Lenten Soundtrack Song 2: Vertigo by U2

11Mar11

But of course. This one’s hard to miss. When it comes to lyrics, Bono is at his best when he tips his hat to Bible stories—so cool how he slips it in with all that nonchalance. You have to pay attention to get it, but it’s all over the place. The brother has a prophetic imagination. But Bono, why ‘catorce’? C’mon, every-juan knows cuatro follows tres. Well, I have a theory. More on that later.

Thesis: Vertigo is explicitly a song about the Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. Bam. It’s also about our 40 day journey into the wild with the Christ. When Satan takes you up to the top of the temple, or wait, better yet, up on top of a really high mountain, you’re at a place called vertigo. Success and fame gladly take us there. So there’s vertigo. But then one of the album’s running themes is this idea of kneeling. That movement counters the nausea of the great heights. Which Bono is always honest about, that little Napoleon of a man. Little Napoleon is redundant, I suppose.

But this vertigo place is ‘everything I wish I didn’t know.’ Yep, it’s that journey into the wilderness that surfaces all the ugliness within. What’s scary is that it was there all along. But in the empire (the opposite of the wilderness?) we were so addicted to the constantly titillating stimulation that the ugliness never needed to rear its head completely.

But when we’re all alone, with no to-do list, with no meds, with no drone of the tv or radio or twitter feed, Temptation starts to get into our heads. And ‘though your soul it can’t be bought / your mind can wander.’  I mean, you know you’re not gonna sell your soul or something crazy like that, but you have to entertain the idea anyway. Just for a little bit. So you can know what you’re saying ‘No’ to. You consider what the stones would taste like. You try to feel the sensation of jumping from the temple and being caught. You imagine the power trip for if you just bow down. And man, just letting the mind wander is fun. That’s vertigo right there my friend. Temptation is a trip. Bono gets it.

‘All of this, all of this can be yours.’ There  goes Bono slipping into that Macphisto alter-ego again. Minus the accent. Brilliant.

Interesting how Bono pits the evil mind against the good heart… See, the mind wanders, but the heart can feel—’You give me something / I can feel your love teaching me how / How to kneel.’ I don’t know, Bono. Is it my mind, that cool rationality, that gets me in trouble, or is it my wandering heart? For me it’s a chicken or the egg thing. But Bono says ‘Your head can’t rule your heart / A feeling’s so much stronger than a thought.’ Ok, I’ll go with you on that one Bono. That’s kind of my bent anyway. I am a man who lives by the heart. But what you live by, you can also die by. Most of my sins are sins of passion. They’re not very well thought out, just reactionary from a gut feeling. My mind tends to shut down when temptation comes. But wait, is that what my mind wants me to think? That it wasn’t there? It’s not to blame? That it didn’t see what my right hand was doing? Tricky stuff.

Yep, I’m pretty sure Bono was camping out in the story of Jesus in the wild when he penned this one.

Ok, my theory on catorce. Catorce is 14. He throws those Spanish numbers in to appeal to his growing Latin audience, yes, but he’s got theological reasons for catorce. We’re still in the Gospel of Matthew, where the story of Christ tempted in the desert is best told. Read the genealogy that starts the whole thing off. 14 is the numerical value of David where D = 4, V = 6, and D = 4 again. (You do the math). It’s like A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, but only in Hebrew. If you look at the genealogy of Jesus that Matthew tweaked for blatant theological purposes, 14 is all over the place. It’s Matthew’s lucky number that ties the whole thing together. It’s Matthew’s wink to his audience, that he believes this Jesus really is the Messiah. There are three sections of 14 generations from Abraham to Jesus. 14 is also twice 7, which is like Jewish double rainbow perfection. It gets even crazier than that, but I say all that to say, “catorce” is intentional. But he slips it in, and most people are like, yeah that’s funny and cool cos it’s Bono. But there’s always something driving the nonsense. This time it was the gospel according to Saint Matthew.

So what to take away from this reflection. Probably that kneeling is a good counter-movement to the vertigo of temptation. A love that brings us to our knees is worth bowing down before. But any time we find ourselves kneeling to get something out of the deal, we’re already screwed.

Let’s take a moment to watch this together.

Advertisement

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  3 Comments