Eddie Vedder released Earthling on February 11th, 2022, and U2 announced a vinyl Record Store Day release of "A Celebration" on February 16th. Earthling has the track "Rose of Jericho" which centers on the plant, whereas U2's song, which is a 40 year commemorative re-release, is biblically grounded in the end on the fall of Jericho.
The fall of Jericho is interesting because it is the first conquest forming God's nation, and is a conquest by miracle which raises questions of mechanical and/or acoustic resonance collapsing Jericho's walls via sound. The only surivivor was Rahab and her family because Rahab helped the Israeli spies on the belief/faith that their God was the one true God. She goes on to become an ancestress of King David/Jesus in the Bible.
Is U2's choice of re-release of a song from forty years ago a more direct name drop, being the Biblical character cause of the name choice at birth, as opposed to a far more obscure Biblical usage? (Given it's the name of the protagonist in the iBook?) -Who's to say? It's far more direct. It is perhaps the thirteenth time this may have been done intentionally. (There's no way to distinguish whether some of the initial signifiers were purely accidental, one probably was (3).)
Speaking of accidents, "Rose of Jericho" would be the most apt personification of the name you could coin unintentionally in the context of the iBook. This is the third resurrection, though only two made the record. These entries are an attempt to map the third, and the song introduces "two outta three". The plant symbolizes resurrection because it can survive dessication for many years and rejuvenate with the introduction of water. It can even be blown like a tumbleweed and it has a winged structure. (It also has an association with the thunder and lightning god Orisha Shango in Santeria. In Ayurvedic medicine it's name is literally "womb flower" and its treatment uses center on female fertility.) Lightning figures in this song as well and harks back to Pearl Jam's title track in 2018. This time it's in the context of starting wildfires.
Now that we are in the greatest age of deforestation in anthropogenic history, coupled with what appears to be a new wildfire regime in Siberia, Canada's boreal forest and the North American west (which has followed in short succession the decimation exacted by the bark beetle in the Pacific Northwest), we have long since entered the ecological price stage of the collective folly exacted in our lifetimes (and far beyond), which was ignored.
Chapter 7 in the iBook is dedicated to the protest to save the coastal temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island at the Walbran Valley in 1991. This was rolled over with a wave of PR diversion with the valley partitioned in a typical "talk and log" deferrment where the valley center was intensively logged, which meant the rate of old growth logging wasn't curtailed in the slightest. It changed nothing in essence except that the arrest count in very close to the same area over remaining scraps (now down to 2.7%) is presently over 1200 souls (this time only about 10% of them have been charged with criminal contempt, and probably not retroactively, which was the stunt performed by the B.C. attorney general for the protests in the Walbran and Clayoquot Sound (1993)). So the framework of the song is the protagonist's outlook in the book, being caught in the position where this sum of observation was meaningless, inconsequential, invisible and ignored while the consequences exacted themselves irrevocably in terms of ecological holocaust, climaxing in new smoke laden summers not just at home but even worse abroad, exacted on a global scale so far as Australia (what RHCP's first single release is about). The shift/increase in B.C.'s wildfire regime was beginning to be well apparent in the '90's. It was just by and large ignored.
Beyond being a surefire firestarter, lightning's a thing in terms of being a signifier that's already come up twice in the writ, once in the first (unredacted) letter, and then again on Valentine's Day 2021. This is the second time it's occurred in what I'm contending is a universal music feedback (when it happened the first time I analyzed this element in reference to the writ). This time it's appeared far more contextualized, meaning "Jericho" refers to the Biblical story where my name exists in the Bible, and the song frames this in a manner that's synonymous with the transpiration of the book's plot in terms of ecological loss, and even possibly invokes the present tense, meaning a context of resurrection of awareness signified by lightning.
This contextual invocation of the "Rose of Jericho" has happened in tandem with the sole individual on this earth who might be signifying me by name by stealth intentionally as opposed to unintentionally using "Jericho" at the exact same time, which in terms of a coincidence of both happening in together in the same month a year after Valentine's is pretty stunning.
U2's drop of the song in terms of a resurrection on pertinence is quite amazing in its own right, as the Cold War reset has really begun on February 22nd with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, -though the Doomsday Clock is still at 100 seconds from midnight. U2's video for "A Celebration" was largely shot in Kilmainham Gaol, a prison with some suppressionist history, unspurprisingly constructed as a panopticon (a term WPC was aware of in terms of optimizing digital surveillance, whereas he chose to invert the meaning into a transmission of all seeing light). It is a word of dual meaning. WPC's invocation turned out to be more than a little prescient in light of what would be considered normally unlawful digital surveillance unleashed upon domestic populations by Covid-19 (for Canada that meant tracking the entire population's movements without notice or permission or oversight, i.e., everyone with a phone).
U2's song is celebration at the cusp of the end of the world, celebration of liberation in the sense of spiritual transcendence, a celebration so vital we don't have time for the collapse. This is the grounding imparted by the Biblical touchstone, which literally signifies the fall of the fortress walls and the spiritual liberation of the children of God through a miracle of sound, which confers celebration and dancing.