salomeU2000
The Fly
Analysis : Images in U2 : Was That A Deer?!
[SIMG]http://bonovox.interference.com/analysis/onebuffalothumb.jpg[/SIMG]
by Kimberly "hippy" Egolf
May 2003
First of all, thank you to everyone who responded and read my last column! Your comments and interactions with the material were invaluable. Please keep sharing your thoughts!
*****
Animal imagery can be powerful, it can be fun; it can be completely unrelated to a song. But there's no doubt that U2 loves animals. They frequently feature them in videos and make references to them in songs.
The most recent animal that's cropped up in a song is that ever-elusive deer in the video for "Electrical Storm." That single image was the talk of Interference for weeks! Everyone wanted to know what was going on and why there was a random deer running through an otherwise serious video. (Because we all know that Larry's love affair with a mermaid is completely serious!)
But then, ?Electrical Storm?s? director Anton Corbijn, enlightened us with his video commentary on the Best ofDVD. He says: "The deer I wanted in there... It was innocence and sexuality and also foreboding, because after that is gets quite dark." So there you go, straight from the horse's mouth...
Speaking of horses, Bono must have had them on the mind in the early '90s, because Achtung Baby and Zooropa contain no less than three separate songs with references to these beautiful four-legged creatures.
"Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?" is the fifth track on Achtung Baby; it is a dark song about lost love and regret. The singer sings about his empty heart, which has been left behind by his love. The chorus of the song is steeped in irony. The singer, somewhat bitterly, recalls the words his lover has left him with: "Who's gonna ride your wild horses?" The lover has a "gypsy heart" that needs to roam, but it hurts people, namely the singer, in the process. But the simple fact is that no one can ride your wild horses except you, even if that hurts the ones you love and the ones who love you.
The irony of "Wild Horses" has hardened into bitterness and rejection by the beginning of "So Cruel." The singer wrestles with the conflicting (at least in this song) emotions of love and lust. He doesn't quite know into which of those categories his emotion fits. The song culminates with the lines "Between the horses of love and lust/ we are trampled underfoot." In this case, the horses (maybe those "wild horses" the lover wanted so much to ride) are a destructive force, trampling emotions underfoot. While they have been a source of empowerment and exploration, even at the expense of the singer, in ?Wild Horses,? in "So Cruel" they end up destroying and maiming. The lovers have become decidedly more hostile.
(An interesting side note that might belong with this song: "horse" is slang for heroin. Reference is made many times in "So Cruel" to drugs; maybe this fits in with that? I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.)
Possibly feeling that horses and bitterness were tied together often enough on Achtung Baby, Bono found a different use for them on Zooropa. For "Dirty Day" Bono lifts a Charles Bukowski line almost word for word: "The days run away like horses over the hill." (Bukowski's line is "The days run away like wild horses over the hill.")
Bukowski (whose poetical alter-ego is named Hank Chinaski, which Bono mentions in the song) is known for his gritty, dirty poetry about booze, sex, and drugs. It's almost fitting that this song, coming on a record saturated by everything that was the ZooTV tour, would lift a line from the booziest, grittiest poet of the past half-century. But even though saturated with ZooTV, which was a lesson in extreme irony, the song has a less pessimistic tone than the songs on Achtung Baby. I think Bono owes a lot to "Hank" in this song, perhaps that is why it's dedicated to him. Even though Bukowski wrote about the "dirtiest" topics of life (sex, booze, rejection), he always found the beauty in those things; he always discovered one of life's mysteries in those everyday, simple events. Perhaps this is what the singer is trying to accomplish. He's trying to see the good even in a "Dirty Day." The end of the song is a reminder that these "dirty days" run away like horses over the hill: they go away, they get better, and in the end what matters is that you've seen the beauty, even in the dirty days.
Horses have played a big part in U2's lyrics, but perhaps no animal is more connected with U2 than the buffalo. Though never mentioned in song, the buffalo has become somewhat of a visual emblem for the band. As most U2 fans know, there were three separate videos made for the song "One." Each video was wildly different than the others. One of these (my own personal favorite), features hazy images of buffalo running in slow motion interspersed with images of flowers slowly losing their color as the word "one" flashes across the screen in different languages. Mark Pellington, a visual designer for the ZooTV tour, created this video based on David Wojnarowicz's now famous image of buffalo tumbling over a cliff.
The series of photographs from which this photograph was taken was part of Wojnarowicz's meditation on life and death. His images are black and white in order to more fully explore the dichotomy between the two states. Pellington used this concept in the video, keeping the colors plain and the images simple. He says that he wanted those images to last for a long time so that whoever was watching could focus on the emotion of the song. He calls the video "a piece of wallpaper that was supposed to be supporting" the song.
But even this simple video became a powerful statement. While the song has many interpretations, Bono often says that it was written about a conversation between a son telling his father he has AIDS. This interpretation fits with Wojnarowicz's image. The photographer himself was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1992. Thus, the image became not only about life and death, but also about the ravaging effects of the AIDS virus. The buffalo tumbling over a cliff became a testament to the devastation that this virus was causing throughout the world.
(Image from U2.com)
Unfortunately, this disease is still a problem in the world. "One" has been described as "a song that would never stop growing." And our efforts to combat this disease must also never stop growing. Bono has been very vocal about his support for this issue. Please, if you feel that this issue is important, get involved in any way possible.
Whether Bono uses them in his lyrics or whether the animals appear in the visual images accompanying the songs, U2 has had a special relationship with animals. I've only explored a few here, but I encourage you to think more about how U2 uses animals in their music.
Thank you to Carrie and Liza for recommending this topic! And thank you to everyone who contributed to that thread. See you next month!
