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ONE love, blood, life
Bonolithic: Political Lyrics, or Lyrical Politics? U2 Blurs the Lines Between Art and Activism Like Never Before.
By Anastasia Pantsios
LATE IN U2’s CURRENT TOUR SET, frontman Bono urges the crowd to hold up its cell phones. This is not a unique gesture for arena rock acts these days; it’s a contemporary version of the old hold-up-your-cigarette-lighters moment. But Bono’s purpose isn’t the stock sing-the-power-ballad-with-us frisson of familiarity and band-worship. Once the arena’s become a constellation of tiny glowing monitors, a phone number flashes on the overhead video screens that had earlier been showing closeups of the band. It’s the number for ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History, a consortium of international anti-poverty groups, including Bono’s own DATA (Debt, Aid, Trade for Africa). Bono’s trying to enlist the band’s fans in the issue that’s been a passion of his for almost 20 years: ending world poverty, specifically on the African continent.
In Pittsburgh in October, following his plea, Bono dedicated the set-closing song “One” — an apolitical tune about the rigors and rewards of love with its reminder that “we got to carry each other” — to former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who was in attendance. He was part of a diverse crowd that ranged from the fortysomethings who were U2’s first fans when they made their initial inroads on college radio in the early ’80s, to a trio of young women in their early 20s, one there despite battling a terrible cold, crowded near the stage to take in their first U2 concert.
That this band should attract an ex-treasury secretary as opposed to, say, a gaggle of actors, is no surprise. When rumors surfaced in March that Bono might be named to head the World Bank, O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, not only didn’t scoff, he was quoted as saying that Bono “does a lot of good in this world of economic development. Most people know him as a rock star. He’s in a way a rock star of the development world, too. He understands the give-and-take of development. He’s a very pragmatic, effective and idealistic person.”
The job ultimately went to former Defense Department second-in-command Paul Wolfowitz, whose résumé on issues such as Third World debt is skimpier than Bono’s. Still, in October, Bono had lunch with President Bush (not their first meeting), something that made some purists howl in outrage. But Bono has justified such meetings by saying that you have to work with people you disagree with to accomplish certain goals. As he told Time in 2002, “I am not willing to give up on Republicans. They’re tough, but they’re willing to listen.”
If it all sounds a bit earnest, well, it’s just another year in the life of U2. The other members — drummer Larry Mullen Jr., guitarist The Edge and bassist Adam Clayton — are not as outspoken as their hobnobbing singer, but are known to support his goals. That’s likely why the band has survived for nearly three decades with no personnel changes, making music that continues to resonate with old fans and attract new fans 25 years after releasing its first record.
That 25-year period made the band eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year and predictably, they were inducted March 14, 2005, in their first year of eligibility. Most inductees are well past their artistic peak, and that was certainly true with U2’s mates in the Rock Hall’s 20th class: soul icons the O’Jays and Percy Sledge, blues artist Buddy Guy and rockers the Pretenders.
U2, on the other hand, has had a year befitting a band in its prime. It released a new, now multi-platinum album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, last November; embarked on its sold-out, yearlong world tour last spring; and even released a custom iPod, embracing emerging technology in a way that has mostly eluded the major record labels. As other bands their age have slipped into irrelevance, U2 built upon the enormous success of its 2000 All That You Can’t Leave Behind with its new album, showing how a band can grow up gracefully and passionately without growing old and tired.
Known for songs that explore the inner workings of the heart and matters of social justice — as well as for looking distracted and overly serious in grainy black-and- white photos — U2 has always been about more than music for its fans. Writer Kristine McKenna once began a review of the band’s 1988 album Rattle and Hum by asking, “Why is it that in every picture you see of this band they look like they’re about to deliver the Gettysburg Address?”
It would be a mistake to think that the band’s passion for human rights add up to humorlessness, although it’s a mistake that’s been frequently made. The group’s always had a sense of humor — heard in Bono’s perpetual wisecracks about being a pop star, acknowledging both his status and the absurdity of the level of respect it grants him — that’s perhaps the result of having its feet firmly planted in the soil of its native Dublin, Ireland, not one of the world’s glamour celebrity capitals. Yet even in the band’s mid-’90s “ironic” period, with its giant lemons and Bono’s jokey alter-ego “Mr. Mephisto,” one could sense the serious purpose lurking behind the twinkle, as he toyed with the concept of bringing out the inner Satan in the forthrightly Christian band.
