Spectacle and Spectacularization

Did you attend a 360 show in Dublin, Istanbul, Pittsburgh, or Moscow? If so, Michael Williams needs you for his dissertation!

Sacralizing the profane and profaning the sacred

I noted some time ago on this blog the publication of Deane Galbraith's essay "Meeting God in the Sound" in The Counter -Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music. I happened today to discover that portions of that interesting essay, which includes extended readings of "Unknown Caller" and "White as Snow" as well as some useful thought about hymn allusions, are readable on Google books. You might want to give the pages that are available a look.

Courting an untamed God

Here is a look at the imagery of "Wild Honey," brought into dialogue with the Puritans, Isaiah, John Eldredge, Augustine, and others who have used courtship language about God.

"I couldn’t help but think that there just might be some good eschatology..."

I missed this at the time, but here is a 2009 post connecting some U2 lyrics from No Line with the NT Wright book Surprised by Hope.

On the tightrope

Mark at Quaerentia shares several examples of music that "deftly walks the tightrope between realism and optimism" and consequently has been of help to him in times of depression. Not surprisingly, U2's work turns up on the list, but not in the way you might think. (Incidentally, Mark has collected some of his previous Quaerentia writing on U2 at a Q U2 link here. I'd forgotten his U2 album Wordles, which are very interesting if you haven't seen them.)

"I was speeding on the subway through the stations of the cross"

I seriously doubt that this art exhibition, Stations of the King's Cross, which opens Saturday in London, is actually a reference to "Moment of Surrender," but the notion of turning London tube stops into a set of Stations certainly brought the song to mind for me. Here's a quick explanation of the project, and on this page you can find a way to donate to charities the project benefits.

The current @U2 "Like A Song" issue is about "Vertigo," written by Tim Neufeld, and it's worth a read.

"We walk by faith and not by sight"

Here's a post on "Walk On" as a soundtrack for the Lenten journey from the blog God's Word, Our Words and the World.

"wary of the poet's notion of erotic love"

A short piece by Michael Austin, professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University, explores the dangers of absolutizing romance's role in marriage in an article called "Authentic Love, Kierkegaard, and U2." Drawn from a longer academic paper from 2007, it looks at the thought of Danish philosopher/theologian Soren Kierkegaard in dialogue with the U2 song "A Man and a Woman."

Excerpt: "Those who have truly integrated erotic love and divine love understand that committed married love is valuable for human existence in ways that the person who merely seeks personal pleasure cannot experience or understand. But this kind of love is deeply satisfying and fulfilling, and offers pleasure as well. So we shouldn't trade authentic love for an inferior counterfeit; we shouldn't risk losing love to find romance."

I just heard about a new article called "Soundtracks of Acrobatic Selves: Fan-Site Religion in the Reception and Use of the Music of U2," which appears in the October 2011 issue of The Journal of Contemporary Religion. Free viewing of the actual text isn't possible for 12 more months (even from within an academic gateway with a subscription, it seems), but the abstract says that the article analyses 40 pieces posted on a fansite in response to U2 songs, looking at how such online reflection "may contribute to the development of religious/spiritual exploration in contemporary Western societies." The authors are Clive Marsh and Vaughan S. Roberts.

Random stats

Hmm, it turns out my most popular post since 2009 (when Blogger started tracking such things), from about a year ago, is Your heart is my home, a reflection on the new version of "Mercy." OK, but I still wish I'd gotten to hear it live.

Paul, U2, &...

A couple of interesting U2 related posts here from New Testament professor Tim Gombis. One recent post on hermeneutics takes on the task of comparing the benefits and perils of collapsing historical distance (between us and scripture, or us and the past in general), claiming that U2 see it as their mission to collapse historical distance. There's an unusual reading of the title track of No Line on the Horizon given as evidence (suggesting that the narrator of the song is deliberately situating himself with regard to music history). It seems to me personally that much of the evidence for U2's "collapsing of historical distance" would have to come from their live work, and can be most fruitfully analyzed through the liturgical category of anamnesis, or perhaps the literary one of intertextuality. Read the post and see what you think. (Hat tip DB.)

