U2 remain the band capable of putting more meaning into a line than many others manage in a whole album.
The latest target for singer/songwriter Bono's acute social critique is advertising. POP frequently distorts words while the ongoing Popmort Four feature the largest TV screen ever made as stage backdrop. Both these devices deliberately confuse reality and perception, which is precisely the charge Bono wishes to level at the marketing execs.
The Playboy Mansion is used as a symbol for an imagined world of perfection where 'sorrow, pain . . . shame' will be no more. 'And though I can't say why, I know I've got to believe' that world exists because ours is fundamentally false 'if beauty is truth and surgery the fountain of youth'. Bono's being reacts against this notion but where can he look for a resolution?
Jesus features on POP, but only to compound the problem. For how can a good God be in charge of a world where so much bad happens? 'I know you're looking out for us, but maybe your hands aren't free' says the final song whose title (and chorus) is revealingly Wake up dead man. The plea is this: to 'tell me, tell me the story, the one about eternity and the way it's all gonna be'. But instead of leaving it all to the future, might not God intervene now?
POP considers this highly unlikely. It defiantly shakes a fist at God, who, it believes, 'has got his phone off the hook, babe, would he even pick up if he could?' If God will send his angels arrogantly declares: 'I sure could use them here right now', but immediately asks: 'Where do we go?' This unfair, over-marketed world is confusing again, even to the extent of limiting our understanding of Jesus. 'Then they put Jesus in show business, now it's hard to get in the door.'
Discotheque reminds us of the innate knowledge that a resolution exists. 'You take what you can get 'cause it's all that you can find. Oh you know there's something more.' But this something proves indefinable and unattainable. 'You can reach but you can't grab it', so we may as well enjoy ourselves: 'Let's go, let's go, discotheque!'
Under the pretence of offering us choice, marketing panders to our lust for instant gratification. 'What you thought was freedom is just greed' Gone informs us. Mufo goes further, criticising the tyranny of consumer choice as leaving us unable to grow up as real people, 'mother . . . left and made me someone, now I'm still a child but no one tells me 'no' '. Real identity and significance are not to be found by succumbing to the adverts that scream at us from billboards, TV screens and bus tickets. Humanity was made for something more, so Bono is 'still looking for the face I had before the world was made' and 'looking for to fill that God-shaped hole'.
Pleasures in life
'The sun' is POP shorthand for the pleasures in life, which it encourages us to chase after, in contrast to 'the rain' which is used to symbolise pain and trouble. The recommended lifestyle is Staring at the sun, which will inevitably have adverse effects, though Bono tells us that he's 'happy to go blind'. He cannot discover how to be significant, i.e. truly human, so instead takes a course that will lead to full dehumanisation.
Gone informs us he is committed to 'living like it's the last night on earth', 'I'll be up with the sun and not coming down'. Bewildered in a world where marketing makes nothing ever seem what it truly is, angry that God is unwilling or incapable of acting to right the world's wrongs, he knows that humanity was made to be more than a market target and a victim. Unwilling to be either, he embraces hedonism and ends as both. 'You wanted to get somewhere so badly, you had to lose yourself along the way.'
So what is the solution in a world that promises us escape from its pain by continually serving our greed? As always, it lies with the one and only real man. He is sovereign Creator and ruler and we derive our significance from his. The ideal future world does exist but will only be inhabited by those prepared, like their master, to be crucified to this one and its desires . . . let's prayerfully meditate on Hebrews 12.2 and 1 John 2.15-17.
