Sunday, February 25, 2007

3. Stay, far away, so close- U2

U2 are really where mine and my brothers music tastes collide, cross over and find a lot of common ground. I love the way they progress throughout the albums they make, the cyclical way their albums have come out. Their albums always come in stacks of three. Boy, October and War form their early years of working out how to do this rock thing, and getting it pretty near perfect on War. The Unforgettable Fire starts to experiment with new things, new ways of expression, Joshua Tree is when they nail it and Rattle and Hum is when the wheels start to fall off. And so they go back to the drawing board and come up with something new and inventive again, Actung Baby; if ever you need to explain the difference between the 80s and 90s as decades to an alien from outer space, just sit them down with the Joshua Tree and Actung Baby.

Going back to my brother for a moment, you can tell a lot about us both from the fact that his favourite U2 album is the Joshua Tree and mine is Actung Baby. Someone once described Actung Baby as the sound of the Joshua Tree being hacked down with a chainsaw. In the days of cassettes the first song had us all checking our stereos to see if they were chewing the tape rather than just playing the distorted opener to Zoo Station. Irony, cynicism, tiredness of hope never getting fulfilled and the loss of meaning pretty much marked the 90s and U2 moved with that. Zooropa took it further and then it all started to fray at the edges with Pop. And so they went back to the drawing board and put all the good elements of their career together and came up with ‘All that you can’t leave behind’ and ‘How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb’. If things carry on like this the next album might not be so great and we might be due for a new invention again, it’ll be interesting to see.

Anyway, clearly all this is just an excuse to write down my theories on U2 as a band, now to the song. There are too many good ones to chose from and so I chose this one, a slightly obscure one only listeners to Zooropa will discover. It’s a beautiful song with all the usual elements that make for a beautiful U2 song, but I chose it for the ending alone. I have never heard a cymbol clash used so evocatively.

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