[SIMG]http://bonovox.interference.com/analysis/onebuffalothumb.jpg[/SIMG]
by Kimberly "hippy" Egolf
May 2003
First of all, thank you to everyone who responded and read my last column! Your comments and interactions with the material were invaluable. Please keep sharing your thoughts!
*****
Animal imagery can be powerful, it can be fun; it can be completely unrelated to a song. But there's no doubt that U2 loves animals. They frequently feature them in videos and make references to them in songs.
The most recent animal that's cropped up in a song is that ever-elusive deer in the video for "Electrical Storm." That single image was the talk of Interference for weeks! Everyone wanted to know what was going on and why there was a random deer running through an otherwise serious video. (Because we all know that Larry's love affair with a mermaid is completely serious!)
But then, ?Electrical Storm?s? director Anton Corbijn, enlightened us with his video commentary on the Best ofDVD. He says: "The deer I wanted in there... It was innocence and sexuality and also foreboding, because after that is gets quite dark." So there you go, straight from the horse's mouth...
Speaking of horses, Bono must have had them on the mind in the early '90s, because Achtung Baby and Zooropa contain no less than three separate songs with references to these beautiful four-legged creatures.
"Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?" is the fifth track on Achtung Baby; it is a dark song about lost love and regret. The singer sings about his empty heart, which has been left behind by his love. The chorus of the song is steeped in irony. The singer, somewhat bitterly, recalls the words his lover has left him with: "Who's gonna ride your wild horses?" The lover has a "gypsy heart" that needs to roam, but it hurts people, namely the singer, in the process. But the simple fact is that no one can ride your wild horses except you, even if that hurts the ones you love and the ones who love you.
The irony of "Wild Horses" has hardened into bitterness and rejection by the beginning of "So Cruel." The singer wrestles with the conflicting (at least in this song) emotions of love and lust. He doesn't quite know into which of those categories his emotion fits. The song culminates with the lines "Between the horses of love and lust/ we are trampled underfoot." In this case, the horses (maybe those "wild horses" the lover wanted so much to ride) are a destructive force, trampling emotions underfoot. While they have been a source of empowerment and exploration, even at the expense of the singer, in ?Wild Horses,? in "So Cruel" they end up destroying and maiming. The lovers have become decidedly more hostile.
(An interesting side note that might belong with this song: "horse" is slang for heroin. Reference is made many times in "So Cruel" to drugs; maybe this fits in with that? I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.)
Possibly feeling that horses and bitterness were tied together often enough on Achtung Baby, Bono found a different use for them on Zooropa. For "Dirty Day" Bono lifts a Charles Bukowski line almost word for word: "The days run away like horses over the hill." (Bukowski's line is "The days run away like wild horses over the hill.")
Bukowski (whose poetical alter-ego is named Hank Chinaski, which Bono mentions in the song) is known for his gritty, dirty poetry about booze, sex, and drugs. It's almost fitting that this song, coming on a record saturated by everything that was the ZooTV tour, would lift a line from the booziest, grittiest poet of the past half-century. But even though saturated with ZooTV, which was a lesson in extreme irony, the song has a less pessimistic tone than the songs on Achtung Baby. I think Bono owes a lot to "Hank" in this song, perhaps that is why it's dedicated to him. Even though Bukowski wrote about the "dirtiest" topics of life (sex, booze, rejection), he always found the beauty in those things; he always discovered one of life's mysteries in those everyday, simple events. Perhaps this is what the singer is trying to accomplish. He's trying to see the good even in a "Dirty Day." The end of the song is a reminder that these "dirty days" run away like horses over the hill: they go away, they get better, and in the end what matters is that you've seen the beauty, even in the dirty days.
Horses have played a big part in U2's lyrics, but perhaps no animal is more connected with U2 than the buffalo. Though never mentioned in song, the buffalo has become somewhat of a visual emblem for the band. As most U2 fans know, there were three separate videos made for the song "One." Each video was wildly different than the others. One of these (my own personal favorite), features hazy images of buffalo running in slow motion interspersed with images of flowers slowly losing their color as the word "one" flashes across the screen in different languages. Mark Pellington, a visual designer for the ZooTV tour, created this video based on David Wojnarowicz's now famous image of buffalo tumbling over a cliff.
The series of photographs from which this photograph was taken was part of Wojnarowicz's meditation on life and death. His images are black and white in order to more fully explore the dichotomy between the two states. Pellington used this concept in the video, keeping the colors plain and the images simple. He says that he wanted those images to last for a long time so that whoever was watching could focus on the emotion of the song. He calls the video "a piece of wallpaper that was supposed to be supporting" the song.
But even this simple video became a powerful statement. While the song has many interpretations, Bono often says that it was written about a conversation between a son telling his father he has AIDS. This interpretation fits with Wojnarowicz's image. The photographer himself was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1992. Thus, the image became not only about life and death, but also about the ravaging effects of the AIDS virus. The buffalo tumbling over a cliff became a testament to the devastation that this virus was causing throughout the world.
(Image from U2.com)
Unfortunately, this disease is still a problem in the world. "One" has been described as "a song that would never stop growing." And our efforts to combat this disease must also never stop growing. Bono has been very vocal about his support for this issue. Please, if you feel that this issue is important, get involved in any way possible.
Whether Bono uses them in his lyrics or whether the animals appear in the visual images accompanying the songs, U2 has had a special relationship with animals. I've only explored a few here, but I encourage you to think more about how U2 uses animals in their music.
Thank you to Carrie and Liza for recommending this topic! And thank you to everyone who contributed to that thread. See you next month!
.
great job!!
