Deena Weinstein has dryly observed that no one reading
Melville’s Moby Dick (with its
famous opening “Call me Ishmael”) would conclude that Melville was suffering
from an identity crisis.[20] Yet popular-music listeners often
“hear the singer’s ‘I’ as a literal reflection of the author, indicating a
failure to see that art may be something beyond giving vent to one’s personal
feelings and experiences.”[21]
[15] The roots of Pop’s persona problem are found in the perceived
“sincerity” of 1970s singer-songwriters such as James Taylor, Jackson Browne,
Carole King, and Dan Fogelberg. Although some of the singer-songwriters’ songs
were at least partially based on personal experience (Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,”
for example, addressed the singer’s heroin addiction and institutionalization),
often times the first-person narrative was automatically equated with
authenticity. In 1976 millions heard Barry Manilow sing “I Write the Songs,”
unaware that he didn’t write that song—Bruce Johnston did. Thirteen years later, Neil Young sang in his
song “Wrecking Ball”: “My life’s an open book / You read it on the radio.”
(What, then, are we to make of this line when sung by Emmylou Harris in her
1995 cover version?)
[16] In a paper entitled “She
Sounds So Sad—Do You Think She Really Is?”, musician and teacher Sarah
Dougher points out that the oldest meaning of “authentic” comes from the Latin
(and Greek) authenticus, “from the
author.” “So if you say you want to communicate “authentically” it has a
meaning close to wanting to “author” something. The other things we associate
with authenticity, like “truth” or “reality” are a little more nostalgic and
depend on some notion of what “truth” and “reality” might be…. In the early
stages of developing my voice as a teacher and performer, I realized right away
that audiences want to hear you speaking. They want a version of you that conforms to their expectations. … If you don’t conform, or if you
challenge your audience, you have a mighty row to hoe.”[22] There
is a contradiction embodied in this statement: “audiences want to hear you speaking,” yet they also want “a version of you that conforms to their expectations.” Some
songwriters—such as Randy Newman—willfully play with these
expectations of authenticity; most of Newman’s songs are in the first-person
voice, but instead of autobiography these songs are invariably in the voice of
sundry unsavory characters: a bigot, a slick slave trader, an abusive father, a
pimp. When one of Newman’s songs unexpectedly reached the top 10—“Short
People” reached #2 on the charts in 1977—the success brought on
predictable protests from the vertically challenged.
[17] In U2’s case, the fact that
“Wake Up Dead Man” began with a verse containing the “F” word would, in Irish
pastor Steve Stockman’s words, “not help the medicine go down.”[23] In his book Walk On: The Spiritual Biography of U2, Stockman
summarizes what the song meant for many people, and offers an alternative
interpretation:
Initially, the song
seems to portray Jesus as dead and impotent with His hands tied behind his
back, unable to bring any help to a troubled world. Closer inspection sheds a
little more light. Struggling with why things are as they are and why God does
nothing about it is common to everyone at one time or another. “Wake Up Dead
Man” is trying to make sense, without actually making any, of the problems of
pain and suffering under the eye of a loving God. It is the prayerful seeking
of help and wanting a reminder of how things will be in eternity. It confesses
belief in God as Creator—“He made the world in seven”—and in Jesus as the “Boss.” It’s a ranting
plea to intervene and bring a solution to humanity’s conundrum of evil: “Are
you working on something new?”[24]
[18] Bono’s interpretation of the
song was straightforward: “It’s the end of the century, and it’s a century
where God is supposed to be dead. … People want to believe, but they’re angry,
and I picked up on that anger. If God is not dead, there are some questions we
want to ask him. I’m a believer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get angry about
these things.”[25] As Bono put it in a better-known U2
song, Christ “carried the cross and my shame / You know I believe it / but I
still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
[19] Speculating as to the state of
anyone’s spiritual walk is ultimately a dangerous business. Many of Bono’s
at-times-controversial spiritual opinions can be traced to his background. Born
in Dublin, to parents of a mixed Protestant-Catholic marriage, Bono witnessed
firsthand the tragic results of sectarianism in Ireland. It has influenced some
of his more blunt statements on the subject, such as “I
often wonder if religion is the enemy of God. It's almost like religion is what
happens when the Spirit has left the building.”[26] Evangelical Christians frequently make the argument that Christianity is a
relationship and not a religion; Bono’s clarifying remarks about the Spirit
similarly imply that he sees true Christianity as more than the sum total of a
particular denomination’s doctrine and traditions. “God's Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that
can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm. I love that. You know,
it says somewhere in the scriptures that the Spirit moves like a wind--no one
knows where it's come from or where it's going [John 3:8]. The Spirit is
described in the Holy Scriptures as much more anarchic than any established
religion credits.”[27] Such a statement would appear to
harmonize with Jesus’ statement that “a time is coming when you will worship
the Father neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem. … God is spirit, and his
worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:21, 23; NIV).
