To every garage band, basement jammer, and Stratocaster-copy basher in America, U2 must be the Dream personified. With scant, almost minimal musical resources, vocalist “Bono,” bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen, and guitarist “The Edge” have carved out a solid and distinct artistic identity, a huge international audience, and a critical reputation as the band of the 80s. One can easily imagine an average middle-class kid shaking the foundations of Mommy and Daddy’s suburban, home, banging away at “Sunday Bloody Sunday” with a hitherto unfathomable frenzy, and justifying it by pointing to U2’s current stature and saying, “See! It can be done.”
Once you get past technical considerations, however, things start to change in a hurry, for despite their limitations U2 have managed to amass a reasonably impressive book of material.
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“Pride (In the Name of Love)” is solid march-time stuff from the word go, but Bono’s resonant vocal does pack a certain punch, giving an otherwise ordinary progression a surprisingly uplifting feel.
Being essentially the same group that got together in a Dublin high school some 12 or 13 years ago, U2 have developed an intuitive sense of what works within the context of their abilities and what doesn’t. They clearly understand that what’s important is not what you have but what you do with it. They have the sort of consistent attitude toward their sound and approach that makes music at any, level of proficiency. They know how far they can go and have never pretended to be better than they are. There’s nothing phony about them.
U2 is on fairly stable ground playing covers such as the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” (which, with its blaring guitar intro, does serve as a good crowd rouser) and Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (in the middle of which Bono delivers the most honest statement any rock star could: “All I have is a red guitar / Three chords and the truth / All I have is a red guitar / The rest is up to you”). But things are considerably shakier when they take on the blues. While their reasons for writing songs like this are not totally clear, the end result is, knowingly or not, a denigration of a justly proud musical tradition. Specifically, whether in structure (“God Part II”) or in content (“When Love Comes to Town”), the blues, as an idiom, is demonstrably outside of U2’s league. If you can’t absorb this kind of music to the point where you feel it in every expression, every movement, every sinew and, indeed, in your very marrow, don’t mess with it.
Unlike their concert audiences of three or more years ago, a sizable chunk of U2’s current audience is now there strictly for bragging rights. (“Me and Donna went to see U2 last night and it was soooo excellent.”) That audience is also quite young; the median age at last year’s Horizon concerts couldn’t have been more than 17. Unless U2 manage to broaden their appeal, develop new ways to get their message across, they might find themselves ten years from now a vestige of a time gone by. All the media intimations of U2 affecting the youth of the world through the power of their convictions just don’t pan out when one looks at the similar messages of the late 60s and early 70s and the nostalgic background schmaltz they have since been turned into by “classic rock” radio and slickly produced television specials. (Rolling Stone magazine grabbing a two-hour slot of prime time?)
