Just where does the Zoo TV Outside Broadcast Tour come from? Nothing U2 has ever done–nothing any rock group has ever done–prepares one for how gripping it is as music, how compelling it is as theater, how apropos it is as pop artifact, and how knowing it is about the culture. It takes all the rock ‘n’ roll cliches, translates them into semiotics, repackages them according to the blueprints of postmodern theory, and comes up with something fresh, something prescient, something ultimately humane. It is nothing less than the new face of popular music.
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Jim Morrison.
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Bono pulls a woman up onto the stage with him, and they dance slowly, arms around one another. The onstage camera crew moves in for a close-up. The largest of the big-screen TVs above the stage shows the woman’s hand curling around the nape of Bono’s neck; it is shaking uncontrollably.
Camping it up as the ultimate rock star, Bono is free to invest each song with as much throwaway passion as he desires. His emoting only serves to create a more noticeable–dare I say poignant–distance between the surface meaning of the songs and their subtext, a divide that is an essential part of U2’s latest album, Achtung Baby. Songs like “One,” “The Fly,” and “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World,” which chart a shaky course between ambition and reality, gain new resonance.
