| “People want you to die on the cross when you’re 33—or they ask
for their money back.”
—BONO, Spin, April 2001
It’s especially hard to gain some semblance of aesthetic ethos when you’ve
been dubbed Legend In Your Own Time for ten years running. As Lester Bangs
said, being a hero is a tough task—almost as hard as having heroes. In
a move of daring boldness, U2 has gone head on with the Legend “albatross,”
and have been the most successful challengers to the fickle face of populism
since the Beatles. But that does not mean their near-Messianic pretensions
has not chopped off some hands of ego in the process, or forced themselves
to utter almost every contradictive statement in the English language.
And of course, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t been burned, deeply scolded
in fact, by the bitch Goddess of Success, whose smile one writer once wrote
“disguises a taste for blood.” And it also doesn’t mean that they can be
shot down by egregious critics-as-prophets to a point where their music
cannot intuitively communicate with the willing ears of the world.
“Looking for the one / But you know you’re somewhere else instead / You want to be the song / The song the you hear in your head.” —BONO, “Discothèque,” Pop
(1997)
“But irony, postmodernism and kitsch are all too often the last refuge of morally bankrupt style whores. It’s bourgeois slacker apathy in smart-arse hipster’s second-hand clothing, and even though we needed a spoonful after [the ’80s,] the decade that U2 epitomized, it soon became an overdose.” —JOHNNY CIGARETTES,
New
Music Express, 1997
For U2’s next record, they planned on fully emerging themselves in electronica,
and would abandon their producing team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois—whom
they had worked with since 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire—in favor
of chic zeitgeists Flood and Howie B. But a rumored 1996 release date passed,
and a recording was painstaking and fruitless. During the recording of
Achtung
Baby when the band was frayed down and hitting a wall, they rallied
around a newly penned song called “One,” the album’s centerpiece which
has since gone on to be U2’s signature tune. There was no “One”-quality
song coming together for Pop, the now-title for the album. Somewhere
in the tangles of commitments, the band began plans for a coinciding tour.
These plans, in turn, imposed a deadline. Song were mixed by engineers
who hadn’t slept in four days, and typical U2-perfectionism took a back
seat. U2 had built on being an intuitive, honest band, not over-thinking
their music and maintaining that the articulation between their inner ranks
to produce pure musical objectives. After all, even Achtung Baby
evolved in the final 72 hours before the deadline—the music could not possibly
suffer on Pop….
“I can’t remember how we got the idea of turning a supermarket [into a road show], but I remember it made a lot of sense at the time. As I’m sitting here, I am trying to remember what that was.” —BONO, at the PopMart kick-off press
conference, February 2, 1997
Zoo TV’s follow up, the PopMart tour, kicked off in the schmaltzy locale
of Las Vegas, and was broadcast during prime-time on ABC. The consumerism
overstepped its joking bounds, and very few people saw the touring golden
arches over the stage in their context; the broadcast was the lowest rated
non-news network program ever. The album itself was beginning to
elicit mercilessly mixed reviews, the positive of which were ignored, and
the negative ones frequently using the term “half-baked.” Beaten down to
a state where their experimenting appeared to be humorless satires, U2
was in the midst of being dismissed as middle-age dimwits whose dappling
in electronica was considered a misguided attempt to cling to mainstream
inhabitancy. In hindsight defense, Pop had an urbanized montage
of techno, and focused less on the back beat and more on how its tones
and sensibilities could be translated to rock songwriting. Nevertheless,
U2 had an album on their hands that was essentially passionless, and the
band was beginning to see their mistakes: arrangements seemed flawed, the
band was unprepared. “We ended up in Las Vegas under-rehearsed,” said drummer
Larry Mullen, Jr. “It was one of the most frightening experiences of my
life. We had built a reputation as a great live band, and all of a sudden
we were placed in a situation where we didn’t know if we were able to deliver.”
The spectacle to enliven the music was now undermining it, and worse, U2
was gazing for too long into their parody of art becoming a product, and
the product their art had become was gazing also.
“[In May 1997] we got into Washington, D.C., before all our equipment arrived and rehearsed with just guitar, bass and drums—none of the loops or samples that we had been attaching to the songs. Howie B. came in during the middle of the rehearsal and said, ‘Wow, what a sound. What is this?’ We told him it was us, it was what U2 sounds like. I think that’s when we realized that it was time for us to get back to the essence of what we do.” —BONO, Los Angeles Times,
October 29, 2000
Later legs of the tour had more of a flourished fervor to them, as arrangements
were changed and the band gained familiarity that made the material their
own. The band had, though, touched on a artistic and financial failure
and seen the underside of fame’s coin—worse than past disappointments like
Rattle
& Hum (1988), or even their early years (while Pop’s first
single “Discothèque” went #1 on the UK charts, it was still U2’s
lowest selling album since 1980’s Boy, their debut). Excess was
enough. After putting out a greatest hits album in 1998 (Best of U2:
1980-90), the band realized that the age old idiom of the Back to Roots
Record, a concept as old as the Beatles’ Abbey Road, was what the
band wanted. The band that was constantly evolving was evolving back to
themselves.
