U2

Their next album, also produced by Eno and Lanois, is the album that made them gigantic superstars the world over. Called The Joshua Tree, it set a record by going platinum (that’s twice as many as gold) in England alone in 28 hours. The Joshua Tree opens with the wonderful Where the Streets Have No Name, which begins with a slow crescendo from nothing, centered on the deeply echoic and layered sound of The Edge’s Infinite Guitar. The effect is like watching the sun rise, or standing on a hill and listening to a parade get closer and closer, finally overcoming you and bursting into life. It’s a great beginning, but it almost never happened. While they were in the studio sketching it out, Brian Eno became restless. Daniel Lanois and the boys were working out the logistics on a chalkboard, trying to figure out how long the opening should take and when everybody should come in. Eno was fidgety and bored by all the intricate planning and lack of spontaneity represented by the elaborate chalk scrawls and threatened to erase the board and start over. Fortunately, the band and Lanois convinced him otherwise, and one of the best album openers had been saved. The slow fade out at the end of a song is common to the point of cliché, but a slow fade in to start an album is still very rare – although it is used to great effect on another monster, world-eating album, Boston’s eponymous debut, as well as, I suppose, in Beethoven’s Ninth.

On The Joshua Tree, U2 started exploring American musical ideas, adding elements of country and the blues to embellish their sound. Their fascination with American roots music blossomed on their next album, Rattle and Hum. A double album, Rattle and Hum has one live disc and one studio disc and nearly everybody agrees, it is an embarrassingly bad project – one of their worst – with particular venom being reserved for the song God, Part II. So, of course, that is the cut I chose to put on this disc. God, Part II is an answer of sorts to John Lennon’s song God, in which the ex-Beatle refutes virtually every belief (God, Buddha, kings, yoga, Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan), the Beatles) and ends up saying he only believes in himself. I can see how rabid Lennon fans might take offense at this recasting, but I really like it – especially the opening. I also really like that the song is short – considerably shorter than almost anything else they do except, perhaps, MLK from The Unforgettable Fire. Although I must admit the song is pretty disingenuous for U2. Yes, they believe in love, but they also believe that rock ‘n’ roll can change the world, and that’s part of their appeal.

After the critical and popular bashing of Rattle and Hum, U2 took three years off to rest and rethink their strategy. It was right before their highly-anticipated return album Achtung, Baby came out that Negativland released their U2 single, in which they covered U2’s Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For badly and intercut some infamous tape of American Top 40 DJ Casey Kasem chewing out his staff while recording a show and going off especially on U2 (“these guys are from England (sic) and who gives a shit”). Negativland was immediately crushed into dirt by U2’s lawyers, Casey Kasem’s lawyers and their own record label (who’s slogan was, ironically, “corporate rock sucks”) in a much publicized legal action.

Part of the problem with Rattle and Hum was that, after the explosion of The Joshua Tree and the universal proclamation that U2 was the most important band in the world, they became paralyzed. Their tentative embrace of American roots music was ridiculed by everybody, and part of their three-year exile was trying to figure out how to deal with their fame. They did it by taking on the trappings of rock superstardom, but doing it with an ironic wink. On the next album and worldwide tour, Bono turned into The Fly, and then MacPhisto, both larger-than-life creations forged to deal with the increasing public pressure. They mounted a gigantic tour, dubbed the Zoo-TV tour, in which they overloaded the stage with giant video screens, projecting media caught from satellites and rebroadcast live – which was supremely ironic because they were doing to the world what Negativland did to them, claiming that the media at large, being beamed to us 24 hours a day, didn’t really belong to anybody and could be sampled and recontextualized at will. They could get away with it because they were the biggest band in the world, but it’s bitterly ironic that they crushed a small, almost completely unknown band of media terrorists for doing the same thing. Although, to be fair, it was their hungry lawyers who jumped up and down on Negativland, the band really had nothing to do with it and, according to some reports, felt bad about how it all played out. It’s true to form that what interests me about the biggest band in the world is how they affected the smallest band in the world, and not for any of their own merits.

U2 continued to evolve, folding techno and dance elements into their music, and remained one of the most important, exciting, and relevant bands through the ‘90s. They also released an interesting collaboration with Brian Eno under the Passengers name. Called Original Soundtracks 1, it features music for films, real or imagined and was quite experimental for them, which is probably why they changed their name for it. It also includes one track, Miss Sarajevo, that features the vocals of Luciano Pavarotti (!). Of course, it goes without saying that that was much more interesting than their work as U2, but nobody much liked it – there wouldn’t be an Original Soundtracks 2 – and, after a couple of performances, they went back to U2 and Brian Eno went off on his own. As influential as Eno is as a producer (Bono was once quoted as saying they (U2) couldn’t afford art school, so they hired Brian Eno instead), he seems to burn out working with somebody after three projects in a row. David Bowie’s famous seventies trilogy with Eno (Heroes, Low, and Lodger) were all they could stand of each other for 20 years, before teaming up again on 1995’s Outside album. Talking Heads did three in a row during their peak (More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light), before that partnership soured. And now U2 had done the three strongest and biggest albums of their career (The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, and Achtung, Baby) before burning out on the Passengers project and moving on. Although they did reunite after a nearly ten year hiatus with 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, in which they leave did behind a lot of their studio trickery and postmodern irony and return to their roots as a solid, passionate band out to change the world through rock ‘n’ roll, even if they say it can’t be done.