In fact, U2 has forged a stance and an attitude that has always stood singularly apart from the prevailing mood of the times, dovetailing with that mood only by accident, as it did when the events of 9/11 suddenly lent resonance to the leading tracks from All That You Can’t Leave Behind, “Beautiful Day,” “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” “Walk On” — songs about standing strong in the midst of confusion and doubt. As other acts dropped even remotely unsettling songs from their sets, U2 used the remainder of its Elevation tour to acknowledge the dramatically changed mood of the world through such gestures as scrolling the names of some of the 9/11 victims during “One” and Bono accepting and displaying the American flags proffered by fans in place of the Irish flags that have become standard audience accoutrements. It seems corny now — or shrewedly manipulative, if you’re cynical — but at the time, it felt right.
But mostly the band’s maintained a respectful distance from trends in both music and cultural attitudes, something that’s likely contributed to its ability to sail relatively unscathed through shifting music eras. It emerged in the midst of punk rock, inspired as teenagers by that genre’s emphasis on passion over professionalism, but lacking its corrosive scorn. It soared to a commercial peak with 1987’s The Joshua Tree, singing about life and death and faith and salvation when the airwaves were full of party metal bands and feel-good dance music. It forged through the ’90s grunge era as (mostly) married family men now in their 30s, with little affinity for the willful infantalism and the I-hate-myself-and-I’m-screwed-up-because-my-parents-were-divorced wallowing that was that era’s hallmark. The 1997 CD Pop sounded to some listeners like a concession to the late-’90s electronica hype, but it was more an adaptation of some of the genre’s sounds, with songs that even more deeply explored the meaning of faith in the modern world. And of course, they came roaring back with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, an album that enjoyed unexpected levels of radio airplay and sales.
With How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the band made an album that sonically consolidates its entire career, even quoting some of its signature riffs and sonic textures. And while Bono’s activism has become more prominent, reflecting a world grown more chaotic and uneasy, the band’s music had turned inward, reflecting sea changes in the members’ lives. It’s most striking on “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” a tribute to Bono’s up-and-down but ultimately devoted relationship with his father, who died in 2001 while the band was in the midst of it Elevation tour.
That song forms a mid-set turning point on the current tour. As the video screens show images of a lone man strolling, Bono lifts his signature tinted glasses in tribute to his father, who perpetually asked him to remove them. All the elements came together to make a powerful statement, visual, lyrical and musical, about the difficulty of making a connection with someone with whom you’re inextricably linked.
Though many of the fans posting on the band’s message boards feel the band’s current shows lack the gripping fervor of the Elevation tour, the band’s still showing its savvy in drawing on its entire catalogue to craft an entertaining evening that makes strong emotional and political points. It opened in Pittsburgh with “City of Blinding Lights” from its latest disc, with Bono appearing in the middle of the crowd at the point of the so-called “ellipse,” an enclosure in which fans chosen by lottery from those holding floor tickets can be close to the band in almost a club-within-an-arena setting. Early ’80s tunes like “I Will Follow” and “Electric Co.” are followed by hits both recent (“Beautiful Day”) and older (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”).
It’s right after “Sometimes You Can’t Make It...” that the evening takes a turn toward the political. In “Bullet the Blue Sky” — the Joshua Tree tune addressing the effect of war on civilians that unfortunately is just as relevant today as in 1987 — Bono’s outro rap is replaced with a nerve-jangling instrumental, featuring Edge’s unsettling guitar. “Miss Sarajevo,” recorded as a duet with Luciano Pavarotti, features Bono singing both vocal parts with startling effectiveness, given that he’s never been known as a supremely technical singer. (At one show, he was reported to have joked, “Pavarotti’s not here, but I’ve been putting on a few pounds.”) “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, the group’s tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., finds a place in this part of the set as well, followed by the most electrifying tune on Joshua Tree, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and, finally, “One.”
A mixed bag of encores closes the evening: an acoustic “The First Time”; “Stuck in a Moment”; “With or Without You”; and “Yahweh” from the new disc, a song that seems to sum up U2 with its complicated approach to Christianity. Its poetic yet direct expression of faith, humility, yearning and celebration weaves together the different layers of its beliefs: “Yahweh, Yahweh / Always pain before a child is born / Yahweh, Yahweh / Still I’m waiting for the dawn … The sun is coming up / The sun is coming up on the ocean / This love is like a drop in the ocean / This love is like a drop in the ocean … Take this city / If it be your will / What no man can own, no man can take/ Take this heart / Take this heart / Take this heart /And make it break.”
U2 plays a sold-out concert at Quicken Loans Arena, One Center Court, Saturday, Dec. 10 at 7:30 p.m., with Institute opening.
