shaun vox
New Yorker
just found this, any one seen this before?
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/26/144848.php
U2 has enjoyed a long and prolific career. Their success is due in large part to their record of continually pushing their music into new areas of style, technique, and image. Few groups today can match them in terms of their constant appeal, influence, and inventiveness. They certainly deserve their upcoming induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It is unfortunate that the event must coincide with what promises to be a very mediocre follow-up to their very mediocre previous album.
What the band lacked in their early years they made up for in enthusiasm and zeal, and they soon acquired a reputation for their exciting shows. Their popularity steadily increased throughout the 80s, and they progressed from playing small shows to huge stadium venues. Throughout this decade, their music retained an intimate, personal, and sincere quality, though it became increasingly difficult to maintain this in huge concert settings. The band was faced with the inherent contradiction of trying to be earnest and sincere rock & roll mega-stars. Instead of trying to disguise this aspect of their careers, they decided to take advantage of it and expose the artificiality of pop music.
With the Zoo TV tour, and the two albums it encompassed (Achtung Baby and Zooropa), U2 occupied themselves with commenting on the absurdities of a postmodern world. In their stadium shows, U2 projected images of themselves on enormous TVs. Bono further blurred the lines between real and simulation by getting behind a video camera and taping members of the audience, and by adopting the separate stage personas of Mr. Macphisto and the Fly. This is the stuff of postmodernist performance art, and U2 was doing it nightly, before thousands of fans. The band’s Popmart tour was an extension of these stage games—it merely replaced the artificiality of television with consumerism. The band even kicked off their tour at a K-Mart.
The postmodern themes explored in U2's tours also appear repeatedly in their music from the same period in their career. In "Babyface," the speaker is in love with a woman on his television screen. "The Playboy Mansion" and "If God Will Send His Angels" address the problem of maintaining one's spirituality in an artificial world. The whole time that U2 was singing about our postmodern world, they embodied it on stage, simultaneously reveling in it and criticizing it. It is this tongue-in-cheek approach that redeemed their pop tunes. Beneath the bubble-gum exterior beat a human heart.
With the release of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 abandoned this approach, trying to revert to a more traditional rock band. This time around, they had the veneer of an organic rock band, but their music was pure pop fluff at the core. The album sounds like U2 Lite—it continues some of the themes of the band’s music, but it lacks the subtlety of their other music.
Bono has commented in the past that they like to sing about God and women, and that they sometimes confuse the two. In the past, such songs could be overlooked upon a first listen, such as in “Mysterious Ways.” It could be a song about the Holy Spirit (considered by some to be the motherly figure in the Trinity) or an earthly woman—the meaning is somewhat ambiguous. Compare this with “Grace,” a song that treats the same theme with little or no subtlety: “Grace/It's a name for a girl/It's also a thought that/Changed the world.” The band’s last album fared no better musically than it did lyrically. The band stripped away the layers of irony and stylistic playfulness that marked their previous three albums, but were unable to reclaim the sincerity and honesty of their early years. All that was left was a collection of simple pop tunes executed with little originality and no irony.
Their new album promises to be little better. Only one single has been released so far, but “Vertigo” appears to be continuing the pattern of pop tunes from a band trying to remake themselves into something they never were. This newest song contains a few moments that truly hearken back to their early days, but it is a pure pop hit at heart. The signs point to another disappointing album. I hope Bono & Co. can prove me wrong.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/26/144848.php
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/26/144848.php
U2 has enjoyed a long and prolific career. Their success is due in large part to their record of continually pushing their music into new areas of style, technique, and image. Few groups today can match them in terms of their constant appeal, influence, and inventiveness. They certainly deserve their upcoming induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It is unfortunate that the event must coincide with what promises to be a very mediocre follow-up to their very mediocre previous album.
What the band lacked in their early years they made up for in enthusiasm and zeal, and they soon acquired a reputation for their exciting shows. Their popularity steadily increased throughout the 80s, and they progressed from playing small shows to huge stadium venues. Throughout this decade, their music retained an intimate, personal, and sincere quality, though it became increasingly difficult to maintain this in huge concert settings. The band was faced with the inherent contradiction of trying to be earnest and sincere rock & roll mega-stars. Instead of trying to disguise this aspect of their careers, they decided to take advantage of it and expose the artificiality of pop music.
With the Zoo TV tour, and the two albums it encompassed (Achtung Baby and Zooropa), U2 occupied themselves with commenting on the absurdities of a postmodern world. In their stadium shows, U2 projected images of themselves on enormous TVs. Bono further blurred the lines between real and simulation by getting behind a video camera and taping members of the audience, and by adopting the separate stage personas of Mr. Macphisto and the Fly. This is the stuff of postmodernist performance art, and U2 was doing it nightly, before thousands of fans. The band’s Popmart tour was an extension of these stage games—it merely replaced the artificiality of television with consumerism. The band even kicked off their tour at a K-Mart.
The postmodern themes explored in U2's tours also appear repeatedly in their music from the same period in their career. In "Babyface," the speaker is in love with a woman on his television screen. "The Playboy Mansion" and "If God Will Send His Angels" address the problem of maintaining one's spirituality in an artificial world. The whole time that U2 was singing about our postmodern world, they embodied it on stage, simultaneously reveling in it and criticizing it. It is this tongue-in-cheek approach that redeemed their pop tunes. Beneath the bubble-gum exterior beat a human heart.
With the release of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 abandoned this approach, trying to revert to a more traditional rock band. This time around, they had the veneer of an organic rock band, but their music was pure pop fluff at the core. The album sounds like U2 Lite—it continues some of the themes of the band’s music, but it lacks the subtlety of their other music.
Bono has commented in the past that they like to sing about God and women, and that they sometimes confuse the two. In the past, such songs could be overlooked upon a first listen, such as in “Mysterious Ways.” It could be a song about the Holy Spirit (considered by some to be the motherly figure in the Trinity) or an earthly woman—the meaning is somewhat ambiguous. Compare this with “Grace,” a song that treats the same theme with little or no subtlety: “Grace/It's a name for a girl/It's also a thought that/Changed the world.” The band’s last album fared no better musically than it did lyrically. The band stripped away the layers of irony and stylistic playfulness that marked their previous three albums, but were unable to reclaim the sincerity and honesty of their early years. All that was left was a collection of simple pop tunes executed with little originality and no irony.
Their new album promises to be little better. Only one single has been released so far, but “Vertigo” appears to be continuing the pattern of pop tunes from a band trying to remake themselves into something they never were. This newest song contains a few moments that truly hearken back to their early days, but it is a pure pop hit at heart. The signs point to another disappointing album. I hope Bono & Co. can prove me wrong.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/26/144848.php
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