[20]
Similarly, in its music U2 has resisted efforts to be pigeon holed as standard-bearers
for what has become commodified as “Contemporary Christian Music” or CCM. Steve
Stockman frankly addresses the failings of CCM:
Since its start, U2 has lived its art in the eye of a storm
that has been kicking up dust since Jesus walked the streets of earth. In
Jesus’ day, the Pharisees strictly differentiated between what was sacred and
what was profane. Today in the United States and Northern Ireland—two
places of particular reference to U2—there is a similar dualism at work,
and it has put bands like U2 under pressure regarding where they perform and
what they say.
If U2 had been in fellowship in the United States or even
just sixty miles north of Dublin, in Northern Ireland, it would have been easy
to get sucked into a Christian subculture. Many bands in similar situations are
discouraged from playing in secular venues like bars or clubs because
Christians shouldn’t be in these places. The theory is that you shouldn’t take
Jesus into what are often called “dens of iniquity.” The only acceptable reason
for attending these places would be to evangelize the lost who go there.
As a result of this mindset, many talented musicians are
steered into a gospel band scenario, going from church to church singing
cliché-driven songs with limited content. The audience members are almost
exclusively Christian, and, as the majority of them have already assented to
the beliefs being preached from the stage, the clichés are wasted. A safe
Christian industry ghetto is created with pop stars and record companies. There
is a magazine, Contemporary Christian Music, which has become the label for the
entire industry—an industry that is always in danger of ending up
culturally irrelevant. When Jesus told His disciples they were the light of the
world, where did He want them to shine? (Matt. 5:14) As more beams of light
that make the light shine blindingly bright upon itself, or as strobes of
illumination flashing radical alternative lifestyles across the darkness? Do
you blame the dark for being dark, or the light for not shining?[28]
[21]
Stockman may be making his case with overly broad strokes, but one look at the
best sellers in the popular Christian media seems to confirm his argument.
Catalogs from major retailers such as Family Christian Bookstores regularly
give highest visibility to products intended to help the believer’s
walk—not necessarily to reach the lost. Christian radio mega-networks
such as K-Love offer a steady stream of uplifting, “positive and encouraging”
praise songs that often don’t even address Jesus or God by name.
[22] U2’s
refusal to fit the “Contemporary Christian Music” mold is partly because of
such market-imposed limitations. Bono also sees that kind of marketing as
setting the artist up for failure (and it has already happened—for
example, Amy Grant’s divorce from Christian artist Gary Chapman in 1999 and
subsequent marriage to country artist Vince Gill sullied her image in the eyes
of many Christians). He has said, “I think carrying moral baggage is very
dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it's to be true and not cover up
the cracks.”[29] When the artist’s cracks are allowed
to show, they are repaired by grace, which Bono calls “the most powerful idea
that's entered the world in the last few thousand years” and “the reason I
would like to be a Christian.”[30]
[23] How,
then, can we reconcile these statements with the persona of “Wake Up Dead Man”? Even Ann Powers concedes that in “Wake Up Dead Man,” Bono sounds “like a
drunk calling for another whiskey … trying to remember how he got to this
terrible place.”[31] The roots of this dissatisfaction can
be found at the height of U2’s “anthem” stage—in “I Still Haven’t Found
What I’m Looking For.” John Smith has argued that the song is a plea for
fulfillment of the Lord’s Prayer—“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10)—not
as passive acknowledgment but as active imperatives. In the absence of such
fulfillment, the song deals with what Smith describes as the “Christ-like agony
of a world so racked with Divinely rejected injustice, loneliness, and
corruption.”[32] It is this same world of “Divinely
rejected injustice, loneliness, and corruption” revisited—in even more
harrowing, stark, detail—on “Wake Up Dead Man.”