“This is no time to be arty, at the beginning of the 21st century. We had to find the center.…Somewhere between being true to yourself and repeating yourself is a world of questions.” —BONO, Spin, April 2001
Cycles never fit this efficiently into decade doldrums, but the ’90s fit
as a timed experimental period from U2. When New Year’s Eve 1999 passed,
U2 was working off and on again with Eno and Lanois, and were reacquainting
themselves with earth and grains of rudimentary instrumental interplay.
The Edge was itching to reapply his patented lead guitar sound onto the
tracks, but Bono was twitching and constantly effacing it by saying “it’s
too U2.” In fact, Edge applied a stellar lead to a burgeoning punk number
called “Always,” and then the band slowed it down and added a pulsating
bridge into it; that song became “Beautiful Day.” Granted, it didn’t have
a “One”-esque epiphany for the creation process to rally around, but the
song would prove All That You Can’t Leave Behind’s (2000)—and U2’s—re-introductory
grace.
“We don’t want to be the only band out here doing this kind of thing.…I just want to hear it on the radio. I want rock to chase pop down the road.” —BONO, Rolling Stone, January
11, 2001
The U2 maxim that rock could coerce the ear-drums of the world towards
peace/understanding was changing; pop (not to be confused with the
album) was now included in the definition and could now change the world
too. “When rock stops trying to communicate on the level of mass media,
it becomes progressive rock; it becomes solipsistic,” Bono told Spin.
He and Edge have been making calls to rock bands like Radiohead and Pearl
Jam to stop being indifferent to Mainstream Radio, and that that
could be the way to ward off Korn Bizkits and cutie-teen-pop, the most
depressing movements of popular culture since disco. They reaped what they
sewed by heavily promoting All That…; “Beautiful Day,” which became
the first single, regaled the anti-converted and created an ecstatic radio
buzz. Despite being All That…’s release occurring after the Grammy
deadline, that still didn’t stop “Beautiful Day” (released before the deadline
and therefore eligible) from collecting three awards—Record of the Year,
Song of the Year, and Best Group Rock Performance. Meanwhile, All That…
rounded several prominent critics’ Top Ten lists, completely purging whatever
stigma Pop had still floating around. A line had been drawn between
the indulgence of experimenting and plain good melodies in plain good song.
Stripped down. Back-to-basics. Purity of motives. Simple basics of entering
the mind through beauty.…These were the ways U2 would win back the mainstream.
Only they had made being themselves both progressive and beautiful.
“I just think: simplify. Let’s just get on the stage and play and be a band. [The Pop Mart tour] was a disaster. We spent so much time worrying we were going to go bankrupt.” —LARRY MULLEN,
RollingStone.com,
January 10, 2001
Now in this rehashing of events past, we come to the current: U2’s newest
spectacle, the Elevation Tour. Only the newest gimmickry consists of some
complex intertwining, like the voice of angels sonically imparting themselves
on the ears of the masses as the instigator of impassioned political evolving
through the powers of rock & roll and ethereal beauty—i.e., U2’s playing
it as just themselves. “In the U.S., the experience of seeing U2 was never
a physical one the way it is in Europe,” Bono told the Los Angeles Times.
There’s no grandiose stage props, no intricate productions to elaborate
themselves onto the songs, no costumed personas to ingratiate—it’s just
themselves. So, on May 4, the population of Lexington will not flourish
with tour crew members, brown-outs will not proliferate, and Rupp Arena
will not be transmogrified into an orgiastic Warholian fantasy. But there’s
the possibility that U2 might be just as ingratiating.
“I’m not afraid of anything in this world / There’s nothing you can throw at me that I haven’t already heard.” —BONO, “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t
Get Out Of,” All That You Can’t Leave Behind
And so the pendulum has swung back. And as true Legends, their reverence
has long been out of their hand, and has mutated into a festering tangible
in the minds of listeners around the world. U2 made itself on the ideal
that God’s face could be recognized through a guitar, and the insipid idea
that rock & roll can change the world if its content could match
its form, and if it could galvanize itself to be more than the proletariat’s
art form. There’s a line of self-righteous pomposity that U2 has for so
long straddled, but only because St. Bono & Co. believe both colloquially
and complexly, that rock & roll will change the world.
“U2 might very well be the best rock band in the world.” —any given music critic, any given time between 1984-2000
Just because Legends can fall, does not mean that they can’t get back up.
And U2, right now, might very well be the best rock band in the world. |