--Free Times
By Anastasia Pantsios
LATE IN U2’s CURRENT TOUR SET, frontman Bono urges the crowd to hold up its cell phones. This is not a unique gesture for arena rock acts these days; it’s a contemporary version of the old hold-up-your-cigarette-lighters moment. But Bono’s purpose isn’t the stock sing-the-power-ballad-with-us frisson of familiarity and band-worship. Once the arena’s become a constellation of tiny glowing monitors, a phone number flashes on the overhead video screens that had earlier been showing closeups of the band. It’s the number for ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History, a consortium of international anti-poverty groups, including Bono’s own DATA (Debt, Aid, Trade for Africa). Bono’s trying to enlist the band’s fans in the issue that’s been a passion of his for almost 20 years: ending world poverty, specifically on the African continent.
In Pittsburgh in October, following his plea, Bono dedicated the set-closing song “One” — an apolitical tune about the rigors and rewards of love with its reminder that “we got to carry each other” — to former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who was in attendance. He was part of a diverse crowd that ranged from the fortysomethings who were U2’s first fans when they made their initial inroads on college radio in the early ’80s, to a trio of young women in their early 20s, one there despite battling a terrible cold, crowded near the stage to take in their first U2 concert.
That this band should attract an ex-treasury secretary as opposed to, say, a gaggle of actors, is no surprise. When rumors surfaced in March that Bono might be named to head the World Bank, O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, not only didn’t scoff, he was quoted as saying that Bono “does a lot of good in this world of economic development. Most people know him as a rock star. He’s in a way a rock star of the development world, too. He understands the give-and-take of development. He’s a very pragmatic, effective and idealistic person.”
The job ultimately went to former Defense Department second-in-command Paul Wolfowitz, whose résumé on issues such as Third World debt is skimpier than Bono’s. Still, in October, Bono had lunch with President Bush (not their first meeting), something that made some purists howl in outrage. But Bono has justified such meetings by saying that you have to work with people you disagree with to accomplish certain goals. As he told Time in 2002, “I am not willing to give up on Republicans. They’re tough, but they’re willing to listen.”
If it all sounds a bit earnest, well, it’s just another year in the life of U2. The other members — drummer Larry Mullen Jr., guitarist The Edge and bassist Adam Clayton — are not as outspoken as their hobnobbing singer, but are known to support his goals. That’s likely why the band has survived for nearly three decades with no personnel changes, making music that continues to resonate with old fans and attract new fans 25 years after releasing its first record.
That 25-year period made the band eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year and predictably, they were inducted March 14, 2005, in their first year of eligibility. Most inductees are well past their artistic peak, and that was certainly true with U2’s mates in the Rock Hall’s 20th class: soul icons the O’Jays and Percy Sledge, blues artist Buddy Guy and rockers the Pretenders.
U2, on the other hand, has had a year befitting a band in its prime. It released a new, now multi-platinum album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, last November; embarked on its sold-out, yearlong world tour last spring; and even released a custom iPod, embracing emerging technology in a way that has mostly eluded the major record labels. As other bands their age have slipped into irrelevance, U2 built upon the enormous success of its 2000 All That You Can’t Leave Behind with its new album, showing how a band can grow up gracefully and passionately without growing old and tired.
Known for songs that explore the inner workings of the heart and matters of social justice — as well as for looking distracted and overly serious in grainy black-and- white photos — U2 has always been about more than music for its fans. Writer Kristine McKenna once began a review of the band’s 1988 album Rattle and Hum by asking, “Why is it that in every picture you see of this band they look like they’re about to deliver the Gettysburg Address?”
It would be a mistake to think that the band’s passion for human rights add up to humorlessness, although it’s a mistake that’s been frequently made. The group’s always had a sense of humor — heard in Bono’s perpetual wisecracks about being a pop star, acknowledging both his status and the absurdity of the level of respect it grants him — that’s perhaps the result of having its feet firmly planted in the soil of its native Dublin, Ireland, not one of the world’s glamour celebrity capitals. Yet even in the band’s mid-’90s “ironic” period, with its giant lemons and Bono’s jokey alter-ego “Mr. Mephisto,” one could sense the serious purpose lurking behind the twinkle, as he toyed with the concept of bringing out the inner Satan in the forthrightly Christian band.
