Government Approved Rock and Roll

Is this what U2 has become?



With the loserly likes of John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Jesse Helms, Rick Santorum, Condy Rice, and Bill Frist in the U2 fan club, I am confronted with the frightening fact that I am in love with a band that is what my prophet Bill Hicks warned against.

Is it possible to overturn the money-changers' tables when your rock and roll temple has been soiled by a Rick Santorum fundraiser?

God, please give me back the ranting ballsy Bono of the 80s and 90s over this pious priestlike person doing penance for his past pomposity!!!

The great comedian Bill Hicks suggested that there is really nothing worse than government-approved rock. It is akin, to, well, in his words, sucking off Satan.

So please, to save Bono's soul from Satan, read on and pray that he will renounce his evil ways. Instead of sucking up to senators, why not a PsyOp with vigorous versions of the Rattle and Hum-era Bullet the Blue Sky piping through the halls of Congress!


Here is a commentary about Bill Hicks from Will Kaufman in a scholarly book on comedy :

(with more available here)

Hicks found it easy to segue from the War on Drugs into a critique of artistic prostitution and dishonesty. After invoking Hendrix, the Beatles, Keith Richards, Janis Joplin, and other musicians for whom drug experimentation proved a litmus test for the creative pursuit of an alternative viewpoint -- an "altered state" -- he would "extend the theory to our generation now, so it's more applicable" (RC). His conclusion was merciless: "These other musicians today who don't do drugs, and in fact speak out against them: boy, do they suck. What a coincidence. Ball-less, soul-less, spiritless, corporate little bitches, suckers of Satan's cock, each and every one of them." Signing up to the War on Drugs was tantamount to masquerading as a rock star: "'We're Rock Stars Against Drugs because that's what the President wants!' Aw, suck Satan's cock. That's what we want, isn't it? Government-approved rock and roll" (REV). The same rock stars fighting the War on Drugs were just as likely to be selling Pepsi-Cola and Taco Bell products: there was a connection. Certainly, a review of the eighties' and nineties' most prominent rock stars suggests an advertising chumminess inconceivable in the sixties and seventies, when the music was synonymous with nonconformity: Michael Jackson pushing Pepsi; Phil Collins and Eric Clapton pushing Michelob; George Michael pushing Diet Coke ("Diet Coke? Even Madonna fuckin' hawked real Coke"); M.C. Hammer pushing Kentucky Fried Chicken; Barry Manilow pushing McDonald's; Genesis pushing Volkswagens; Pink Floyd pushing Volkswagens. (Heaven alone knows how Hicks would have handled the news that, less than two years after his death, even Keith Richards would be pushing Volkswagens.) "Everyone is hawking products. That's the highest thing you can achieve now, isn't it -- become some barker?... I'm waiting to see, 'It's Jesus, for Miller! I was crucified, dead for three days, resurrected, and I've waited two thousand years to return to Earth -- it's Miller Time!'" (D).