Vertigo: U2 Nails American Culture in the New Millenium

Vertigo – by U2

Unos, dos, tres, catorce…Turn it up loud, captain!

Lights go down. It's dark. The jungle is your head - Can't rule your heart
I'm feeling so much stronger than I thought
Your eyes are wide and though your soul it can't be bought
your mind can wander

Hello, Hello Hola! I'm at a place called vertigo (Donde esta?)
It's everything I wish I didn't know
Except you give me something I can feel - Feel

The night is full of holes. Those bullets rip the sky of ink with gold.
They twinkle as the boys play rock and roll.
They know that they can't dance. At least they know

I can't stand the beat. I'm asking for the check
Girl with crimson nails has Jesus 'round the neck
Swinging to the music - Swinging to the music. Whoa!

Hello, Hello - Hola! I'm at a place called Vertigo (Donde esta?)
It's everything I wish I didn't know
But you give me something I can feel – Feel.

All this, all this can be yours
All of this, all of this can be yours
All this, all of this can be yours
Just give me what I want and no one gets hurt.

Hello, Hello - Hola! I'm at a place called Vertigo (Donde esta?)
Lights go down and all I know
Is that you give me something I can feel
You're teaching me hoooowwwooww
Your love is teaching me hooowww
How to kneel – knee-eel

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

It is no secret that U2 is not only one of the biggest rock bands of all time, but also one of, if not thee, most respected. How often does the lead singer of a rock band receive Time Magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ award AND get asked to be the keynote speaker at the U.S. President's National Prayer Breakfast? In Bono’s case, these honors had little to do with his singing voice and everything to do with his political voice. By bestowing these high honors on this diminutive Irishman, the people at Time and the White House were acknowledging Bono’s enormous impact on our world, an impact that has political, economic, and moral dimensions.

In the 2005 smash hit “Vertigo,” Bono and the boys unleashed a dizzying barrage of images that captures American culture in the 21st century. The mathematically flawed first line, “One, two, three, fourteen” knocks us off balance, and the rest of the song makes sure we stay that way. (It also made me feel a little better about the D’s I used to get in math!) “The lights go down,” putting us in a “darkness” where the “jungle is your head” that “can’t rule the heart.” In this dizzying darkness, while our “soul can’t be bought,” our “minds can wander.” This opening verse transported me back to a video arcade I used to frequent that was inside a shopping mall. Talk about major sensory overload!

In verse two the rapid-fire images keep coming with “bullets ripping the sky,” creating “holes of ink and gold” that “twinkle.” “Boys play rock and roll” but “can’t dance” to the music they create. As the dizzying whirl of “Vertigo” continues, we begin to sense that the narrator is both attracted to and repulsed by all that is swirling all around him - the thumping “beat,” “asking for the cheque,” a “girl with crimson nails swaying to the music” with “Jesus ‘round her neck.”

Taken together, the first two vertigo-inducing verses create an almost Yeatsian world, where “the center cannot hold” and “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” (Yeats, “The Second Coming”) The singer himself calls this “everything I wish I didn’t know.” And, to make us even dizzier, Bono calls upon and repeats the universal shriek of nauseous amusement park riders: “Whoa-oh-oh! Whoa-oh-oh!” The last time I took my youth group to Cedar Point and rode the “Magnum Force,” I coughed up that cry, along with some regurgitated elephant ears. By the end of the second verse and chorus, U2 has not only vividly described vertigo, they’ve created an experience of it.

Vertigo is defined as “a condition in which one feels a sensation of whirling or tilting that causes a loss of balance.” Is there a more apt or compelling metaphor for life in the new millennium? The pace of change in our post-modern world is dizzying. Not only can few if any of us keep up with technology, but technology can barely keep up with itself! I got a “new” iBook G-4 last February and am already on my third “new and improved” operating system!

We live at break-neck speed, packing more into a single day than our ancestors did in a week. My older brother recently took a week’s vacation with his wife and asked his in-laws to babysit his 13 and 15-year-old boys. When my brother returned, his father-in-law was passed out on the couch in exhaustion. Once his daughter revived him, he said, “I’ve never worked so hard in my life – driving one boy to soccer, the other to hockey, picking them up from band, getting them their meals at different times and always to go. I haven’t watched a half-hour of T.V. all week! I need a vacation.”

