Flight to Now and Then

This post will contain some spoilers from an article on the upcoming tour. If you don't want to see them, stop reading now.

The New York Times has a track record of revealing pertinent insights into U2's thinking in its profiles of the band, and this most recent article by Jon Pareles is no exception. It's a must-read to get a glimpse of how planning for the tour is progressing.

One point I found heartening and wanted to comment on was about the overall design of the flow of the show. As some may remember, I was a very big fan of No Line on the Horizon but not at all a fan of the live shows of the 360 tour. (Well, OK: The Claw! Montreal! But still.) I felt that for the first time the show was not a deliberate process through which we were led, but more of a series of songs; I also felt that the setlist did not feature the NLOTH songs enough to allow that album to find its voice and work out into the public whatever experience was latent within it.

So I was quite pleased to read this:

The band calls the walkway the divider stage because that’s what it does midway through the concert — turning into a barrier that separates the audience completely. The division is part of the concert’s underlying narrative, a passage from innocence to experience inflected by Irish memories....

The concert’s bleak midpoint — “the end of the innocence,” Bono calls it — is “Raised by Wolves,” a song from the album about a terrorist car bombing in Dublin that killed 33 people on May 17, 1974....

At the intermission, Bono said, half-seriously, “people will walk out into the aisles not buying T-shirts but having counseling, and wondering, ‘Where did the fun go?’ ” The second half of the concert breaks down the divide and, true to U2’s past, promises healing and love. 

Part of what U2 do best, in my mind, is design and preside at extended multisensory group experiences that mimic (or we might say give wider expression to) the kind of corporate spiritual process that happens in (good) liturgy. I missed being escorted through that process by them on the last tour, and am looking forward more to the concerts I'll be at in Chicago in June after reading this article. Lots of other interesting stuff in there too, if you don't mind the spoilers.

Songs of Innocence theological roundup

Readers may already have seen many of these articles, but just to get them in one place, here are comments from several writers who regularly treat the topic of U2 from a theological perspective. I'm on record, below, as saying that I find Songs of Innocence to have a different kind of focus than much of U2's work; some of these folks note the same thing in one way or another, others don't agree and see the same set of Christian preoccupations here that we've had in other albums.

Greg Clarke, for example, reads the opening track as about Christian conversion and only tangentially related to Joey Ramone.  Steve Harmon offers a typically thoughtful and subtle piece with some interesting comments on "Sleep Like A Baby Tonight." The folks at Mockingbird artfully take the album's delivery method as a metaphor for their laser focus, one-way love (grace). After that earlier Wordle, Mark Meynell looks to be planning on blogging on some individual songs; here's "Song for Someone," memorably called "opaquely specific."

There may be others I have missed. Do chime in in the comments if so.

A few comments on U2's Songs of Innocence

I expect anyone who reads this blog has seen a few other pieces dealing with U2's newest release by Christian reviewers already, and I'll try just to say a few words about my own reaction without rehashing what's already out there. I've been struck how many of the comments on Songs of Innocence by theologically-minded reviewers could have been written about any U2 album. And I suppose it is a truism that yes, of course, there are layers to any U2 song; YOU is often God juts as much as a woman; the eschatological horizon is ever-present. Who can argue?

But I have to say that my first impressions - and that's all these are - after a few listens to Songs of Innocence is of how specific and rooted and local this material is. I think on this album, far more than on any other I could name, a song about Joey Ramone is about Joey Ramone, and a song about meeting Ali Stewart is about meeting Ali Stewart. Is there a background, an overall outlook and vocabulary, shaped by the Christian narrative? Of course there is. But these songs strike me as being fairly far from vehicles for U2's traditional longing for the ultimate (or lament over its absence.) Sure, there are some stadium hooks that will provide wonderful group singalongs -- but is there anything with which 30,000 people can (consciously or unconsciously) cry out primal desire for God? I'm not hearing it.