In fact, U2 has forged a stance and an attitude that has always stood singularly apart from the prevailing mood of the times, dovetailing with that mood only by accident, as it did when the events of 9/11 suddenly lent resonance to the leading tracks from All That You Can’t Leave Behind, “Beautiful Day,” “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” “Walk On” — songs about standing strong in the midst of confusion and doubt. As other acts dropped even remotely unsettling songs from their sets, U2 used the remainder of its Elevation tour to acknowledge the dramatically changed mood of the world through such gestures as scrolling the names of some of the 9/11 victims during “One” and Bono accepting and displaying the American flags proffered by fans in place of the Irish flags that have become standard audience accoutrements. It seems corny now — or shrewedly manipulative, if you’re cynical — but at the time, it felt right.
But mostly the band’s maintained a respectful distance from trends in both music and cultural attitudes, something that’s likely contributed to its ability to sail relatively unscathed through shifting music eras. It emerged in the midst of punk rock, inspired as teenagers by that genre’s emphasis on passion over professionalism, but lacking its corrosive scorn. It soared to a commercial peak with 1987’s The Joshua Tree, singing about life and death and faith and salvation when the airwaves were full of party metal bands and feel-good dance music. It forged through the ’90s grunge era as (mostly) married family men now in their 30s, with little affinity for the willful infantalism and the I-hate-myself-and-I’m-screwed-up-because-my-parents-were-divorced wallowing that was that era’s hallmark. The 1997 CD Pop sounded to some listeners like a concession to the late-’90s electronica hype, but it was more an adaptation of some of the genre’s sounds, with songs that even more deeply explored the meaning of faith in the modern world. And of course, they came roaring back with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, an album that enjoyed unexpected levels of radio airplay and sales.
With How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the band made an album that sonically consolidates its entire career, even quoting some of its signature riffs and sonic textures. And while Bono’s activism has become more prominent, reflecting a world grown more chaotic and uneasy, the band’s music had turned inward, reflecting sea changes in the members’ lives. It’s most striking on “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” a tribute to Bono’s up-and-down but ultimately devoted relationship with his father, who died in 2001 while the band was in the midst of it Elevation tour.
That song forms a mid-set turning point on the current tour. As the video screens show images of a lone man strolling, Bono lifts his signature tinted glasses in tribute to his father, who perpetually asked him to remove them. All the elements came together to make a powerful statement, visual, lyrical and musical, about the difficulty of making a connection with someone with whom you’re inextricably linked.
Though many of the fans posting on the band’s message boards feel the band’s current shows lack the gripping fervor of the Elevation tour, the band’s still showing its savvy in drawing on its entire catalogue to craft an entertaining evening that makes strong emotional and political points. It opened in Pittsburgh with “City of Blinding Lights” from its latest disc, with Bono appearing in the middle of the crowd at the point of the so-called “ellipse,” an enclosure in which fans chosen by lottery from those holding floor tickets can be close to the band in almost a club-within-an-arena setting. Early ’80s tunes like “I Will Follow” and “Electric Co.” are followed by hits both recent (“Beautiful Day”) and older (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”).
It’s right after “Sometimes You Can’t Make It...” that the evening takes a turn toward the political. In “Bullet the Blue Sky” — the Joshua Tree tune addressing the effect of war on civilians that unfortunately is just as relevant today as in 1987 — Bono’s outro rap is replaced with a nerve-jangling instrumental, featuring Edge’s unsettling guitar. “Miss Sarajevo,” recorded as a duet with Luciano Pavarotti, features Bono singing both vocal parts with startling effectiveness, given that he’s never been known as a supremely technical singer. (At one show, he was reported to have joked, “Pavarotti’s not here, but I’ve been putting on a few pounds.”) “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, the group’s tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., finds a place in this part of the set as well, followed by the most electrifying tune on Joshua Tree, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and, finally, “One.”
A mixed bag of encores closes the evening: an acoustic “The First Time”; “Stuck in a Moment”; “With or Without You”; and “Yahweh” from the new disc, a song that seems to sum up U2 with its complicated approach to Christianity. Its poetic yet direct expression of faith, humility, yearning and celebration weaves together the different layers of its beliefs: “Yahweh, Yahweh / Always pain before a child is born / Yahweh, Yahweh / Still I’m waiting for the dawn … The sun is coming up / The sun is coming up on the ocean / This love is like a drop in the ocean / This love is like a drop in the ocean … Take this city / If it be your will / What no man can own, no man can take/ Take this heart / Take this heart / Take this heart /And make it break.”
U2 plays a sold-out concert at Quicken Loans Arena, One Center Court, Saturday, Dec. 10 at 7:30 p.m., with Institute opening.
--Free Times
