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.

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.

Return. The call. To home.

Josh Hurst at The Hurst Review, where I was part of a U2 retrospective just before NLOTH came out, invited me to engage in an email conversation on the new album and publish the results. Our extended dialogue is up today if you'd like to see what we came up with.
(You also might enjoy reading some earlier comments from Josh on "I'll Go Crazy If...."

Like a crown

I've enjoyed throwing out ideas on NLOTH this week, and I want to wind up this series of posts with thoughts about some of the songs that are not as obviously "character" pieces. I've talked a few times about this vibe of "settledness"; part of that was on the very large scale of the Sound ("God is, period"), but these songs tend to show us settledness in a more domestic, pragmatic, incarnate setting.

The propulsive sunburst of "Magnificent" is retrospective in tone, as the narrator looks back over his life and names it as having been claimed by God from "my first cry," while also commiting to continue a life of service and adoration "till we die." (The "living sacrifice" line "I give you back my voice" is quite poignant, even more so if it happens to conjure for you another close-to-the-bone promise from 28 years ago: "If I had anything, anything at all, I'd give it to you.")

The middle of the album features a three-song pop/domestic set, which comes off to me as picturing a couple at ease with each other in a long relationship. In "Crazy," they're mature enough to have accepted that the sudden victories we dream of in youth nearly always "come slow" and are still far from complete, but they're reminding each other that their quest to get "all the way to the light" is assured of success, and vow to keep generating "sparks" as they go. They look back down the "mountain" from partway up to offer reassurance to those daunted by early stages of the climb, and encouragement to the rest of us to value those "boys and girls" too. (Here's another way to say what I mean about "settledness" here: If this song had been written by U2 in the 80s, it probably would have treated the quest and the climb as demanding uncompromising urgency: tonight! tomorrow's too late! -- yet now the actual topic of record is taking a fun break from it with your lover.)

"Boots" is that break, the "fun fair" at which the reliability of "love and community" proves its ability to "cast out all fear" and overcome the nervous environment; what's actually eternal is not "a bomb scare" but the "laughter" of "[real] joy," which to quote a recent Bono interview is "the spilling over of a life well-lived" (back to "Crazy" and forward to "Comedy" and "Breathe" to see what a well-lived life looks like.)

I've said elsewhere that I spoke on "spiritual health for social justice workers" the day before first hearing "Stand Up Comedy," and one of my initial thoughts was that I could have just played it for the audience, and said "If you sound like this after 33 years, you're doing fine." Bringing that filter to it, you could say that all the standard spiritual pitfalls for people passionate about justice are handily disposed of in this song. The call to take action is undiminished from earlier U2 work motivated by outrage, but now it is pictured as empowered by an unassailable joy (again) that, not being dependent on seeing achieved outcomes, is far more sustainable than anger. Action is also set in the context of non-anxious perspective on one's own flaws, hapless "small child"/"high heels" ego, and hypocrisies. Another part of sustainability is "getting over certainty" (in favor of a more spacious assurance that the Divine is not so feeble and fragile that everything depends on how hard we "help God" get us what we think is right.)

And then there's "Breathe." While the verses are an onslaught of distractions and chaos, everything else radiates spacious ease. It's hard not to just quote the whole thing: "got a love you can't defeat," "there's nothing you have that I need," "I found grace, it's all I found, and I can breathe." Not to mention that culminating "wear them like a crown" line you could cite about a hundred Bible verses for. But all this is not just easy triumphalism; it's rooted in the "every day" task of getting up and doing what needs to be done in a world that is as crazy as those verses. It all adds up to a song -- and an album -- which almost makes me want to say, "If U2 were to quit after this, it would be all right."

Counting down to.....?

Pulled out of that last post to avoid getting too off topic: I mentioned that there's a frequently-remarked error in the official lyrics to "Moment of Surrender" and that I think it may be explained by the fact that "MoS" and "Unknown Caller" began as a story that flows from one song to another. The official lyric sheet ends "counting down to the Pentecost," but Bono very clearly sings "counting down till the pain would stop."

If we think in terms of a cross-song narrative, "counting down to the Pentecost" would fit as a description of the character who ends "MoS" having surrendered to God, but is still waiting for the direct revelation (i.e., his own Pentecost) that happens in "Unknown Caller." I wonder if that concept may be where the line came from. But U2 didn't really stick as strongly with the 3rd person character premise for the album as they had originally thought they might -- and if you're not using it deliberately to send a character into the next song's story, the line about Pentecost makes less sense. So my guess is they replaced it with "pain would stop," which is far more appropriate to the vibe of "MoS" by itself. But that news didn't get to the official lyric people -- just the kind of thing that often seems to happen with the many errors in U2's printed song texts.