[24] So let us assume for a moment
that the voice of “Wake Up Dead Man” is not Bono in some spiritually destitute
state, but instead might be a persona—representing all that are without
Christ and yet, in their own groping way, are seeking Him. Much of the song’s
affect can be attributed not only to the performance, but also to the
production and arrangement surrounding the vocal. Cone observes that the vocal
persona “participates in, and is largely formed by, an all-encompassing
environment of nonverbal sound—an environment to which he in turn
contributes through his own melodic line and vocal timbre. And because we as
audience are bathed in the same sound, we can feel this environment as ours. To
the extent that we do so, we tend to interpret the vocal character in terms of
our own sympathies and emotions, and to feel ourselves involved in his.”[33]
[25] Even the production of the
song, its arrangement and the unusual way that Bono’s voice is recorded, help
to construct the “persona” that Bono adapts for “Wake Up Dead Man.” As the song
begins, Bono’s voice sounds haggard, slurred, and dirty—a distortion box
is used to give extra “grain” to his voice. At the same time, a single
unprocessed finger-picked electric guitar provides accompaniment, while a layer
of murky processed sampled sound hints at something disquieting below the
surface. In the second verse (beginning at 0:27), as Bono sings “Tell me the
story / the one about eternity,” another voice emerges from the samples,
sounding initially like a wailing gospel singer (0:37-0:46). The voice,
however, is from a sample of Bulgarian choral music, making the “gospel”
reference at once familiar and alien, ambivalent between exultation and
despair.
[26] An additional, more distorted
electric guitar punctuates the “wake up” of the chorus with power chords
(0:48). As the song adds instrumental layers, including bass and drums, the
guitar takes on a stylistic persona reminiscent of the late-1950s instrumentals
of guitarist Duane Eddy. Eddy’s low-register “twang” style was heard on songs
such as “Rebel Rouser” and “Peter Gunn,” but other songs—such as “The
Lonely One” and “Forty Miles of Bad Road”—suggest a connotation of
wide-open spaces and lawlessness. This connotation of the low-register twang
guitar was taken up in the 1960s by film music composer Ennio Morricone (in his
theme for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,
for example) and in the 1990s by Angelo Badalamenti (the theme for the TV
series Twin Peaks might be seen
as Morricone’s musical signifier mediated through New-Age marketing
sensibilities). The same musical terrain was staked out in the closing song on
U2’s Zooropa, “The Wanderer.”
That song, a sort of musical version of Ecclesiastes, cast Johnny Cash as its
singer, “walking with a bible and a gun,” his guest status perhaps making it
easier to hear as a vocal persona. The place where Bono’s vocal persona finds
itself in “Wake Up Dead Man,” then, is lonely, bleak, and—thanks to the
song’s A-flat-minor aeolian tonality—dark.
[27] All
of this is quite foreign to the freshly scrubbed musical Prozac offered by the
likes of K-Love. But it is instructive to remember that American folk hymnody
of the nineteenth century was often in modal, minor keys; such songs also often
reminded believer and non-believer alike of death and judgment. Today—“Softly
and Tenderly”’s reference to “deathbeds coming for you and for me”
aside—we have few reminders of this. Today’s praise choruses freely adapt
passages from Psalm 8 (“O Lord, Our Lord, How majestic is Thy name in all the
earth!”) or Psalm 118 (“Give thanks to the Lord; for He is good; his love
endures forever” [NIV]). How many contemporary Christian songwriters turn for
inspiration to Psalm 10 (“Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide
yourself in times of trouble?” [NIV])? Psalm 13 (“How long wilt Thou forget me,
O Lord? Forever? How long wilt Thou hide Thy face from me?”)? Psalm 60 (“You
have rejected us, O God, and burst forth upon us; you have been angry—now
restore us!” [NIV])? Even after the horrors of 9/11 no Christian artist dared to
write such songs. While this may appear to be a facetious argument, it should
be remembered that the Psalms record both extremes of human experience with
God. Bono has said in this regard, “David was the first blues singer. As well
as praising, he was there shouting at God—you know: ‘Where are you when
we need you?’…’We’re surrounded.’…’Your people are starving.’…’Are you deaf?’
That type of thing. He’d be wailing, this militant mind, this poet musician
with enough faith to believe he had a deal with God…believed it to get angry
when it looked like He wasn’t coming through.”[34] Elsewhere he told an
interviewer, “I was never tormented in the way those early rock and rollers
were between gospel and the blues. I always saw them as parts of each other. I
like the anger of the blues—I think being angry with God is at least a
dialogue.”[35]
[28] It
is possible to hear “Wake Up Dead Man” as such a dialogue, rather than as a
diatribe. In this reading of the song, the title phrase is not addressed to God
or Jesus, but to humanity. The chorus is, after all, a paraphrase of Ephesians
5:14 (“Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you”),
which is itself a paraphrase of Isaiah 60:1; Bono’s titular line, then, merely
continues a tradition of Biblical paraphrasing that has its roots in Scripture
itself. The strophic form of the song, and the differences in arrangement
between verses and chorus, suggest a dialogic approach. In that case, Jesus’
answer to this entire litany of doubt and despair presented in the verses is
summed up by Ephesians 5:14—“Wake Up Dead Man.” If Jesus Christ is the
same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8), why not use a repeating
chorus for His part of the dialogue? His answer remains the same.
