Okay, so I just tried to walk up to my office after the show, and the stairs were closed off with a security guard waving me away. But I thought I recognized the Irish accents wafting down, so I went around a different way to my office and to the same landing but from above this time, looked down the staircase, and guess who is sitting there. Here’s Bono and Clayton, shot from just above, giving an interview a few minutes ago. Okay, so it’s a nondescript Keating staircase, it’s not quite Jacob’s ladder, but we all have our ways of rediscovering those ordinary sites that may become for us the “gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:17). Not sure I can ever look at that landing the same way again.

1 Comment »

1. 

   I’ve listened to the new one three times over now and I will say it’s better than the last two but overall, U2 has left me frustrated again. Out of five stars, I’d give it 2 out of my generosity.

   I don’t know…in the early records (even up to Pop) I felt that there was something I had to work for in their music, a challenge…whether in Bono’s lyrics or The Edge’s oddities, U2 used to be a band that really walked that line between the ascent of the sacred and the descent of the profane. In the last ten years they’ve crossed over into a contemporary worship mode, a grossly suburban manifestation of their sound that is wrapped up in a sugar-coated gloss that is more likely to find itself echoing off the walls of a church auditorium than off the brick and stone of a back alleyway or in and around the cactus and desert sands of our cultural desolate wasteland.

   There’s no “f**k the revolution” in their sound anymore…and I think that’s unfortunate.

   But alas, this is what happens with age I’m told and I’ve always argued that the best thing Bono and Co. could do at this point is put out an acoustic album. At least at that point, they’d be honestly addressing that they no longer rock per se and perhaps deliver something that was ACTUALLY as raw and stripped down as they keep touting every new release to be.

   I apologize for the candor here and the aggressive rhetoric (however tempered I try to keep it.) I have no living memory of ever NOT knowing who U2 was on account of my older brother and the band has always held a special place in my heart. But, this doesn’t blind me to their tragic turn towards the uncool (which Bono himself claims would be the end of the band – and I’d tell him, if I met him, that the time is come by his own standards to hang it up).

   Nonetheless, there’s my thoughts. I can’t stomach the divination of the band…but these are all just my subjective critiques in the throes of my twenties, as a fan, more or less.

   Comment by Josh — March 6, 2009 @ 1:28 pm

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