[Update: commenter Rhiannsu below adds the helpful information that if you bought the deluxe box set, you actually have the correct lyric, as opposed to what's on U2.com]

Moments and characters

I talked in the last post about how NLOTH seems to have both a settled confidence in God's availability (as distinct from "certainty" about religious ideas) and a sense of being at mature peace with life. It interests me that while we've heard Bono speak from that kind of place in interviews over the past 7-8 years, U2's music has not reflected it as much. (I suppose it's sort of there on HTDAAB: you might name "A Man and A Woman," which was handicapped by sounding like a 60s toothpaste commercial, and we hear moments of it in other songs.) But I wonder if, in part, the use of 3rd party characters on NLOTH helps the outlook we've heard in interviews come into view: when Bono stops singing so directly about himself, we paradoxically get a clearer view of how he thinks the world works. What I mean is that we witness deliberate choices to set up situations that turn out to be (sorry to keep beating up on this reviewer's phrase) the kind many people "wouldn't bother to consider."

So let's look at a couple of those. "Moment of Surrender" and "Unknown Caller" are both songs in which the narrator began life as a 3rd party character -- the same character, in fact. (Incidentally I think this may explain a frequently-remarked error in the official lyrics, but I'll put that in a separate little post.) The situation examined in "Moment of Surrender" is exactly what its title says -- that precise moment at which someone reaches the point of giving up to God, in this case from the dregs of a life gone bad. And "Unknown Caller," which for my money is perhaps the most sublime spiritual document U2 have ever produced, pictures the Divine response to the previous song's surrender, although brilliantly choosing to focus just before the character has made meaning out of the liminal experience of his phone starting to talk to him. (A few minutes later in the story, and the title would have had to be "God Calling.") But U2 don't want to show us the certainties we humans make of religious experience after the fact; they want to show us actual religious experience in all its imperious, weird, transformative power. (PASSWORD: YOU.) The mere decision to identify and enshrine that moment makes the hair on my arms stand on end, as does Edge's attempt to play the ineffable after the Caller goes to work following his Psalm 46-esque last word: DON'T MOVE OR SAY A THING

"White As Snow" is another 3rd party song which situates us in a moment -- in this case the deathbed, with the narrator's life having come down to wondering if he can still recapture his early experience of "forgiveness" from and knowledge of "a love divine" through "the lamb as white as snow."

So three choices, three narrative situations: the moment someone surrenders to God, the moment God responds, and the moment of accounting before God's face at death. It's probably no wonder all that stuff would bore people like our straw-man "bother to consider" friend whom I keep quoting. But for me these choices reveal a distillation of life's true questions; they highlight which are the moments that really matter in the end.

Next full post: a few comments on the songs which seem to be less 3rd-party.

Dhikr

So, we continue on with this series of posts. (BTW, readers, thanks for having the courtesy to hat-tip when you borrow material from here.) My theory about why a less apophatic and more immersive sacred "sound" comes to the fore on NLOTH is that in part, it may have to do with the album's initial birthing during the World Festival of Sacred Music in Fez. Comments about that history from critics have focused on how the songs don't sound North African, but I think they're missing the point. What if the real influence was not particular musical gestures, but something much closer to the mission of the Festival?

A little background: Along with formal concerts from sacred musicians of many religions, this article talks about how the "real draw" in Fez is the opportunity to experience nightly Sufi dhikr ("remembrance of God"), ecstatic musical worship in various styles. (Here's a clip of one of those sessions from Fez 2007 when U2 were in town; more can be found by clicking around.) This Muslim mystical tradition has a developed understanding of sound itself as a medium of direct contact with God (as well as, incidentally, a long history of something U2 also have a long history of: using romantic metaphors for the experience of that contact).

Musicians from the Sufi brotherhoods were invited into the studio with U2 along with Gnawa players (by the way, I do think the bass on "Moment of Surrender" has a fairly Gnawa sound.) More recently both Bono and Larry Mullen have invoked "Sufi singing" in interviews (and you could argue that the Sufi use of unison chorus, which you can hear above, turns up all over the place on NLOTH, as do Sufi-esque melismas.) So I wonder if NLOTH doesn't actually bear many traces of Fez, in the form of fruit from a broader, cross-cultural experience of shared sound as a vehicle for the Divine in the midst of a songwriting residency.