[29] A
few observations of the printed lyrics’ typography, as found in the Pop CD booklet, reinforces this dialogic reading: the verses
are written in all lower-case letters (with the significant exception of the
nouns “Jesus,” “Father” and “He/Him” in reference to God), while the chorus line
is written in all upper-case letters. (Another item of typographical interest
is that the only punctuation marks in the song’s lyrics are question marks).
Even the distorted quality of the voice, then, makes sense in light of C. S.
Lewis’s observation that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in
our conscience, but shouts [in capital letters, as in an e-mail] in our pains:
it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[36]
[30] Obviously “Wake Up Dead Man”
expresses a significant amount of dialectical tension, between belief (however
obliquely stated) and doubt. It is equally easy to interpret this song as a
bitter expression of disbelief, as many Christian media commentators apparently
did. But the fact that this song does not so obviously yield its secrets is
what makes it so compelling. C. S. Lewis correctly observed that Christianity
“creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem
unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had
received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and
loving.”[37] In other words, we need our U2 along
with our K-Love.
[31] Bono summed up the music of
U2’s Achtung Baby – Zooropa – Pop era as moving “from Psalms to Ecclesiastes.”[38] Stockman concurs, writing that “whether listening to the Pop album, enjoying
the Popmart experience or just watching the video … there is an overwhelming
feeling that the book of Ecclesiastes is being made into song to live among
us.”[39] Ecclesiastes, of course, relates the
world-weary state of someone who has tried living without God. It is not,
however, a rejection of God—in fact, the final chapter of Ecclesiastes
signals a return to seeking God’s grace. In the same manner, the last verse of
“Wake Up Dead Man” seems to acknowledge a need for repentance, asking “If
there’s an order in all of this disorder? / Is it like a tape recorder? / Can
we rewind it just once more?”
[32] In
this study I have referred frequently to the writings of C. S. Lewis. I close
with a reference to another C. S. not often discussed in evangelical Christian
circles—the American pragmatic philosopher C. S. Peirce. In his essay
“The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce notes that “The irritation of doubt
causes a struggle to attain a state of belief.”[40] He
elaborates as follows:
Doubt is an uneasy
and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into
the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we
do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. … Belief does
not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave
in a certain way, when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least effect of
this sort, but stimulates us to action until it is destroyed.[41]
It is for this reason that Mark
tells us that the father of the possessed boy immediately implored, “I do believe; help me overcome my
unbelief!” (Mark 9:24; NIV). As Kettler interprets the story, the man “admits …
that he believes and does not believe. … The man is of two minds, yet he does
not revel in that situation. He wants to be delivered from his unbelief: ‘help my unbelief!’ Doubt is not a virtue for him.”[42] This desire for immediate resolution may be what led many commentators to
automatically interpret “Wake Up Dead Man” as a denial of the Christ rather
than to earnestly grapple with the difficult questions of belief that the song
poses—the same questions expressed by David in many of the Psalms. By
effectively writing off the possibility of this interpretation, we fail to come
to terms with the problems for which Christ offers the solution. As Peirce puts
it: “we frequently hear it said, ‘Oh, I could not believe so-and-so, because I
should be wretched if I did.’ When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as
danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course. It hides the
danger, and then calmly says there is no danger; and, if it feels perfectly
sure there is none, why should it raise its head to see?”[43]
The solution, according to Kettler,
may be found in Christ’s vicarious faith. “The paradox of the Crucified God is
one who takes upon all of our sufferings, including our doubts, and triumphs
over them by his faith, not ours.”[44]
[33] Francis Schaeffer, in his
classic apologetic text The God Who Is There, wrote that everyone has a “point of tension” at which “the person is
not in a place of consistency in his [world] system.”[45] To
deal with this point of tension, “man” has “built a roof over his head” at this
point to shield himself “as a protection against the blows of the
real world, both internal and external.”[46] Schaeffer’s solution is straightforward:
The Christian,
lovingly and with true tears, must remove the shelter and allow the truth of
the external world and of what man is to beat upon him. When the roof is off,
each man must stand naked and wounded before the truth of what is.
