Analysis: American Prayer

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by Abigail E. Myers

Lyrics courtesy of USA TODAY

This is the time to finish what you started.
This is no time to dream.
This is the room. We can turn off the dark tonight.
Maybe then we might see.
This is my American Prayer
American Prayer.
This is the land.
The land that keeps your feet from getting wet.
And this is the sky over our head.
Remember that what you see depends on where you stand.
And how you jump will tell you where you're gonna land.
This is my American Prayer.
American Prayer.

Chorus:
My oh my, let's not get tired.
Let's not kick at the darkness.
Let's make the light brighter.
These are the hands
What are we going to build with them?
This is a church you can't see.
Give me your tired and poor and huddled masses.
You know they're yearning to breathe free.


Harking back to the days of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, the members of U2 - most notably Bono - have been somewhat unabashedly pro-USA. All one has to do is remember the look of unadulterated glee on Larry Mullen Jnr's face while hanging out at Graceland during Rattle and Hum, or recall Bono brandishing the Stars-and-Stripes lining of his leather jacket during the halftime performance of ?Where The Streets Have No Name? at the 2002 Super Bowl (a quintessentially American event).

So many of U2's songs deal with the US that it almost seems to have become an auxiliary homeland for the band - "In God's Country," "New York," "Pride (In the Name of Love)," and others - that it should come as no surprise that two of the band's most recent songs also deal with the United States of America.

"The Hands that Built America," the theme from the film Gangs of New York, is a more ambitious and atmospheric meditation on the people who fought on New York?s streets two centuries ago. But, if "The Hands that Built America" might be compared to "MLK," "American Prayer" (U2's most recent America-themed tune) might analogously be compared to "Pride." "Hands" is quieter, and more historically based; "Prayer," on the other hand, is a more rousing call to action that urges us to focus on the challenges the world is facing. As Bono and others performed the song during the ?Heart of America? tour in late 2002, it possessed an even greater significance as a wake-up call to conscientious, concerned Americans. Through the tour, and particularly through this song, Bono and his companions hoped to make Americans aware of the magnitude of the AIDS crisis and other problems in Africa, and to rouse them to action towards those problems.

Upon further examination, ?Prayer? features a number of elements that link it to other U2 tunes, and also help to place the song very precisely in its chronological niche in the catalog. By looking at these elements first, we can then thread them together to get a better sense of where the group is coming from with the song, and what they are trying to communicate to their audience.

At the beginning of the song, one surprising lyric jumps out immediately: "This is no time to dream." This is coming from Bono - the same man who likes the phrase "Dream Out Loud" so much so that he used it in no fewer than three different songs over the course of eight years ("Acrobat," "Zooropa," and "Always"). Only time will tell, of course, if this is a significant and somewhat pessimistic shift in perspective for Bono, especially coming right at the opening of the song and in lieu if his recent trip to Africa.

Bono has long been fond of light/dark and blind/sight imagery (see: "Ultraviolet," "Until the End of the World," "Stay (Faraway So Close)" and others), so lines such as "We can turn off the dark tonight/Maybe then we might see" constitute a clever play on words that helps to articulate what the problem seems to be in the song: blindness, procrastination, a lack of urgency, a desperate need to "see." The conflict is repeated later in the chorus: "Let's not kick at the darkness/Let's make the light brighter."

Further interesting (and familiar) wording arrives later when we are told "This is the land/the land that keeps your feet from getting wet/And this is the sky over our head." It demonstrates closeness to the land and physical settings of things that are so prevalent in the UF/JT eras - and the closeness that is such a hallmark of American art and literature. Think of the sinewy landscapes of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"; think of the writings of John Steinbeck and Walt Whitman. This awareness of surroundings helps to give the song a sense of place - and a distinctly American point of reference.

More Americana is served up in the chorus, in a wrapper that will probably be more familiar to the average listener: Bono's allusion to the Emma Lazarus poem, "The New Colossus," which is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
My oh my, let's not get tired.
Let's not kick at the darkness.
Let's make the light brighter.
These are the hands
What are we going to build with them?
This is a church you can't see.
Give me your tired and poor and huddled masses.
You know they're yearning to breathe free.


It is a direct and pointed reference to the ?idea of America? "Give me your tired and poor and huddled masses/You know they're yearning to breathe free." This adds to the challenging, almost evangelical feel of the song by appealing to a sense of patriotism and history in the American audience in particular, and hopefully to a similar sense to others as well.

In a not-so-subtle self-reference, the chorus asks: "These are the hands/What are we going to build with them?" This is a direct reference to the "The Hands That Built America,? and might serve as another challenge embedded in the song: ours may not be the same "hands" that "built" this country, but they're the hands we have - and they could build, or re-build, something new.

One more allusion that might touch on American culture is the line "My oh my, let's not get tired." This sentiment is common in African-American spirituals and American hymns, particularly the spiritual "Keep Your Lamps" ("Children don't get weary/till your work is done"). Bono?s fondness for spirituals might have lended to this influence.

Departing from the American cultural studies analysis, it is also worth noting that ?Prayer? can be placed in the greater pantheon of U2's more religious songs, particularly the more-recent songs such as ?Grace? or ?When I Look at the World.? Those songs, and ?American Prayer,? contain themes of awareness of the world, a sense of wanting to be empowered, and an understandable feeling of awe when faced with the power and love of God. ?Prayer? contains the line "This
is the church you can't see," which recalls the burst-open, no-walls feelings of songs like "Where the Streets Have No Name" or the Grammy-winning anthem "Beautiful Day."

"American Prayer," exists as a clarion call to action - not only for Americans, but for all persons who have something to contribute to the fight for justice around the world. It has, of course, been a prayer of the band's for quite a long time, but perhaps never before have they tried so overtly to bring their whole audience to it. If the song finds a wider release, maybe their efforts will pay off.
 
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