U2: A Rant

Let me begin this by giving a summary of my taste when it comes to U2. I am an enormous U2 fan; they used to be my favorite band ever, and they absolutely shaped my musical tastes growing up. I own everything they've ever released, including some rare singles thanks to The Complete U2 Digital Box Set from iTunes. They remind me quite a bit of Bob Dylan in that none of their albums are flawless through and through (each one always contains at least one decent/mediocre song), and they've released quite a bit of mediocre stuff, but all of their material is worth listening to, and when they are at their best, they are absolutely extraordinary.

For example, The Joshua Tree is a seminal piece of work, and the first three songs on that album (Where The Streets Have No Name, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, With Or Without You) are probably the best triplet of songs ever to open an album; each one is a masterpiece of production and songwriting, and they flow perfectly from one to another. Really, that stretch of albums from War to The Unforgettable Fire to The Joshua Tree is one of the great periods of any band. Achtung Baby, while containing some tremendous songs (One, Mysterious Ways, and Love Is Blindness, for example), is a very mixed album to me in terms of song quality (The Fly is incredibly lame, for example, and Even Better Than The Real Thing gets stupider every time I listen to it).

I tend to like experimental U2, especially Zooropa and Pop. Zooropa is a very mixed album in terms of song quality, but it also has my favorite U2 song, Stay (Faraway, So Close), and has a very organic feel to it. Pop is almost the exact opposite of organic, but I simply love the production value by Flood, and some of the songs, like Please and Staring At The Sun, are wonderful. I also think that Pop holds together as an album better than most of their work; I think most people get turned off by the sound of first couple of songs, like Discotheque and MOFO (Mofo is admittedly pretty terrible, although it does have a neat, eerie submerged message about mothers in it), and don't listen the rest of the way through. Pop is, in my humble opinion, one of the most underrated albums of the 90s.

With all of that said, I am now going to say the truthful words that almost no U2 fan will say: U2 have gone WAY downhill this decade. All That You Can't Leave Behind had traces of excellence in it. Beautiful Day is actually one of their best songs, and easily the best thing they've done this decade, although Walk On and Stuck In A Moment That You Can't Get Out Of are pretty great too. But we should have all seen it coming; ATYCLB has some simply atrocious stuff on it, like New York, Elevation, and Peace on Earth. That kind of material is stuff they would have left on the cutting room floor in earlier years. The lyrics are stupid and the music is uninspired (especially on New York and the lyrics for Elevation).

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was even worse; there were two good songs (Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own and City of Blinding Lights, and even Sometimes could be argued to be too pappy), three decent songs (Vertigo, One Step Closer, and I'm stretching with Miracle Drug; also, Vertigo's lyrics are terrible, but the music is fun), and the rest were crap. You could argue that Yahweh is decent, but the more I listen to it, the sillier and more unsuccessful it gets.

And now the new album, No Line On The Horizon, which has, and I'm not kidding here, ONE good song on it, Cedars of Lebanon, the final track. The rest just sound completely uninspired and like tired retreads for U2, and Get On Your Boots has got to be hands down the worst first single off an album they've ever released. Yes, even worse than Discotheque.

There are two huge problems with U2 right now. One is simply their reputation. They bill themselves as the biggest and best band in the world, and the media plays along. Hell, The New York Times declared Atomic Bomb U2's best album ever, and Rolling Stone just gave No Line On The Horizon a perfect five star rating (there's a reason I stopped both reading Rolling Stone and trusting the New York Times for unbiased reporting a long time ago). But they're simply not anymore, not when they're putting out material as lame as this. They do have an extraordinary array of material from the 80s and 90s to play, and they perform them well. But let's face it: Bono can't sing anywhere close to what he used to be able to do, and they're getting older. Their live shows are inevitably going to suffer, no matter how hard they try.

The second problem is Bono's lyrics. I got into a great epic argument with a friend in college over this, when I still drank the U2 Kool-Aid. She was arguing that the lyrics in Atomic Bomb were incredibly lame, and I couldn't accept it at the time. But now that I'm a little older and wiser, I see she was completely right, and that Bono's lyrics have been terrible in general all decade except for rare occasions. He needs topical subjects or very personal events to focus on now in order to write good material; the days of With Or Without You are long gone. Beautiful Day really does strike me as a fluke, since it's an abstract song. But just look at these lyrics from No Line On The Horizon, the first song from the new album: I know a girl who's like the sea/I watch her changing every day for me/One day she's still, the next she swells/I can hear the universe in her seashells. My eyes are rolling just typing that. And those are some of the better lyrics on the album in regards to rhyming and "cleverness" (the same song rhymes linear and ear). Cedars of Lebanon is the only topical song on the album, and it really stands out. Bono's well has more or less run dry.

The thing about U2 is that they're smart when it comes to production. They have long worked with arguably the three best producers in the game: Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Steve Lilywhite. So for example, the new album, which is loaded with terrible material, sounds fantastic because of the production. I have a feeling this might be one of the major reasons so many of us thought U2 were still putting out good stuff: everything sounded great. But if you look past the sheen of the production, you're left with tired, recycled melodies and terrible lyrics. To bring up Cedars of Lebanon again, it also stands out on the album because it is the ONLY song that isn't heavily overproduced; the song speaks for itself, and Lanois, the solo producer on the track, smartly lets it shine through.

I don't know what could bring the old U2 back, if anything. Part of what made them such an exciting and brilliant band was their youth, and how they attacked it full throttle with songs like Out of Control, and vented their youthful anger with songs like Sunday Bloody Sunday and Bullet The Blue Sky. Back then, the music was fresh and raw, and Bono's lyrics had a piercing, insightful quality to them that they've completely lost. Their songs meant something back in the 80s and early 90s, and now they feel like just plain, boring rock songs from a group desperately trying to maintain their image and status as "the world's biggest band."

I would like nothing more than for U2 to come back to their old selves, to write more material that had a point, and to experiment with their sound again like they did in the mid to late 90s. I really hope they do. But for now, we are left with a group of old men who have been trying unsuccessfully for a decade to sound young and hip again. Guys, if you honestly think "Get On Your Boots" is the path towards sounding fresh and hip again, you might as well just hang up those boots now rather than saddle us with crap like your new album for another decade.