music ranjeet on 03 May 2009 05:16 pm
Musical Relativity
Strangely enough, I’ve had a number of musically related thoughts recently. Lately, the topic of my cogitations has been U2. For much of my early music-consuming life, I considered U2 to be my favorite band. By now, I would say that Radiohead has taken up that mantle. That’s not a huge dig on U2; I really only started listening to music a bit after U2 came out with Achtung Baby, so effectively I came into the music world just when U2 had passed their creative peak, almost 14 years into their now 29 year career, while I caught Radiohead on their way up.
Recently, U2 came out with a new album, No Line On The Horizon. At this point in their career, I’m not exactly waiting at the record store at midnight for their newest release. At best, I hoped that it wouldn’t be horrible. At worst, I cringed at what this would do for their legacy.
So, when March 3rd rolled around, I fired up Rhapsody, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. After the first run through, I wasn’t totally put off, to the extent that I went back for a second and third and fourth listen. I had mixed feelings about what was going on. So, because I have little faith in my own opinions and require the backup of more experienced minds, I went in search of reviews. My current favorite on these general media matters is Metacritic. For movie reviews, I usually turn to Rotten Tomatoes, which gives a ‘big picture’ view on a movie’s critical reception. But for all other media (games, music), it’s Metacritic. So I looked at Metacritic’s rundown of No Line On The Horizon. A 72. Meaning generally favorable, but not world-beating. But then looking down, I see that the three highest scores are 100. Now, with metacritic, 100 isn’t always 100 — they’ll convert a score based on a star system to it’s numeric counterpart, and if a review doesn’t have any rating at all, they’ll give it one based on the tone of the review. So I went ahead and read a few of the reviews that I could read (Rolling Stone, Blender). I was amazed at the phrases I was reading. “Third killer album in a row”. “…the clean gleam and rocket’s arc of [Bono's] voice.” “But it’s Bono who dominates.”
What are these people smoking? Did these people listen to the same album I did? I was so confused, I ended up pulling out The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Pop, and All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the dusty shelves of my CD rack to figure out if they’re hearing things that I’m not.
See, the thing is : Bono kills this album. His voice, in my view, has deteriorated greatly from the 80’s and mid 90’s. When Pop came out, I was struck by how horrible he sounded, although for that album, his hoarseness actually added something for many of the songs. In general, I thought that album was under-rated. For ATYCLB, his voice was back, so I thought that maybe he stopped treating his vocal chords like crap and they just got better. For NLOTH, though, he compounded a bad voice with bad vocal choices. This album, Bono excepting, isn’t that bad (yeah, I know, a ringing endorsement). In fact, a lot of it sounds like classic, anthemic U2. But every song that I find redeeming musically is ruined by Bono doing something obnoxious, either with a strange vocal flourish or a weird similie, eg. “Like a small child crossing an eight lane highway on a voyage of discovery.” I find the opening song to be haunting (in a good way), but I can’t stand Bono’s “Whoa whoa whoa” flourish at the end of each line, and “then she stuck her tongue in my ear” is not an acceptable rhyme to “time is irrelevant, it’s not linear”. “Magnificent” is probably the best song on the album, classic U2, but the chorus is a cheesy paean to love. “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” is another song in the classic U2 vein, but I can’t get past the stupid, horrible title. Almost every song that is actually catchy has some glaring flaw in it that makes me cringe at what could have been.
But that didn’t quite cover all that I felt was wrong. I don’t know to whom I can attribute this idea, because it certainly did not spring full-formed from my own head, but one of the main things missing from modern day U2 is the tension.
U2 has always been a bunch of devout Christians, an oddity of a group composed of two Protestants and two Catholics hailing from Ireland. Their convictions have always filtered into their music, and for the most part, I haven’t minded that much. Their faith gave them inspiration for a lot of their best work, because they could sing about faith and hope, but it was always contrasted with reality. War and The Joshua Tree were albums about hope and peace, but always shadowed with war. The Joshua Tree (and Rattle and Hum) was a musical tour through America, even as they wrote songs decrying America’s involvement in Latin America and love affair with guns and war. Just as The Joshua Tree was dark but joyful at the end, Achtung Baby was dark and cynical, through and through. Those songs were written after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uncertainty that following, during the failure of The Edge’s marriage, and came as U2 was trying to move away their previous personas. How they could reconcile their faith and their belief in God’s love for mankind with what they see all around them? How could they be crazy rock stars, doing what rock stars do, and still be good enough to be saved?
Now, however, that tension is gone. It seems that during the past three albums, they are no longer concerned about their salvation. They’ve got it figured out, and life is roses now. How long has it been since they’re written a song that could be considered dark? Not since Please, from Pop in ‘97. Since then, it’s been Beautiful Days and Magnificent, or irrelevance like Elevation and Vertigo and Get On Your Boots. It’s been happiness or playfulness, and frankly its boring. The best songs on NLOTH are “ruined” by their overt religious nature — U2 is turning into a barely veiled Christian rock band. “Unknown Caller” and “Moment of Surrender” are filled with religious language, while other songs approach it more subtly, but it’s more pervasive than ever before.
In summary, U2 always claims to be trying to mix it up, to reinvent themselves, but I don’t there’s any reinvention left in them, unless, perhaps, they decide to become a hip-hop or death metal group. At the current moment, all they are doing is ruining their reputation. Right now, the bulk of their work has been memorable and influential, but if they keep it up, they’ll start to tilt the scales out of favor.