The other day, the world's biggest popular rock band, U2, played the UK's greatest summer festival, Glastonbury; the event, historic for some, was marred - or improved - depending on your perspective - by a small group of protesters, who want U2 to pay taxes in Ireland, rather than avoid them. The response, from the group's manager was that U2 was "a global business" and had an international tax profile. Fine and dandy - but that admission, to me, signals the death of U2 as a band of singer-songwriters I want to have in my earphones. When I listen to music I don't want to listen to BP or Exxon. If U2 is now a global business they can't have my business, because I don't want to think of music that way. Would we still love and respect Heaney or Ashbery if they were incorporated? The Pogues are not a multinational corporation; they are geniuses. What makes matters worse is that Bono swans around with world leaders, claiming to want to improve things. He should keep his own house in order. In a time of austerity, he might start by cutting ticket prices. These lads are multi-millionaires, they can afford to stop stashing away so much loot under their rainbow. Their passports may be green, but U2 needn't be about the green stuff. It used to appear to be about so much more - or were they always just looking for that perfect tax haven in the sun, in a bank with no name?
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
Comments
Martine
As a company, they are not only accountable to their stakeholders (themselves, record labels, tour organizers, lawyers, etc), but to their shareholders as well (the fans, the communities where the concerts are held, the environment and their employees to name a few).
Beppe
Screw all that and listen to the music!
It's not just U2. Most rock stars are unbelievably greedy, selfish and hypocritical. I am always astonished that ordinary people treat them with such reverence.
Best wishes from Simon