Party Boy
Refugee
Solid rock and castles on sand
David Sinclair
On their umpteenth album U2 are stronger than ever, while Eminem falters on his sixth
“IT’S A long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll,” sang AC/DC. What they didn’t mention is that it’s an equally long and often much swifter journey back down to the bottom again. All the more reason to marvel at the achievement of U2, who, 24 years after the release of their debut album, Boy, are still one of the most successful and revered groups on the planet. It’s a lesson that the fading rapper Eminem would do well to learn.
While it is one thing to keep selling a lot of CDs and concert tickets, it is another and much harder trick for an artist to maintain a position of cultural relevance. Madonna and, to a lesser extent, David Bowie have managed do it by a process of constant renewal and reinvention. Others, such as Duran Duran, have simply waited around until the fickle finger of fashion was once again pointing in their direction. Then there are the veterans who remain part of the modern celebrity landscape for reasons that have very little to do with their music: Ozzy Osbourne, Sir Elton John, John Lydon.
But for a band still to be standing at the apex of popular culture in 2004, recognised and respected by teenagers and prime ministers alike for their ability to write and perform great and relevant music, is a singular achievement.
U2’s new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, continues to mine an apparently endless vein of inspiration with a combination of heartfelt zeal and hard-nosed diligence that is nothing short of heroic. From the striding bass-driven riff and apocalyptic imagery of Love and Peace or Else — “The troops on the ground are about to dig in” — to the plaintive melody and canyon-sized emotions of Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own, the band sound as committed and creative as at any time in their long career. Melodies that seem fresh yet haunting are gilded with lyrics that speak of the personal and the global, often in the same breath. “Where you live should not decide/ Whether you live or whether you die,” Bono sings in Crumbs from Your Table, a couplet which retains a profound resonance even though it was borrowed for his speech at the Labour Party conference last month.
The opening track, Vertigo, a cracking rock’n’roll song partly influenced by bands such as the Hives and the Strokes, is odds-on to be No 1 when the new singles chart is announced on Sunday. And it successfully surfs the troubled Zeitgeist while neatly chiming with the situation the group finds itself in.
“It’s a dizzy feeling, a sick feeling, when you get to the top of something and there’s only one way to go,” Bono explains, when asked about the meaning of the song. “It’s a club and you’re supposed to be having the time of your life but you want to kill yourself. It’s a light little ditty.”
Small wonder that most acts fail to maintain their position in such a rarefied atmosphere. But according to U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, the group’s formula for lasting at the top for so long is not that complicated.
“It’s because they try hard,” McGuinness says. “The important thing is to do good work. In fact they work harder now than they did at the beginning. They are very competitive. They feel they have a title to hold on to and they are relentlessly self-critical. Bono has a horror of ending up sitting around running a fish farm.”
As in all the great long-running bands — R.E.M., Metallica, the Rolling Stones — there is a unique chemistry at work between the members of U2.
“A band, when they’re really hitting it and they’re on top of their game, there’s nothing like it,” says the band’s guitarist, the Edge. “It’s a completely different thing to a singer/songwriter or a guy playing with session musicians.”
It is certainly different from being the most successful rap star in the world. Eminem, whose new album, Encore, is rush-released today in an attempt to stem the loss of sales resulting from its being leaked on to the internet, still has a vast audience in the palm of his hand. And he knows how to drum up a storm of instant controversy — or publicity, depending on how you look at it. The anti-George Bush track Mosh, which was leaked (deliberately) just before the American election last week, is a stark and dramatic piece of polemic — although you have to wonder exactly what the net effect of having the most notorious rapper in America declaring himself in favour of John Kerry actually had on voter intentions in those sensitive swing states of the Midwest.
Like Toy Soldiers, a remake of the US No 1 hit by Martika, is another strong statement, both musically and verbally, as Eminem seeks to bury the hatchet with his various hip-hop rivals over the sound of a marching snare-drum beat: “It was never my object for someone to get killed/ Why would I want to destroy something I helped build?”
Why indeed? Eminem’s last new studio album, The Eminem Show, sold an astonishing 19 million copies worldwide and there is no doubt that Encore is destined to be a big and very instant hit. But those two tracks aside, there is no getting away from the impression that it is actually a rather lame offering.
Although executive produced by Dr Dre, the album’s backing tracks lack the rhythmic ingenuity and ear-catching little hooks that used to be Eminem’s stock in trade. Instead, too many of the numbers seem to drift past with the drum machine on default setting and a familiar-sounding bass line plonking away on an eternal loop, while Eminem delivers his long wodges of scattershot vocalese.
Although still an amazingly fluent rapper, he has lost the cartoon-like impishness that made his previous albums so scurrilous and entertaining. Here, the tone is either earnest — as on Evil Deeds, where he whines about his rough upbringing and pleads forgiveness for his sins — or else simply gross, as on Puke, which begins with the sound of the artist vomiting and the line, “You don’t know how sick you make me”. Mostly it is rather boring. The same old tired devices that have shown up on hundreds of rap records — gunshots, answerphone messages, children’s voices — are recycled with a minimum of variation, and by the end of the album it is hard to avoid the suspicion that, just eight years since he signed to Dre’s Aftermath label, Eminem may have reached the limits of what he has to offer.
