That's all well and good (and a fine defense of that crap song, maybe the best I've seen) but a song is not an article in a newspaper, an entry on a blog, it's not a poem, it's not a short story. A song is a musical. It's cleverness is relative to how it functions as a piece of music, both words and music. If it doesn't fit together it doesn't matter. I'm not accusing Stand Up Comedy of not fitting together, I'm illustrating how this interpretation, accurate or not, doesn't have to mean anything at all.
The song is sluggish. Musically, it sounds like U2 performing a cover version of an obscure Aerosmith song from 1978 nobody has ever heard. That's fine for some bands but nothing at all about what made U2 magical to begin with.
Lyrically, we can say what we want about what it's supposed to mean but in the end it's trite and full of hamfisted sloganeering. So much of 21st Century Bono suffers from this, like classic pop and country songwriting. Working from the bumper-sticker slogan backwards...and be damned if it's a little clumsy off the tongue, it's a clever line! No. That's not what makes for great music.
Bono was better off singing random nonsense phonetics, his Bonogolese, until something just...arrived. I sense he doesn't do much of that any more and he gets a little too eager to shoehorn 'Freedom Is The Scent..." in two different songs because, well, he's a little too high on his own cleverness just to let the song, the music, the feel, the mood dictate what the words should be saying. Doesn't even matter what its saying really, specifically, as long as it's sincere and you can feel that it's sincere. I just resent music that feels like someone came up with a T-shirt slogan for the title and went from there. So much of U2 since Beautiful Day has been just this.
Lastly, on that song specifically, I am sick. to. death. of the self-effacing stuff, the owning up to being a 'hypocritical rock star'. We get it. Tell us something from your soul and try to sing it like you stumbled into it, not like it was a phrase you randomly jotted down in a notebook on an airplane and then shoved it somewhere inside one of your newest songs where it seemed to be least awkward.
Truthfully, I am not much of a lyrical critic. Lyrics do matter and they matter to me, but this isn't storytelling. This is music, rock music in particular. There is a harmony between music and lyrics that must exist. Music is an auditory medium like film is a visual medium. The script matters...but it's only one component of the overall piece. And not even the most important if we care about art as much as or more than being a popcorn thriller. Pop music listeners often pay far too much mind to lyrics. Lyrics should never wreck a song if the song is worthy in the first place. Think about how many times any of us have sung along to La-La-La or Oh-Oh-Oh. If you're reading this, I know you're 100% guilty. It's music folks. I Am The Walrus basically means nothing and so what? It's perfection.
So really I don't begrudge anything written in say, Miami because it all fits perfectly. I don't analyze anything in Elvis Presley and America. I don't get too carried away looking at any of those early lyrics and scrutinizing how banal some were. It was all so very sincere, I appreciated it because of that. U2 were the greatest band at being magically accidental, at not truly knowing what they were doing. When they were at their best, they weren't clever at all, they weren't even good - as Bono likes to say - they were just great. I don't think U2 can be great with this method of operations from Bono and his lyric writing. He's not that kind of writer and he never was. He's not a cerebral lyricist IMO. He's always been emotional and it always worked until he decided he wasn't that guy anymore. No song is more indicative of the worst of all of this than Stand Up Comedy. But I'm glad at least you like it.
Straws, they be graspin' at them.
