Michael Griffiths
Rock n' Roll Doggie
I particularly like what it says about Joshua Tree fans, towards the end (in the parenthesis) - quite true, and I am one!
Article by Matt P.
October 8, 2002
I saw Best Buy had DVDs of the U2 concert film Rattle and Hum on sale for a good price this week, so I went out and picked one up.
I came late, for someone of my age, to U2. I missed out on the Joshua Tree boat and wouldn't have come onboard with the Rattle and Hum album had not my longstanding secret crush--the original porn monkey, now that I think of it--been a huge fan of the band. (Kenan will no doubt seize on the preceding as an example of the ravages of peer pressure most foul.) The R&H album ended up being one of the first two CDs I owned, the other being Europe's The Final Countdown. (Misspent youth, indeed.)
I think the fact that I remain a fan of the band--'though it must be said my devotion has faded like the R&H T-shirt in which I spent the last couple years of the 80s--rests heavily on my being introduced to U2 through that oft-maligned album. The Bono--and U2 is, and always has been, all about Bono--of Rattle and Hum is overstated and overblown, practically camp, in his sincerity. Rewatching the movie for the first time in the better part of a decade, I see Bono as a honeycomb oozing sticky-sweetness of goodwill and respect-for-influences and passion-for-the-people and (a high crime in this age) earnestness. Bono here is a cartoon rockstar who wants us to know he's in touch with his roots, man.
I remember reading at the time of the film and album?s release that critics were none too pleased with the work; I particularly recall one of Rolling Stone?s critics calling Rattle and Hum "bombastic". I didn't get it then; I do now: the work just tries too hard to humanize the rockstars, makes too much effort to force the band into the pantheon. I mean, Jebus, the movie and album both open with Bono proclaiming vengeance on Charles Manson on behalf of The friggin' Beatles. I thought that was cool when I was a kiddlie; I now see it as the posturing (but oh-so-sincere posturing) that it is.
So why on earth would such an overdone piece of work have been a perfect intro to U2 for someone my age? Partly because a young person before the Decade of Irony was still able to take all that hyper-sincerity at face value; it may be hard to remember now, but back then fifteen-year-olds still had fresh faces and really, truly wanted to Save the Planet. Between the more-or-less end of Reagan and the onset of Desert Storm, our The Day After nightmares started fading when we realized the man with the button hadn't got us blown to bits after all and we were able to enjoy a few years of, basically, hope for the future. (Silly us.) Bono's antics seemed genuine to us youngsters in that brief spring when the Berlin Wall would fall and Mandela would, amazingly, be freed.
All that's the lesser reason Rattle and Hum made the perfect ingress into U2 fandom, though. The greater reason is that the broad gestures and primacy of persona so evident in R&H set us up for the U2 of the 90s. Having known Bono from first sight as someone who would work his talented arse off to project an image, having at least unconsciously realized that "Bono" is more a performative act on Paul Hewson's part than a guy who adopted a silly stage name, we were prepared for the wild tonal and imagistic shifts the band would kick around over the next decade. When Bono showed up a couple years later clad in black leather and wrap-around shades, older fans started peeling off while the rest of us started realizing U2's not just a band that makes great music, it's a band that makes great music with full awareness of current cultural context. By the time of Pop, we who were suckled on Rattle and Hum cheered at the band's glittering admission of the nature of their overarching project while people who came in with The Unforgettable Fire or earlier finally abandoned ship.
(The Joshua Tree fans mostly hung around and grumbled and made a nuisance of themselves yelling, "Play the old shit!" at PopMart concerts.)
So, yeah. Rattle and Hum may be U2's first major work identifying them as a postmodern pop band, concerned more with manipulation of surface than development of content. That the songs and performances in the film/album work are pretty well-crafted and well-performed is the wink that makes it all work--there really is substance under there, it's just secondary.
Now, having written all that, I just got to the point in the movie where Bono delivers his "Fuck the revolution!" monologue during "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." I watch that and see the overblown, hyper-sincere performative Bono, but I also see the surfaces cracking here and there in that monlogue, see Paul Hewson's genuine sincerity and heartbreak and concern break through. Bono takes the stage back from himself by switching to a--yes--bombastic reprise of the chorus, and I think maybe that break between spoken-word and singing is the occassional genius of U2 captured on celluloid.
