A Look Back at Me and U2

Occasionally, I like to take a look back at the years through the lens of a music band’s history, and U2’s distribution of Songs of Innocence along with the unveiling of iPhone 6 earlier this week provides a good opportunity to do just that.

I was a teenager when U2’s undisputed masterpiece The Joshua Tree came out in 1987. I had it on cassette and by the time Rattle and Hum came out a year later, I belonged to a small group of musicophiles at school for whom U2 were gods. We passed around VHS tapes of the Rattle and Hum documentary and tried to make our jeans holey like The Edge’s. More than anything, I wanted a hat like his, but the shopping malls in rural Iowa didn’t sell them and my parents wouldn't have bought anyway. One of my friends from that time stuck with music and currently is the lead singer of a successful U2 cover band on the West Coast.

In recent years, I’ve read that Rattle and Hum received mixed reviews and some thought it portended the beginning of the end for U2, but if so, we didn’t know it. Rattle and Hum was perfect in our eyes. More than anything, it was “real” music: real guys on real instruments, meaningful lyrics, and no drum machines or electronic frippery. To quote “Along the Watchtower,” a Bob Dylan tune covered on Rattle and Hum, U2 represented “three chords and the truth.” I didn’t follow the news closely in those days, but I knew when Bono started talking world events, something significant was happening that the music on the radio lacked.

 

Controversy would continue to follow U2’s music. Despite the now classic status of Achtung Baby (1991), there was grumbling even back then that U2 didn’t sound the same. My faith wasn’t shaken, but something funkier, something weirder, was happening, and as U2 went from big to huge, it only continued to get stranger with Zooropa (1993). Then U2’s concerts went from huge to colossal and the band members were beginning to look like celebrity stooges. I remember seeing Bono on MTV wearing a reflective suit and glittery cowboy hat as he showered fans and reporters with champagne and rambled drunkenly.

Where had the U2 I loved gone?

 “Discothèque,” the first single off Pop (1997), turned me off U2 completely. I still remember sitting in the snack cafeteria at The University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland and seeing the video for the first time on television. My heroes were dressed like the Village People, grooving under a mirrorball, humping the camera, and busting bad dance moves reminiscent of “Y.M.C.A.,” all to a song that in no way resembled anything I could accept from the band who had once sung about The Troubles in “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” U2 was sacred for me, its music was sacred, and I felt like the band members themselves had just shat all over it.

 

But I was wrong. A few years later, I gave the album a solid listen and realized U2 had grown musically and I just hadn’t been able to see it. Pop moves among ironic discopop, soaring grandeur, serious issues, foul-mouthed blasphemy, and wry commentary on the band’s own stardom and hubris. And everywhere, Bono’s poetry elevates the music to heights few can attain. With Pop, U2 exploded, pissed off its fans, warned it would do what it wanted, and became legendary.

U2’s albums since have received critical acclaim even if the music has never been as revolutionary or captured as much attention. My wife, whom I met in Ireland when I was disaffected with the band, is also a longtime fan, so when we heard U2 had made Songs of Innocence available for free to anyone with an iTunes account--in what Apple CEO Tim Cook called "the largest album release of all time"--we could barely contain ourselves.

From what I can tell so far, Songs of Innocence is a lot like the lighter music of U2’s post-Pop releases. That is to say, it has all the musicianship, message and magic, but nothing to change the course of popular music or win over younger generations. Some will like it, and some won’t. Music is like that. But when a band with the caliber of The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin is still in good form and putting out music, you’re missing out if you don’t at least check it out.

 

Postscript: Last night I awoke with a start and bolted from bed in the realization that there would soon be a follow-up album titled Songs of Experience, named like its predecessor after poet William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. My subconscious had worked this out as I slept and I was certain of it. No doubt plenty of other people had their own suspicions. This morning, a quick internet search revealed that Bono has indeed just announced plans for a companion album titled Songs of Experience. Perhaps it will showcase the more experimental and edgier side of the band.