It seems to me that before, U2's style has been to craft a specific shape that has its own style and message, but behind which we primarily read their general thirst for God and justice -- words and sounds that, whatever else they may mean, make the most sense when addressed to Jesus. That is not so with Songs of Innocence, to my mind. The words and sounds here make the most sense when addressed to the specific circumstances of 1970s Dublin on which they explicitly claim to reflect. They are shaped by a familiarity with the Biblical narrative, yes, and people will point that out endlessly as if it were news (which, honestly, it isn't by now, is it?)

So as one would expect, there are moments, phrases, that probably could not have been written other than by a mature Christian: "where there's no daylight there's no healing," "complete surrender: the only weapon we know," "crushed under the weight of a cross in a passion where the passion is hate" along with the persistent theodicy questions in "Raised by Wolves,"  and so on.  And there are the usual Biblical turns of phrase: "I'm naked and I'm not afraid,"  "I've got your life inside of me," "a long long way from your Hill of Calvary." But my strongest impression is that more than ever before these moments are not at all the main point; these are just the kind of phrases that are in U2's collective brain as they really write about something else entirely, something very personal and very specific. {Edit: I strongly suggest reading Camassia's comment below, which expands interestingly on this line of thought.}

I think the poetry is wonderful and the sounds are wonderful. I am very intrigued by the idea that there may be another album, or even two, on the way as part of this project. There is a part of me that still wishes they'd stopped with No Line, which far more encapsulates what I personally am looking for with U2. But does Songs of Innocence have integrity and beauty? Sure it does.

U2 Songs of Innocence Wordle

Remember Mark Meynell's fascinating Wordles of U2 albums at Quaerentia?  Well, here's one for Songs of Innocence. He writes, "it is interesting that knowledge and perception are standouts. An epistemological album? We’ll see."

U2 Songs of Innocence, post #2 of the day

"One minute you're reading it, next minute you're in it"
--Bono on the Bible in the liner notes

From the Miracle to the Troubles: U2 surprise album Songs of Innocence

Well, folks, it's here. While I digest, here's a quick guide from Rolling Stone and another from Neil McCormick.

New article on U2 via Baudrillard

Deane Galbraith, author of the fascinating "Fallen Angels" paper in Exploring U2, writes to say that he has a publication on U2 included in a new book out on theology and rock music, The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music: Songs of Fear and Trembling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.) It's edited by Mike Grimshaw, and the U2 chapter is "Meeting God in the Sound: The Seductive Dimension of U2's Future Hymns." In the article, Deane employs Jean Baudrillard's distinction between the production of meaning and the seductive capacity of texts, in order to "examine the role played by U2’s emphasis on the formal, mystical, and experiential aspects of their music, and how that emphasis coincides with a religious trend which since at least the 1960s can be located throughout the arts, popular music, and—in a perhaps surprising association—charismatic evangelical Christianity." The chapter focuses on No Line On The Horizon and the U2 360 tour, and includes detailed discussions of "White as Snow" and "Unknown Caller." I haven't had a chance to look it over, but I've read enough of Deane's work that I expect it to be good!

U2 Invisible, reactions

Friend of this blog Tim Neufeld offers some reflections on "Invisible" and its links to previous U2 material on his blog Occasio. 

I'm also indebted to another friend of this blog and fellow U2 book author Steve Harmon (who blogs at Ecclesial Theology) for the suggestion that the lyric may be "a body in a soul," which is, in Steve's words, "not a bad concise theological anthropology."

Catholic Moral Theology comments on the song's theme of making persons visible, seeing it as justice-related and tying it in with Pope Francis' words against exclusion in Evangelium Gaudium 53.

(Not) Invisible

Happy feast of the Presentation/Candlemas, folks.

I'm more than you know
I'm more than you see here
More than you let me be
I'm more than you know
A body and a soul
You don't see me but you will
I am not invisible
....I am here

It should be ordinary

A  nice piece by friend of this blog Mark Meynell on "Ordinary Love" for redeemingsound. Excerpt:

As the song suggests, [Mandela] showed a love for the other, the different, the opponent, that is unparalleled in the modern world. Which ironically makes it an extraordinary love. But the fact that it should be ordinary seems to be the point.  This is the song’s key refrain: “We can’t reach any higher/fall any further if we can’t feel/deal with ordinary love.”