Another post looks at Romans and "Breathe" together, focusing on the inter-connections between Spirit, cross-shaped existence (cruciformity), and community life. I find this a great dialogue and a very fruitful, thorough reading of the song. Check it out too.

Some Spider-related lyric comments

I've been enjoying the previews of the Spider-Man soundtrack (more, in fact, than I enjoyed the music when I saw the show). It seems to me that both "Pull The Trigger" and "DIY World" are telling examples of a genre to which Bono and Edge have been drawn musically and lyrically before: exposing evil by depicting it unflichingly. While "Trigger" is a way better listen, I think, and also has a major modern-day political undercurrent to it (let the reader understand), it sticks to some fairly standard U2 "sin" themes (betrayal, violence, shame, fear), whereas "DIY World" newly tackles a widespread contemporary sin, the desire to live without limits and endlessly to construct and reconstruct one's own identity/reality rather than accept the givens of creation. There is some stuff about accepting limits joyfully on NLOTH, but I'm not, at the moment, recalling any previous work that enters into the negativity of rejecting creation/natural law (if you can call it that) in an effort to expose that attitude as wrong.

I don't know how the function of "Boy Falls From the Sky" has changed from its role in the earlier 1.0 version, but I was sad to see that as the song has become less dark and less of an expression of sensing oneself to be a failure, one of my favorite couplets in the show is gone
"Savior, save yourself" - can't even get that right!
I used to use a single thread to cross the sky.
However, as I remarked to some friends, the new couplet
Lighting splits the sky and kisses your face;
Yours the sacrifice, yours the grace
lets the song still hang on to a nice Good Friday reference. ;-)

Freedom in letting go

Taking off from John 3, Nathan Hart shares a few thoughts on "Kite."

You give me something I can feel

It's pretty common knowledge that U2's "Vertigo" works with the story of the temptation of Christ in the desert,  (even going so far as to create a desert video) which makes Lent 1 (today) "Vertigo Sunday" for all churches that use a Western lectionary. If you haven't thought about those connections since HTDAAB came out, here is a quick refresher from a recent Lenten post on a blog called the:priest:hood.

I was interested to note here the comments about how Bono's lyrics suggest that the mind can wander but the heart will still make a reliable saving connection; that pairing rang freshly to me because I was talking with a student a week ago about how St. Ignatius suggests that this pattern is indeed the case for people who are already committed to God (i.e. the impulses of the heart tend to be more reflective of God's invitations, whereas it is overthinking or intellectualizing that draws committed people away from the Spirit.)  However, Ignatius says that the reverse is more likely the case for people who are, as he puts it, "going from bad to worse" (with them, he says, the heart is continually moved and swayed by sin whereas it is the mind that interrupts the decline by posing questions and suggesting fresh perspective).

There's also a Hebrew gematria reading of "catorce," so you can add that to the catalog of theories on the opening count-off.

The rule has been disproved

Steve Stockman has a nice reflection today on "Window in the Skies," a song around which his church is doing a themed service Sunday (if anyone happens to be in Belfast, check it out). I like his comments both on the movement from objective to subjective, and on the context of "the rule has been disproved" (I'd never asked myself what that line meant.)

guided by the drums of my creator

If you'd be interested in a transcription of some (fairly rough) original "Breathe" lyrics written from the perspective of Nelson Mandela and featuring a chorus about "Agape love forged like steel in the fire, here you go (scroll down).

Songs For A Healthy Soul

Steve Stockman publishes a seasonal reflection on U2's cover of "I Believe In Father Christmas."

Mini Mercy update

From tonight's video, it looks like the lyric is "nowhere else to go/and there's no one else[left?] to trust." (A bit clunky, and maybe I'm the only one whom this reminds of the end of John 6?) And pursuant to my question from yesterday, it looks like not "I" but "You" are, after all, still "silence searching for a sound."  I like the song better after this performance.