The truth that we
let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures but the
truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is. This is what shows him his need. The Scriptures then
show him the nature of his lostness and the answer to it. This, I am
convinced, is the true order for our apologetics in the second half of the
twentieth century for man living under the line of despair.[47]
Schaeffer reminds the reader that
“Christianity is realistic and says the world is marked with evil and man is
truly guilty all along the line. Christianity refuses to say that you can be
hopeful for the future if you are basing your hope on evidence of change for
the better in mankind. The Christian agrees with the man in real despair, that the world must be looked at realistically,
whether in the area of Being or in morals.”[48]
[34] In focusing exclusively on the
new life after salvation, as so many Christian books and contemporary songs do,
one forgets the other side of that equation. As Schaeffer put it: “When I
accept Christ as Saviour, I pass from death to life, and therefore, before
that time I am clearly dead. Therefore,
when modern man feels dead, he is experiencing what the Word of God tells him
he is.”[49] Bono’s song, then, is not the rant of
a reprobate Christian, no matter how the reception history of
singer-songwriters invites us to interpret it as such. Although it avoids
presenting any facile answers, it is simply an acknowledgement of the human
condition, and a reminder to every believer of his or her own spiritual state
before their salvation.
Notes
[1] John Smith, “The New U2,” in The U2
Reader: A Quarter Century of Commentary, Criticism, and Reviews, ed. Hank Bordowitz (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003),
178.
[2] Ibid.,180.
[3] Chris Willman,
“U2 Leaves Nothing Behind,”
[http://jesus.beliefnet.com/story/52/story_5248_1.html], 2001.
[4] Ann Powers, “The Future Sound of U2,” U2
Reader, 110.
[5] Dave Marsh, “U2’s Crash: Why Pop Flops,” U2 Reader, 115-120.
[6] Powers, “The Future Sound of U2,” 108.
[7] Willman, “U2
Leaves Nothing Behind.”
[8] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Collier, 1962), 26.
[9] N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice
of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 2006), 23-24.
[10] Christian D. Kettler, The God Who
Believes: Faith, Doubt, and the Vicarious Humanity of Christ (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2005), 9-10.
[11] Jason
Ewert, “Pop” (album review),
[http://www.cmusicweb.com/rock/u2/pop.shtml], 2001.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 21.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 22-23.
[17] Smith, “The New U2,” 179.
[18] Ibid., 180.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Deena Weinstein, “Progressive Rock as
Text: The Lyrics of Roger Waters,” in Progressive Rock Reconsidered, ed. Kevin Holm-Hudson (New York: Routledge, 2002),
98.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Sarah Dougher,
“Authenticity, Gender and Personal Voice: She Sounds So Sad—Do You Think
She Really Is?” (paper presented at the inaugural Experience Music Project
conference, Seattle, WA, April 13, 2002).
[23] Steve Stockman, Walk On: The
Spiritual Biography of U2 (Lake Mary, FL:
Relevant Media, 2001), 151.
[24] Ibid., 151-52 (emphasis in original).
[25] Ibid., 152.
[26] Anthony DeCurtis, “Bono: The Beliefnet
Interview,” [http://www.beliefnet.com/story/67/story_6758_1.html], 2001.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Stockman, Walk On, 12-13.
[29] DeCurtis, “Bono: The Beliefnet
Interview.”
[30] Ibid.
[31] Powers, “The Future Sound of U2,”
110.
[32] Smith, “The New U2,” 180.
[33] Cone, The Composer’s Voice, 21-22.
[34] Quoted in John
Waters, Race of Angels (Belfast:
Blackstaff Press, 1994), 1.
[35] DeCurtis,
“Bono: The Beliefnet Interview.”
[36] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 93.
[37] Ibid., 24.
[38] Bill Flanagan, U2 at the End of the World (New
York: Delta, 1995), 434.
[39] Stockman, Walk On, 139.
[40] C. S. Peirce, “Illustrations of the
Logic of Science: First Paper—The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science
Monthly 12 (November 1877): 6.
[41] Ibid., 5-6.
[42] Kettler, 52.
[43] Peirce, 7-8.
[44] Kettler, 53.
[45] Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is
There (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 1968), 129.
[46] Ibid., emphasis in original. While
Schaeffer’s image may lack the sophistication of N. T. Wright’s overarching
social critique, the belief in “positivism and progress” cited by Wright may be
regarded as such a “roof.”
[47] Ibid., emphasis in original.
[48] Ibid., 46 (emphasis added).
[49] Ibid., 130 (emphasis in original).
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