In the rapidly changing context of the rap world, he is already a veteran. Any more albums like Encore and it really will be time for the curtain to descend
David Sinclair
On their umpteenth album U2 are stronger than ever, while Eminem falters on his sixth
“IT’S A long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll,” sang AC/DC. What they didn’t mention is that it’s an equally long and often much swifter journey back down to the bottom again. All the more reason to marvel at the achievement of U2, who, 24 years after the release of their debut album, Boy, are still one of the most successful and revered groups on the planet. It’s a lesson that the fading rapper Eminem would do well to learn.
While it is one thing to keep selling a lot of CDs and concert tickets, it is another and much harder trick for an artist to maintain a position of cultural relevance. Madonna and, to a lesser extent, David Bowie have managed do it by a process of constant renewal and reinvention. Others, such as Duran Duran, have simply waited around until the fickle finger of fashion was once again pointing in their direction. Then there are the veterans who remain part of the modern celebrity landscape for reasons that have very little to do with their music: Ozzy Osbourne, Sir Elton John, John Lydon.
But for a band still to be standing at the apex of popular culture in 2004, recognised and respected by teenagers and prime ministers alike for their ability to write and perform great and relevant music, is a singular achievement.
U2’s new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, continues to mine an apparently endless vein of inspiration with a combination of heartfelt zeal and hard-nosed diligence that is nothing short of heroic. From the striding bass-driven riff and apocalyptic imagery of Love and Peace or Else — “The troops on the ground are about to dig in” — to the plaintive melody and canyon-sized emotions of Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own, the band sound as committed and creative as at any time in their long career. Melodies that seem fresh yet haunting are gilded with lyrics that speak of the personal and the global, often in the same breath. “Where you live should not decide/ Whether you live or whether you die,” Bono sings in Crumbs from Your Table, a couplet which retains a profound resonance even though it was borrowed for his speech at the Labour Party conference last month.
The opening track, Vertigo, a cracking rock’n’roll song partly influenced by bands such as the Hives and the Strokes, is odds-on to be No 1 when the new singles chart is announced on Sunday. And it successfully surfs the troubled Zeitgeist while neatly chiming with the situation the group finds itself in.
“It’s a dizzy feeling, a sick feeling, when you get to the top of something and there’s only one way to go,” Bono explains, when asked about the meaning of the song. “It’s a club and you’re supposed to be having the time of your life but you want to kill yourself. It’s a light little ditty.”
Small wonder that most acts fail to maintain their position in such a rarefied atmosphere. But according to U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, the group’s formula for lasting at the top for so long is not that complicated.
“It’s because they try hard,” McGuinness says. “The important thing is to do good work. In fact they work harder now than they did at the beginning. They are very competitive. They feel they have a title to hold on to and they are relentlessly self-critical. Bono has a horror of ending up sitting around running a fish farm.”
As in all the great long-running bands — R.E.M., Metallica, the Rolling Stones — there is a unique chemistry at work between the members of U2.
“A band, when they’re really hitting it and they’re on top of their game, there’s nothing like it,” says the band’s guitarist, the Edge. “It’s a completely different thing to a singer/songwriter or a guy playing with session musicians.”
It is certainly different from being the most successful rap star in the world. Eminem, whose new album, Encore, is rush-released today in an attempt to stem the loss of sales resulting from its being leaked on to the internet, still has a vast audience in the palm of his hand. And he knows how to drum up a storm of instant controversy — or publicity, depending on how you look at it. The anti-George Bush track Mosh, which was leaked (deliberately) just before the American election last week, is a stark and dramatic piece of polemic — although you have to wonder exactly what the net effect of having the most notorious rapper in America declaring himself in favour of John Kerry actually had on voter intentions in those sensitive swing states of the Midwest.
Like Toy Soldiers, a remake of the US No 1 hit by Martika, is another strong statement, both musically and verbally, as Eminem seeks to bury the hatchet with his various hip-hop rivals over the sound of a marching snare-drum beat: “It was never my object for someone to get killed/ Why would I want to destroy something I helped build?”
Why indeed? Eminem’s last new studio album, The Eminem Show, sold an astonishing 19 million copies worldwide and there is no doubt that Encore is destined to be a big and very instant hit. But those two tracks aside, there is no getting away from the impression that it is actually a rather lame offering.
Although executive produced by Dr Dre, the album’s backing tracks lack the rhythmic ingenuity and ear-catching little hooks that used to be Eminem’s stock in trade. Instead, too many of the numbers seem to drift past with the drum machine on default setting and a familiar-sounding bass line plonking away on an eternal loop, while Eminem delivers his long wodges of scattershot vocalese.
Although still an amazingly fluent rapper, he has lost the cartoon-like impishness that made his previous albums so scurrilous and entertaining. Here, the tone is either earnest — as on Evil Deeds, where he whines about his rough upbringing and pleads forgiveness for his sins — or else simply gross, as on Puke, which begins with the sound of the artist vomiting and the line, “You don’t know how sick you make me”. Mostly it is rather boring. The same old tired devices that have shown up on hundreds of rap records — gunshots, answerphone messages, children’s voices — are recycled with a minimum of variation, and by the end of the album it is hard to avoid the suspicion that, just eight years since he signed to Dre’s Aftermath label, Eminem may have reached the limits of what he has to offer.
In the rapidly changing context of the rap world, he is already a veteran. Any more albums like Encore and it really will be time for the curtain to descend
