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U2’s continuing quest for authenticity
JOURNEY
By Susan Fast
Professor of Cultural Studies, Director,
Graduate Program in Gender Studies and
Feminist Research at McMaster University
WE wanted to make a very personal
album,” U2’s Bono told Rolling Stone
upon the release of the band’s most
recent album, Songs of Innocence.
“The whole album is first journeys…geographically,
spiritually, sexually. And that’s hard. But
we went there.”
Those first journeys also include some
of the band’s formative musical influences,
including The Ramones and The Clash, who
are examples of stripped-back rock and roll par
excellence.
Now, the band is slated to embark on its
iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE tour in support
of the album.
For this tour, the band is certainly scaling
back: they’ll be performing in the relative
intimacy of arenas.
It’s a stark contrast to the record-shattering
production of the band’s last tour – called U2
360 – which was seen by about seven million
people in huge, open air stadiums and grossed
over US$700 million.
On the surface, it may seem as though U2
is suddenly seeking a return to the simpler
times of its early years, both in their sound and
their performances.
But for those who have followed the band’s
career closely, talk of returning to “roots” of
some kind when a new record is released is
nothing new for U2.
If anything, it reveals the well-worn strategy
of a band that seeks to remain relevant even
as it ages – a pattern of alternating between
radical experimentation and mining the myth
of authenticity.
Two poles – sometimes blurred
The first time this trope was invoked was
with 1987’s The Joshua Tree and the follow-up
album and documentary film Rattle and Hum.
For those albums the band, weaned on
1970s punk, turned back to the American triumvirate
– blues, folk and gospel – the deeply
“authentic” music they felt they’d missed out
on growing up.
In interviews from this time, they began
their tendency to, off and on, romanticize
“stripped-down” rock and roll.
This backward turn came in the wake of
the band’s first project with producers Brian
Eno and Daniel Lanois, 1984’s The Unforgettable
Fire.
Interestingly, that album’s atmospheric,
experimental sound was enthusiastically
embraced by the band as an attempt to switch
gears from the hard-driving, guitar-oriented,
stripped-down rock that characterized 1983’s
War.
U2 360 Tour
U2 360 Tour
WESTERN SYDNEY BUSINESS ACCESS SEPTEMBER 2015
The live shows that have supported the
band’s more experimental albums have
been suitably mammoth endeavors, often
taking place in outdoor venues, with every
technological bell and whistle imaginable
in tow.
But the sound of the group’s music doesn’t
swing quite as easily between these poles as
their discourse around it would suggest.
For example, the atmospheric, experimental
influence is present on Songs of Innocence
(The Troubles). Meanwhile, the stripped-back
sound can be found on the most “out there”
album in U2’s oeuvre – 1997’s Pop – in tracks
like Wake Up Dead Man and The Playboy
Mansion.
The tension of fame
So why frame the process of making an
album as a kind of recurring existential crisis?
One that seems to require a radical rethinking
of musical and thematic direction?
One answer to this question comes from
what counts as “authentic” in rock culture: the
quest narrative – the constant search for “realness,”
for what is perceived to be “genuine.”
Led Zeppelin, for example, “reinvented”
themselves on their third album, turning to
acoustic folk music.
The infamous battle between Mick Jagger
and Keith Richards over whether to stay true
to the band’s blues roots or move in a more
contemporary direction began with their 1983
album Undercover.
But U2 is particularly committed to this
narrative. Their need for reinvention, the casting
off of what came before, the re-examination
of directions, the restlessness, can be viewed as
part of a discourse that helps construct U2’s
rock authenticity.
I’m not suggesting that their quest is disingenuous.
But one only has to look at musics
other than white rock to see that the terms
of authenticity vary with genre, among other
things.
In fact, it could be argued that there’s no
such thing as authenticity, except in the minds
of those who construct the idea.
For the band, however, there is more to
this discursive struggle. Rock authenticity is
premised on a revolutionary sensibility – a
rejection of authority. And rock musicians who
become commercially successful often struggle
with how to remain true to these ideals.
The strategy of forever searching for a new
sound becomes especially important in these
circumstances: there’s nothing that shatters
respectability like a commercially successful
rock band that rests on its laurels.
Returning to one’s “roots,” though, or being
on the cutting edge of contemporary music
becomes part of the strategy to maintain credibility
and relevance in the wake of unprecedented
commercial success – to demonstrate
that the ideals on which the band was formed
are still driving them.
Could this explain why U2 recently made
an (intially) covert busking appearance in a
New York City subway station? U2 recently
performed – initially, in disguise – in a New
York City subway station.
After all, busking is perhap the quintessential
authentic performance genre – live, unmediated,
accessible, risky and non-commercial
(if you don’t count the pennies collected in the
guitar case).
Glitzy can be compatible
with authentic
Interestingly, three out of U2’s last four records
have been premised on the idea of “going
back to roots” or “stripping down the sound.”
And ironically, these albums have been
more commercially successful than the last
two attempts at sonic experimentation (Pop
and No Line on the Horizon).
So one wonders – perhaps a bit cynically –
if the “returning to roots” discourse is not only
a means of reaffirming rock authenticity, but
also a way to sell more records.
This is as much an observation about critics
and fans (for whom the discourse of rock
authenticity is religion), than it is about the
band.
For my part, I’ve always found U2’s experimental
records and some of the gargantuan
tours more interesting and more true to the
spirit of rock and roll than their trips back to
the past.
Pop is a sonic masterpiece, as are Zooropa
and Achtung, Baby. The last of these,
incidentally, was also a very personal album,
chronicling, among other things, the shattering
effects of divorce (Edge’s) and the complications
of being in love.
In fact, the mammoth Zoo TV Tour that
supported Achtung, Baby and Zooropa was
one of the band’s most politically astute and
successfully mounted social commentaries. In
a (self-referential) commentary on celebrity,
Bono took on the character of the bloated,
leather-clad, shade-wearing rock star. And the
main premise of the show was a harsh critique
of the desensitizing effects of contemporary
media.
Thus, contrary to the well-worn dualism in
rock between “small and simple equals good”
and “big and glitzy equals bad,” some of U2’s
most incisive music and social commentary
have come out of the latter.
It seems that “small and simple” (if arena
shows can actually fall into this category) is
where they’ll land on this tour, but there’s
already a hint of where the band is going for
the next album.
In a New York Times essay written on the
eve of this tour, Bono had this to say about
Songs of Experience, the album that will follow
Songs of Innocence:
We’re keeping the discipline on songs and
pushing out the parameters of the sound….
One of the things that experience has taught
us is to be fully in the moment. What’s the moment?
Pop music. And so the quest continues.
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