Your heart is my home

I debated whether or not to make any comments on the revised version of "Mercy," but decided that after 6 years of hype about the song, ignoring its first public performance probably would seem odd.  I didn't share the general passion for the original demo version that began circulating around the time of HTDAAB (a stab at the lyrics here); I found it overlong, indulgent, and repetitive, despite enjoying some of the couplets and the ending.  The new version (or the current iteration of it?), which was premiered in Zurich, has been tightened up considerably and made more, let's say, radio-friendly. I don't think we really know all the lyrics for sure yet (particularly the end of the chorus), but this effort is the best I've seen.

So just a couple things about the changes, just for fun.

The title of the song and several of the first lines that with it set the tone are unchanged: "I was drinking some wine/ And it turned to blood..." I really miss the extremely clever "a one and a zero," though. Still, I think the new version has a depth and stability that is absent in the demo -- both for musical reasons (the decision to go more guitar-driven, the clearer form, the tighter melodic moves) and textual ones.

If this wasn't a slip and the lyric does turn out to have been switched from "You're gravity searching for the ground, you're silence..." to "I'm silence, searching for a sound," I wonder if the importance of the image of "the sound" in NLOTH has had some influence.  U2 sometimes seem to define terms in a private lexicon by the way they've already used them elsewhere ("love and logic" for example); perhaps they think the noun "sound" is taken now, in a way it wasn't in 2005.  On the other hand, the first version was a nice, consistent depiction of the incarnational impulse we get in songs like "Stay" (abstract noun wishing to be concrete noun.)

It hits me that the refrain "Because because because we can, we must" may sort of be standing in for the 2004 sections about social justice that recycled some Bono-activism soundbites: "love is justice not charity," "love has got to be with the weak," etc.  However, with that theme now absent from the 2010 text and the song  focusing more intensely on the interior dynamic of weak, weedkiller "me" faced with "you," the concept of an external obligation seems to me to enter from nowhere.

I laughed at the audacity of the new chorus, with its "You’re gonna kill me and I wanna die/ We were meant for each other, you and I."  (A bit more intense than that sweet little Noel nouvelet allusion "Love is come again/I am gone again"  -- although there's plenty of death in that hymn text too!  However, it's refreshing not to have all those repetitions of "Love" throughout the song -- maybe that U2 code word has become a little tired.) Death is certainly not new on the U2 theme list, nor is imagery that veers dangerously close to equating suicide with spiritual surrender; however, as of the time of HTDAAB it was the rebirth aspect that was getting more emphasis. That whole album, as I've said elsewhere, is a kind of extended answer to Nicodemus' question, "Can a man go back into his mother's womb and be reborn?", and thus the original "I'm born again and again and again" ending fit in very well with that era.  But there's very little death on NLOTH.

Because this is 2010 and not 2004, I can't help reading those new lines in light of the mix NLOTH has between images of very workaday ordinary living as graced, and evocations of a kind of ecstatic mystical union undergirding this life.  At the U2 academic conference, Jeff Keuss alluded off the cuff to a citation he had seen mentioning Bono reading John of the Cross (which, sadly, he wasn't able to locate again afterwards), and I did pull up the Spiritual Canticle yesterday, with all its "being brought near death/by the arrows you receive/from that which you conceive of your Beloved.... Reveal your presence, and may the vision of your beauty be my death" stuff.  (And then there's "Why, since you wounded this heart, don't you heal it?"... is that a little reminiscent of "Magnificent"?)  Whatever.  Anyway, death is back, I guess, but this take has a sweep and assurance to it that's different from earlier uses.

"There's no one else to trust," at least until we get a better version of what those lyrics really are, reminded me of mewithoutYou's line about "There's no one here to believe but you" from "Every Thought a Thought of You."  Highly unlikely that there's an actual connection, though.

I'm looking forward to a few more performances and to getting a better sense of what's going to become of this near-mythical song.