Article by Matt P.
October 8, 2002
I saw Best Buy had DVDs of the U2 concert film Rattle and Hum on sale for a good price this week, so I went out and picked one up.
I came late, for someone of my age, to U2. I missed out on the Joshua Tree boat and wouldn't have come onboard with the Rattle and Hum album had not my longstanding secret crush--the original porn monkey, now that I think of it--been a huge fan of the band. (Kenan will no doubt seize on the preceding as an example of the ravages of peer pressure most foul.) The R&H album ended up being one of the first two CDs I owned, the other being Europe's The Final Countdown. (Misspent youth, indeed.)
I think the fact that I remain a fan of the band--'though it must be said my devotion has faded like the R&H T-shirt in which I spent the last couple years of the 80s--rests heavily on my being introduced to U2 through that oft-maligned album. The Bono--and U2 is, and always has been, all about Bono--of Rattle and Hum is overstated and overblown, practically camp, in his sincerity. Rewatching the movie for the first time in the better part of a decade, I see Bono as a honeycomb oozing sticky-sweetness of goodwill and respect-for-influences and passion-for-the-people and (a high crime in this age) earnestness. Bono here is a cartoon rockstar who wants us to know he's in touch with his roots, man.
I remember reading at the time of the film and album?s release that critics were none too pleased with the work; I particularly recall one of Rolling Stone?s critics calling Rattle and Hum "bombastic". I didn't get it then; I do now: the work just tries too hard to humanize the rockstars, makes too much effort to force the band into the pantheon. I mean, Jebus, the movie and album both open with Bono proclaiming vengeance on Charles Manson on behalf of The friggin' Beatles. I thought that was cool when I was a kiddlie; I now see it as the posturing (but oh-so-sincere posturing) that it is.
So why on earth would such an overdone piece of work have been a perfect intro to U2 for someone my age? Partly because a young person before the Decade of Irony was still able to take all that hyper-sincerity at face value; it may be hard to remember now, but back then fifteen-year-olds still had fresh faces and really, truly wanted to Save the Planet. Between the more-or-less end of Reagan and the onset of Desert Storm, our The Day After nightmares started fading when we realized the man with the button hadn't got us blown to bits after all and we were able to enjoy a few years of, basically, hope for the future. (Silly us.) Bono's antics seemed genuine to us youngsters in that brief spring when the Berlin Wall would fall and Mandela would, amazingly, be freed.
All that's the lesser reason Rattle and Hum made the perfect ingress into U2 fandom, though. The greater reason is that the broad gestures and primacy of persona so evident in R&H set us up for the U2 of the 90s. Having known Bono from first sight as someone who would work his talented arse off to project an image, having at least unconsciously realized that "Bono" is more a performative act on Paul Hewson's part than a guy who adopted a silly stage name, we were prepared for the wild tonal and imagistic shifts the band would kick around over the next decade. When Bono showed up a couple years later clad in black leather and wrap-around shades, older fans started peeling off while the rest of us started realizing U2's not just a band that makes great music, it's a band that makes great music with full awareness of current cultural context. By the time of Pop, we who were suckled on Rattle and Hum cheered at the band's glittering admission of the nature of their overarching project while people who came in with The Unforgettable Fire or earlier finally abandoned ship.
(The Joshua Tree fans mostly hung around and grumbled and made a nuisance of themselves yelling, "Play the old shit!" at PopMart concerts.)
So, yeah. Rattle and Hum may be U2's first major work identifying them as a postmodern pop band, concerned more with manipulation of surface than development of content. That the songs and performances in the film/album work are pretty well-crafted and well-performed is the wink that makes it all work--there really is substance under there, it's just secondary.
Now, having written all that, I just got to the point in the movie where Bono delivers his "Fuck the revolution!" monologue during "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." I watch that and see the overblown, hyper-sincere performative Bono, but I also see the surfaces cracking here and there in that monlogue, see Paul Hewson's genuine sincerity and heartbreak and concern break through. Bono takes the stage back from himself by switching to a--yes--bombastic reprise of the chorus, and I think maybe that break between spoken-word and singing is the occassional genius of U2 captured on celluloid.
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