doctorwho!!
that was a great argument. I arrived here, as well, assuming that ZooTV would be the tour in question, and believing it should be.
Originally posted by candyfloss:
But I don't know how they can say that Elevation changed history when it only ended a few months ago. I just think we need to see what other bands - and U2 - do next before we can get proper perspective of the Elevation tour.
You make an astute point, candyfloss.
Nonetheless, doctorwho, you've made me consider Elevation a little more deeply, articulating its cultural context well. I also liked this observation on ZooTV:
As we will all agree, "Achtung Baby" is a brilliant album. ZOO TV did not showcase that brilliance (with a few exceptions - notably "Mysterious Ways"), it detracted from it. In a way, the ZOO TV tour took away from AB.
As an absurdly eclectic music freak (as a friend says, "everything but kabuki!") I can't help but regard ZooTV in a much wider context than rock tours. Elevation did shake up the current conventions of rock shows, and audience expectations, and delivered emotional resonance as few shows ever have.
ZooTV, however, took on the conventions of stagecraft and the performing arts altogether. I'm a poet, I get off on spoken word set to music; I'm a painter, I love the incorporation of text and image into performance pieces. Having produced some of my own humble goup-poetry readings w/music, I was electrified by the two ZooTV shows I saw (one in an arena, one in a stadium). Many modern settings of opera, too, push collisions of media, which is exciting, but rather limited in its audience. The radical thing about Zoo was its mass audience -- to paraphrase a producer of an 80s Dylan video, it was performance art right in the world's fuckin' face!
It's true that ZooTV did not enhance AB, as you suggested, doctorwho, but I think it's because they rather used AB to enhance ZooTV! It was a concept show, yes -- built on powerful ideas about the culture, which were
supported by AB's themes of personal, domestic, emotional disintegration and alienation. By the time I heard Love is Blindness at the end of those shows, I knew a whole lot more about the chill that song describes. (Ditto Can't Help Fallin' in Love and -- wow, With or Without You!)
ZooTV was a cultural assault, not just on rock'n'roll, but on an entertainment culture. You can bet that artists from all kinds of performance media heard about what U2 was doing -- and about how people were responding. Same can be said of Elevation, true -- they got through to people this time out as powerfully as they did in '92. With a different arsenal. And the very same objective: to knock expectations off balance and to make people FEEL.
Thanks for sharing this with us, olive. Great discussion.
Deb D
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I wanna walk with you along an unapproved road
the greatest frontman in the world - by truecoloursfly:
http://www.atu2.com/news/article.src?ID=1575