That's some of what I think is behind this sacred "sound" you don't just hear, but can immersively go "inside." So in view of that, I'm turning over the notion that NLOTH may be the beginning of a subtle shift away from U2's dazzled wordless foretaste mode, the wellspring of which I've always assumed lay in the band's early charismatic formation (let the reader understand). I'm not saying wordless vowels are absent; in fact, there are probably more "oh"s on NLOTH than usual! What I mean is more like this: U2 often used to give us quite a lot of lament alternating with dazzled foretastes, or the two married into a kind of ache. But there is not much aching on NLOTH. The album is more settled and assured on both ends; its quest is to dwell in reality, not drum up drama, and yet it seems more confident than ever that there is a realm of very palpable connection with God available now as well. This embodied confidence is quite distinct from intellectual, abstract "certainty," which we are instead supposed to be "getting over."

NLOTH's evocations of God's vibrant presence (and that's where we're going in the next post, I think) seem to me not to be framed so much as the awe of one who is suddenly undone by a gift of inbreaking grace even "under the trash" or "when there's all kinds of chaos." They're still every bit as celebratory and broadly inviting, but now they rest on an unsurprised, grateful security, in a spaciousness that allows us to "breathe": This is how it is.

Born of sound

Having thrown out some general context in the past couple posts, I want to move on now to making more specific comments on No Line On The Horizon.

As has been pointed out already, it seems clear to me that "the sound" is one central metaphor. We have three "let me in the sound" requests, as well as "I found grace inside a/the sound" and "people born of sound," all of which have an essentialist, palpable ring (especially if you want to argue for a vague John 3 echo in the last one.) Along with these, there are more evocations of sound per se as granting some kind of mysterious access to the ultimate: "hear the universe," "roar on the other side of silence," and "the rhythm of my soul... that yearns to be released from control." And don't forget this album's ineffable soundscapes themselves, such as the one that begins "Unknown Caller." Because of all that, I am more inclined to understand "sound" in NLOTH as pointing to mystical communion with God now, rather than as looking forward to songs sung by others in heaven.

While we also get several specific mentions of people themselves vocalizing ("Sing your heart out," "I was born to sing for you," "listen for me, I'll be shouting") it's the sense of sound as sacred essence that intrigues me here, as if Pop's "looking for a sound that's gonna drown out the world" quest has been fulfilled in a sound-baptism by immersion on NLOTH.

So I think I'd like to at least play with a distinction. I'm certainly not positing a major disconnect, but I'm wondering if we could say that the "sound" metaphor represents something of a shift? Previously, have U2's evocations of eschatological fullness not tended more towards the apophatic? Their work has often reached, yearning, to that ecstatic limit, and then there are no words for what is coming. "I try to sing this... but." "You know I believe it, but I still haven't found..." with "what I'm looking for" left unspoken. "Mysterious Ways" (at least live): You can hear it, and see the celebration, but the lyrics are over by then. In fact, at a lot of these foretaste moments in U2 there is only inarticulate vocalization. And for the quintessential example, as glorious a moment of fulfillment as it is, the song is called "Where the Streets Have No Name," and they traditionally blind us at all its high points. (Any fans of Pseudo-Dionysius and his dazzling darkness out there?)

As a side comment: If you buy the idea, it would be interesting to discuss whether this instinct for apophaticism at the spiritual apex is part of what has made U2 so accessible to secular listeners.

In my next post, I'll share some thoughts about why this more immersive and less apophatic "sound" metaphor might have come to the fore, and either then or later I'll get to how I see it tying in with the settled Sitz-im-leben I mentioned earlier.

In my last post I talked about the perception that NLOTH deals with "subjects [many people] wouldn't bother to consider," and I commented that I am very interested both in these subjects that U2 are considering and in the way they are considering them. But let me clarify (in case the focus of this blog might contribute to any confusion on this point) that by this I do NOT mean I've been hoping to hear U2 sing about God more, or that I like NLOTH because it has many Christian references. That doesn't seem like a very reliable criterion for assessing art to me. As far as I can see, the band have brought the same basic worldview to all their work over the past three decades, whether or not recognizably Christian language was being used or identifiably "religious" topics were being addressed.

Now, naturally I am touched to hear any fellow believer giving wholehearted love to Someone I also love -- but I personally don't feel any special excitement purely upon discovering that U2 have chosen to record a song with that focus. ("Magnificent," for example, did little for me on my first several hearings, and I still don't really enjoy "Yahweh.") I don't much care how many times the texts directly quote the Bible along the way, either (although being able to recognize such allusions when they come is guaranteed to increase your appreciation of U2 songs). But what I do care about, and what so far seems to me to be near the heart of NLOTH, is seeing them (to paraphrase a former homiletics professor of mine) take the issue/moment/situation they want to present and integrate it with everything they have so far learned as Christians about the universe.

