Graphic Using celebrity ties, corporate and charitable partners, Bono has built an advocacy empire.
PRECISELY 22 years ago this month, on the occasion of “the Irish band U2” playing a sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall in New York, the band’s lead singer, 24 years old at the time, stopped to chat with a critic from The New York Times.
A new generation of billionaire business people, the "philanthropreneurs," are trying to harness marketplace forces to do good works.
Bono's Benefit Universe
“I think that’s a misuse of the stage,” Mr. Hewson said. “How can you be the spokesman for a generation if you’ve got nothing to say other than ‘Help!’ ”
That mixture of passion and self-contradiction might have been telling. Bono’s rock stardom — cemented a year later with U2’s appearance at Live Aid, the epic exercise in rock ’n’ roll fund-raising — has been eclipsed by the very empire of advocacy organizations he helped create to do, he now says, what simple fund-raising never could. As a co-founder or principal in a collection of nonprofit, commercial or hybrid entities aimed at tackling poverty, AIDS and debt relief primarily in Africa, and by making expedient alliances — with corporate players like Gap and Armani, or with conservative politicians like Jesse Helms — Bono has become the face of fusion philanthropy.
There’s a method to the mission. The four pillars of the Bono activism conglomerate — the lobbying groups DATA and ONE, the clothing line EDUN and, most recently, the (Product) RED brands — are meant to tweak and motivate change at different levels of the developed world’s social, economic and political systems. That way, barriers to advancement in poor countries can be removed.
The model has earned him high praise. He has been a Nobel Prize nominee. He was one of Time magazine’s Persons of the Year, along with Bill and Melinda Gates. His supporters even lobbied — unrealistically — to have him installed as president of the World Bank.
Throw in the rise of the “U2charist,” in which some Episcopalian congregations have taken to celebrating the liturgy by using U2’s music and what some consider its message of “global reconciliation, justice for the poor and oppressed, and the importance of caring for your neighbor” (snipurl.com/U2charist), and the canonization of Paul Hewson appears complete.
That kind of beneficent overexposure, of course, is bound to draw exasperation. Exhibit one: the appearance in March of the Web site Eliminatebono.com, home of GONE: The Campaign to Make Bono History, an impudent retort to the singer’s project ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History (one.org).
But not every complaint is pure sour grapes.
Labor groups were quick to point out, for example, that Gap — a key partner in Bono’s (Product) RED campaign, which drafts corporate sponsors to contribute profits on RED products to fight disease in Africa — has a reputation for running sweatshops in developing countries.
(Product) RED and Gap representatives have countered that the clothing company has made strides in cleaning up its act, and that the factories manufacturing clothes for (Product) RED were not sweatshops. But Charles Kernaghan, the director of the National Labor Committee for Worker and Human Rights, said he was not convinced.
“Bono cannot be so naïve to think that the conditions in the factories he tours remain the same when he isn’t there,” Mr. Kernaghan said.
Other groups have raised questions about the ability to access and inspect the factories that generate EDUN’s own fair-trade clothing line, even though the company has been vetted by Verité, a nonprofit auditor. And investments by Bono’s private equity firm, Elevation Partners, in video game titles like “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames” and “Destroy All Humans” have resulted in complaints that the rock star is singing from both sides of his mouth.
Bono reflected on his humanitarian efforts — and on the complaints — in a call this month from Brisbane, Australia, where, as it happened, a small group of international activists was planning to demonstrate at U2’s concerts because, they said, “Mercenaries 2” simulates violent military action in Venezuela.
“I have to tell you, the things that come up when you’re in this band,” Bono said. “I mean, some of it of course is real and substantial — and people have genuine fears and concerns. But some of it is just barking mad.
“I’ve come to a place where I realize that there is something obnoxious about a spoiled rotten rock star in a photograph with a vulnerable child taken by a dreadful disease. But that’s who I am and that’s who they are. And I’m doing my best.”
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