But, if only for highly subjective
reasons - nostalgia more than anything else - at a push
I’d still nominate Boy, their debut album, as
my personal favourite out of all their work. With Bono’s
soaring boyish vocals and The Edge’s Tom Verlaine
influenced guitar style lending such range and depth
to the sound, it captured perfectly the giddy rush of
their early live shows. With their next two releases,
October and War, they became more involved in their
fundamentalist Christian beliefs and more preachy, and
I gradually lost interest in what they were doing. All
that running around with white flags may have been fine
for Americans, but it was a bit difficult for any Irish
person with an IQ that ran into triple figures to take
seriously. I’m reminded of the currently popular
car bumper sticker which declares, ‘I’m
For Peace’. Aren’t most of us? But when
they began to work with Brian Eno as producer they began
to get interesting again. The Unforgettable Fire, The
Joshua Tree and Rattle And Hum may still have suffered
from an excess of earnestness, but they did consolidate
the band’s position internationally, not least
because they contained more traditionally constructed
songs which could be strummed on an acoustic guitar,
in contrast to the idiosyncratic and impressionistic
method of composition they’d used previously.
With Achtung Baby and Zooropa, displaying their discovery
of post-modern irony, I came back to the fold. It seems
you can’t hang out with a smart guy like Eno for
very long without some of that cerebral cool and detachment
and distance rubbing off. As Bono said of his MacPhisto
incarnation in a recent interview: “I was surprised
how well insincerity suited
me.”
All this preamble by way of setting the scene for a
consideration of U2’s latest offering, Pop. It’s
a marvellous album, which sees them going forward and
progressing, commendable for a mega-band who could so
easily and profitably stick to tried and trusted formulae.
Howie B has taken over from Eno as agent provocateur
of the studio, and it’s a very rhythm orientated
sound, as can be heard on the single ‘Discotheque’
and ‘Mofo’, with Larry Mullen playing a
blinder on drums. There are quieter moments though too,
like ‘If God Will Send His Angels’ and ‘If
You Wear That Velvet Dress’. The latter, and ‘The
Playboy Mansion’ have a druggy, almost hippyish
feel to them. But then psychedelia is back in vogue.
Lyrically, Bono continues to explore the expression
of spirituality in a fallen world, the validity of religious
belief in a secular society, and many of the tracks
have the moral ambiguity of a song like ‘Acrobat’
from Achtung Baby. ‘Mofo’ quotes Salman
Rushdie’s phrase about ‘filling the God
shaped hole’. ‘If God Will Send His Angels’
contains lines like ‘God has got his phone off
the hook babe, would he even pick up if he could?’
and ‘Jesus never let me down, you know Jesus used
to show me the score/Then they put Jesus in show business,
now it’s hard to get in the door’. And ‘Wake
Up Dead Man’, one of their most powerful songs
ever of faith and doubt, which seems to be addressed
to a deceased divinity, pleads ‘Jesus, I’m
waiting here boss/I know you’re looking out for
us/But maybe your hands aren’t free’. Ultimately,
with U2, unlike Nietzsche, God isn’t dead, he’s
just on an extended
sabbatical.
“We’re still the bleeding hearts club,”
Bono volunteered at the press launch of Pop, “we’ve
just learned how to hide it better.” It may seem
contradictory to adopt a strategic pose and then tell
everyone you’ve adopted a strategic pose, but
while they’ve discovered the vital unimportance
of being earnest, many of their concerns today remain
the same as when they started. They’re older now,
like the rest of us, and have learned that the ability
to dissemble is an important survival skill, but they’re
still more like themselves than they ever were. Most
crucially, unlike other ‘80s bands of arguably
comparable talent, say The Smiths or Simple Minds, they
have endured and are still together. Let’s face
it, regardless of marketing ploys and promotion drives,
they wouldn’t be where they are today if they
didn’t have something people wanted. Long may
they continue to pop up.
First published in 46A