And through all our running, we are bombarded with images – images from billboards, television, advertisements, and the internet. Theologian and cultural critic Leonard Sweet writes, “Postmodern culture is image-driven…Images have replaced words as the primary social currency of the day.” (PMP, pgs 86, 98) The latest video technology allows producers to put hundreds of images in front of us during a single thirty-second commercial. Watch the introductory segment of Sports Center, aired hourly on ESPN, and you’ll be deluged with rapid-fire sports highlights set to music. None of the individual clips woven into the opening SC montage lasts longer than a half a second. But if a picture truly is worth a thousand words, we’ll need a calculator to determine what’s being said to us during a typical thirty-second image barrage on TV. The net effect of this full-on image assault can best be described as vertigo.

But somehow in the disorienting whirlwind of our culture - and of this song - Bono affirms the presence of an anchor, a “You,” who gives him “something (he) I can feel.” And, as is so often the case in the corpus of U2 lyrics, we’re never told who, exactly, this “you” is. Is it the ‘you’ who is swaying to the music? Or is it the ‘you’ who calmed the stormy sea of Galilee? Is it the one who offers us a “peace that passes all understanding,” and who is “our refuge and our strength” even when “the earth gives way and the mountains fall into the sea”? (Philippians 4, Psalm 46)

Whoever Bono’s “you” is in “Vertigo,” he/she has a rival, whose presence emerges in the final third of the song. To highlight the rival’s entrance, the instruments, the tempo, and the volume all drop way down. At the very same moment, Bono alters his voice dramatically so that we can’t help but notice the entrance of another character. Bono drops from a high-pitched, high-intensity yell all the way down to a soft, seductive, almost conversational whisper. And in this new voice, the voice of temptation, we hear, “All of this, all of this can be yours. All of this, all of this can be yours. Just give me what I want and no one gets hurt.”

It’s hard not to recognize in this second voice the echoes of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. In part two of Satan’s three-part temptation, Satan takes Jesus to a high place and shows him “in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.” And at this dizzying and precarious moment, the tempter says, “All of this can be yours, if you bow down and worship me.” (Matthew 3: ) Just as Jesus rejects his tempter in the wilderness, so, too, does the primary voice in “Vertigo.” Instead, Bono chooses the one who gives him “something I (he) can feel,” the one whose love teaches him “how to kneel.”

Bono seems to locate truth and reality in his own experience – something he can feel. In doing so, he speaks for all of post-modernity. Once again, in Postmodern Pilgrims, Sweet notes, “It is one thing to talk about God. It is quite another thing to experience God…In postmodern culture, there is no interest in a ‘second-hand’ God, a God that someone else defines for us…The encounter, the experience is the message.” (PMP, 31 & 43)

In my current role as youth pastor, I have an easier time getting 20 high schoolers to give up a week of their summer vacation to go on a mission trip than I do getting 5 kids to come to a one hour Bible study. Why? Because these kids want something they can feel. They want an experience that is real and their own. They’re not interested in a book that was written thousands of years ago. They’re not interested in someone else’s experience or knowledge of God. They want – they demand - their own. And when they find that genuine feeling, when they find that authentic experience of the Almighty, then and only then will they kneel, bow down, and worship. This hunger for real religious experience is everywhere in “Vertigo,” and that is why U2 concerts not only sell-out in minutes, but they also leave the audience feeling like they’ve had an authentic encounter with the divine. And they have!

For more than 25 years, U2 has managed not to bow down to any of the gods that rock and roll stardom offers. And that refusal to worship other gods is, at least in part, what gives this diminutive Irishman the credibility and the courage to walk boldly into the halls of power with a radical, biblical vision of global justice and to walk out with yet another nation’s commitment to help him achieve that vision. 

As I continue to envision what the Church will be like in the future, I have to believe that folks with the boldness and integrity of Bono will lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Author's Note: For more theological reflections on secular rock songs, visit my website at
www.booksand bridges.com