"The last of the rock stars
When hip hop drove the big cars"
-- U2, "Kite"

Paul David Hewson is his proper and legal name, but none of us care much about that. There are too many Pauls around. Too many Davids. Hewson might be the name of an Arizona development company, we just can't be sure. But his fully known name, a single word... well, that's different. It's blunt in its brevity, and yet, somehow, simultaneously disarming, open: Bono.

There he is in 1985, waving an Irish flag in Croke Park before 50,000 fans. Yes, that's him again, barely two years later, on the cover of Time magazine looking considerably more Native American than Irish. 

Now he's "The Fly," drinking a bottle of Cristal while hacking away at the Joshua Tree with a knife.

And there he is again, this time standing on the White House lawn next to the President of the United States. He's wearing pink sunglasses, or maybe orange, while a war rages on in the background.

Suddenly, he's meeting the Pope. Then he's in Africa, Brazil, Chile, talking about an AIDS pandemic and third-world debt.

He's an Irishman collecting an award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

He's on the cover of Time magazine again, this time saving the world -- while avoiding taxes.

Look, it's Bono, and he's doing it all pro-Bono.

I know Bono.You know Bono. We all know Bono. After all, how could we not? Maybe that's why we feel entitled to scrutinize the man with such severity and reproach. And oh, how the criticism runs free and easy. We like throwing rocks at the glass houses we build; the rubble left behind empowers us.

"The banks they're like cathedrals
I guess casinos took their place."
-- U2, "The Playboy Mansion"

But we're here to talk business. In addition to real estate, private-equity investments, a hotel, and a chain of restaurants, Bono and his wife Ali Hewson also own a line of clothing, Edun Apparel, which according to the website, has relationships with everyone from Google (GOOG) to Motorola (MOT) to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In a 2007 Bloomberg article, Bono Inc., both Bono's and U2's businesses were carefully laid out and autopsied from stem to stern.

"Bono’s empire encompasses real estate, private-equity investments, a hotel, a clothing line and a chain of restaurants," Richard Tomlinson and Fergal O'Brien wrote for Bloomberg. "Along with fellow band members, he also owns a stake in 15 companies and trusts, including concert-booking agencies, record production firms and trusts that are mostly registered in Ireland. U2 was one of the first successful bands in the world to have obtained all rights to its own music."

Fair enough. It's good to see the lads do well for themselves.

Then in a weird turn, especially for Bloomberg, the article quickly tries to stick its stubby little finger in Bono the businessman's eye: 
 

Bono’s own dealings haven’t always followed the altruistic ideals he espouses, says Richard Murphy, a Downham Market, UK–based adviser to the Tax Justice Network, an international lobbying group. Murphy points to the band’s decision to move its music publishing company to the Netherlands from Ireland in June 2006 in order to minimize taxes. The move came six months before Ireland ended an exemption on musicians’ royalty income, which is generally untaxed in the Netherlands. "This is somebody who’s exceptionally rich taking the opportunity to shift his tax burden to somebody else, but then asking governments around the world to spend that tax take in the way that he would like," Murphy says.

"What no man can own, no man can take"
-- U2, "Yahweh"

There's something fiercely ironic about Bloomberg, the data-fuel-pump equivalent of capitalism's engine, taking a rock singer to task for daring to be a businessman. In the world of big business -- and make no mistake, Bono, and the band he's in, U2, is big, big business -- nothing is black and white.

Even something as seemingly simple as profit and loss can't be clutched tight in the fists as separate, closely held distinctions. Now, more than a year past Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, the mathematics of capitalism still slip through our fingers like sand. These days we're sinking in it. Sand everywhere.

But then again, there's always been something jarring about the unsteady cocktail mix of rock music and capitalism. As citizens of the corporate world, we readily accept the fact that companies defined by logos featuring deep blue streams, verdant forests, or crystalline mountaintops are frequently engaged in activities that savage the very images they stand behind. Make money first, ask questions later, and if caught, pay the proper fines and then hire another public-relations firm. That's the cost of doing business.

But not for rock stars, and especially not for Bono.

"Only love, only love can leave such a mark
"
-- U2, "Magnificent"

“U2 were never dumb in business,” Bono told music journalist Michka Assayas in the book Bono. “We don’t sit around thinking about world peace all day.” Indeed. Not all day. But Bono does spend part of his days thinking about poverty and world peace, and a considerable amount of time traveling the world discussing it. And I guess that's why the business side rankles so many the way it does.

"U2 are arch-capitalists -- arch-capitalists -- but it looks as if they’re not,” Jim Aiken, a music promoter who helped stage U2 concerts in Ireland during the 1980s and ’90s, told Bloomberg. It's a true fact. But is the deception intentional, or does it bleed out from under the pedestal we assemble to roughly throw our greatest rock stars and music legends upon? If anything, U2 should serve as role models for other musicians; a corporate outline to be used to avoid falling into the typical industry churn of raise 'em, record 'em and rip 'em off.

"U2 own all their masters but these are licensed long-term to Universal, with whom we enjoy an excellent relationship," U2's manager, Paul McGuinness said in a now infamous 2008 speech at Cannes. (The speech is infamous for taking Internet Service Providers to task for turning a blind eye to illegal music sharing, but that's another story.)

"What U2 and I also understood instinctively from the start was that they had two parallel careers first as recording and songwriting artists, and second as live performer," McGuinness said. "U2 always understood that it would be pathetic to be good at the music and bad at the business, and have always been prepared to invest in their own future."

For Bono, those investments include The Clarence Hotel in Dublin, in which he and Edge took a 50% stake in 1992, transforming it from a gritty, declining businessman's outpost to a five-star luxury hotel, as well as his high-profile involvement with the private-equity firm, Elevation Partners, which became the first outside investor in Forbes Media group, reportedly to the tune of $250 million.

"October and the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear.
What do I care?"
-- U2, "October"

Okay, so Bono and U2 have partially decoded the uneasy relationship between music and capitalism. Well done. Still, for many there's something slightly grating about Bono flying around the world giving humanitarian lectures from behind tinted rock-star sunglasses. If the image of rock star makes for an uncomfortable transition to businessman, the image of businessman makes for a hideously awkward transformation to humanitarian. There's something grossly penitent about the businessman-turned-humanitarian; it's as if there's a crime being covered up somewhere.

"I'm the first to admit that there's something unnatural… something unseemly… about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents, and then disappearing to their villas in the South of France," Bono acknowledged in a rambling 2006 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast.

In the book, Bono, he was even more direct:
 

[As] you get older, your idea of good guys and bad guys changes... I stopped throwing rocks at the obvious symbols of power and the abuse of it. I started throwing rocks at my own hypocrisy. That's part of what that work was about: owning up to one's ego. These characters in the songs like "The Fly" are owning up to one's hypocrisy in your heart, your duplicitous nature.

There's nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that at all -- except for the fact that most of us feel that Bono's hypocrisy and duplicity doesn't really belong to him at all; it belongs to us. We've paid good money for that image and we don't like to see it flog itself on full display. It's our image, dammit, only we get to flog it.

"If there's an order in all of this disorder is it like a tape recorder?"
-- U2, "Wake Up Dead Man"

And, finally, there he is again. Bono. It's July 25, 2009 and he's back in Croke Park, almost 25 years later, waving an Irish flag -- this time before more than 80,000 fans. It's funny how the simplicity of a single name can serve to accentuate deep contradictions; come nearly half-circle, with everything not corralled between the bends spilling out into contradiction and complexity. Bono: We know him. We don't know him.