It seems to me that what U2 have to give at this point is not "We can be cooler than the Killers" or "We consider Fordham students our contemporaries" (which made me cringe on Friday). What they have to give in their chosen genre is a much larger than usual pool of resources for that integration.

A rock band shouldn't....

While I see the main task of this blog as tracking theologically-informed discussion of U2's work, I think I am ready to take a break from being a guide to others' Christian or Biblical reflections on No Line on the Horizon and make a few posts myself this week. Not a review, but some things that have struck me personally.

First, a more general comment on the black and white reactions to the album. One of the many very negative reviews complained that throughout it, "Bono usually sounds like he's speaking for us on subjects we wouldn't bother to consider." This comment has come to mind several times as I've gotten to know an album which definitely speaks for me, and on subjects that I consider constantly -- subjects which in my worldview are so central that I can't think of many I'd rank higher.

Now in one sense that disconnect is nothing new. It's no secret that some of the preoccupations traditionally seen as appropriate to pop culture have never been of much artistic interest to U2, whereas some of the preoccupations seen as gauche or taboo draw them in -- nor is it a secret that many people can't stand that fact. If you are one of those people, my guess is that you will especially hate NLOTH. As I have said to some friends, this is U2 distilled, 120-proof U2, synthesizing their previous work and considering very U2ey subjects in a very U2ey way. (As opposed to in a "classic U2 sound" way or a "the 90s redux" way or a "gotta get on the radio" way. See, I also think people who prefer to interpret the band through only one of the diverse titles under which they get pegged down -- U2 of the Joshua Tree, U2 of ZooTV, U2 of the Stadiums -- are less likely to enjoy this album. You gotta accept it all this time.)

But the particular NLOTH red flag to the bull, I'm beginning to think, is not just its distillation of the essence of U2 (bad enough!), but also its, if you'll forgive a technical Biblical studies term, Sitz-im-leben. This album speaks quite clearly from where the band actually stand: men nearing 50, mostly with long-term families, long-term experience in discipleship, long-term experience in staying in community, and enough perspective to have not just sorted through priorities but also reflected on different modes of addressing them. Statistically, this Sitz-im-leben is pretty rare in the West these days, and vanishingly tiny among the rock 'n' roll world. How many people today create or consume pop culture from the context of even one 33-year relationship, let along a whole gang of them? How many people today create or consume pop culture from the context of a complex spiritual worldview that's been slowly ripening in subtlety and breadth of application for even one decade, let alone three? If you already really like U2, you'll follow them there anyway and see what's on offer, but if you don't....

So no wonder listeners to whom that Sitz-im-leben is foreign, who don't resonate with its insights or imagine it having a valid place in rock 'n' roll, would find connecting with No Line on the Horizon very difficult, and see its whose essence as uninteresting and remote from anything anyone normal would "bother to consider."

This doesn't explain all the negative press, but I think it explains some, and really, it isn't that big a surprise. One of the reactions to U2 has always been "a rock band shouldn't do this." But in the end, haven't their violations of the list of things "a rock band shouldn't do" been the source of their power? From my vantage point, what's going on now is one more example.

Infinity's a great place to start

I don't do album reviews here, but as with How to Dismantle I do want to reserve the right to write a bit on some of No Line's songs. Nowhere near ready to do that yet, but one thought that keeps hovering around my mind is the level of self-differentiated emotional and spiritual maturity that shines through. There's the U2 joy, but it's not "here's our trademark joy pitched so as to get on the radio." There are what everyone calls U2 spiritual themes, but not packaged with careful accessibility for listeners. There are killer riffs, but not weighed and measured out across tracks like a recipe.

The thing I keep feeling tempted to say, but am wary of saying because it's far too early, is: perhaps we are finally seeing a band nearing age 50, with 33 years longevity as a community and (for most of them) a similar longevity as followers of Christ, at mature peace with themselves and the lives they've made, writing out of that place uncensored. I don't feel like this record is looking nervously over its shoulder at bands who are 25 years younger, at listeners who have a different or no spiritual grounding, or at fans who might not be interested in the kinds of epiphanies, brass-tacks convictions, and caution-to-the-winds self-definitions one has at midlife. I may be forming the opinion that NLOTH is just speaking from where it really lives. Out of the kind of truth human beings only get to after many years -- complex, unshakeable, multilayered, able to laugh at itself, irenically sure of what it relies on. The kind of truth U2 have often heretofore reserved for sharing in brief nuggets during interviews.

That's what I feel tempted to say. But I'm not sure we can say it for a long time yet.