Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Bono is the new black (red)

He's more mysterious than Sting, but less smooth jazz. Equally tantric. If he were a meat, he would be salted pork housed in a dingy corner of an 18th century galleon. Film character: satyr.

My first concert was the Oakland Unforgettable Fire tour. As I stood there at the age of 11 cursing my parents for denying me access to the Purple Rain tour a year earlier, I had my first musical epiphany: people who don't give a fuck about making good music can actually perform. In public. To impressionable tweens.

The problem with Bono is, like the status quo, he's just there. All the time. Achtung Baby, sunglasses, iPods, tight black jeans. He's like Madonna but without the reinvention part. And now, like Madonna, he's adopted Africa.

His recent spot as guest editor of Vanity Fair's Africa issue proves that Graydon Carter has officially lost his mind. Once the literary home to original voices like T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Parker, it has now allowed the mediocre rocker who borrowed a borrowed line from Led Zeppelin take his red pen to an entire continent. From the editor of Spy Magazine to a guy with hair like a maxi pad who allows his magazine to turn into a giant ad on behalf of his "good friend" Bono's (Red) campaign, Graydon has lost sight of what journalism truly means.

The issue, which features a 20 different covers with 20 different celebrities, is a glossy advertisement that tries to sell Africa as the new "sexy." While (Red) has raised millions to provide lifesaving AIDS medication to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it, it's spent far more in feel-good marketing the (Red) brand.

The campaign has also spent far more in in continuing to manage, rather than beginning to prevent, the epidemic. While pictures of Bono with world leaders abound, there has been little evidence that he has actually met with Africans who are working on the ground in their communities to stop new infections. Or that he's met with Africans who suffer from the horrible side effects from treatment medication. Or that he's met with teenagers who don't know how to use a condom because U.S. funded "abstinence-only-until-marriage" prevention programs prohibit community educators to discuss contraception methods.

Gender discrimination and weak health systems fuel the epidemic, and infections among youth and women continue to rise disproportionately. And while anti-retroviral drugs extend the lives of those living with HIV, they are hardly the "Lazarus Effect" that Vanity Fair describes, particularly in countries where those living with the disease often refuse testing due to fear of stigmatization and violence. What is needed is more money for prevention, more money for reproductive health services and comprehensive sexual education for youth, and the political will needed to change faulty foreign policies (like the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), yet Bono's Vanity Fair doesn't even touch on these points.

The capacity to change the course of the AIDS epidemic is so great, and the power of celebrities today to mobilize political and consumer will is unprecedented. It's a shame that the whole lot of them, led by Bono, take the easy way out by marketing it as the 21st century celebrity burden.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work.

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