No shame in it
U2 embraces nostalgia with tour based on iconic 1987 album
It finally happened.
U2, the last remaining big tent legacy band still flirting with relevance, has turned the corner into nostalgia.
The writing was on the wall a decade ago, when their 2009 album, “No Line On The Horizon,” failed to produce a viable hit.
It became undeniable when they attempted to give away its follow up, 2014’s poorly reviewed “Songs of Innocence,” by dropping it into a half billion iTunes accounts — free — only to find that instead of saying “thank you,” people wanted to punch them in the nose.
But it wasn’t official until the band formally announced its intention to re-create the magic of 1987 with a 30th anniversary tour to commemorate their iconic album “The Joshua Tree.”
You remember 1987: Ronald Reagan, “RoboCop,” Joan Collins, big hair, “The Cosby Show,” Greed is Good.
With the decision to embrace its past on a Joshua Tree tour that touched down at Toronto’s Rogers Centre Friday night, the Irish band turned into the one thing they swore they would never become: a musical jukebox.
There’s no shame in it. It happened to Elvis. It happened to the Rolling Stones. It would have happened to The Beatles had they stayed together another five years (if they didn’t go disco first).
But the linguistic contortions band members are using to justify their current tour as something other than the dreaded N-word — nostalgia — are laughably Onion-like in their po-faced sincerity.
“It’s like the album has just come out!” lead singer Bono (Paul Hewson) told Rolling Stone, apparently with a straight face.
“Nobody is talking about it as a historical thing. People are talking about its relevance now!”
If you believe this, you will probably also believe that TV alien Alf is poised for a comeback, “Who’s the Boss?” has spawned an underground cult of hipsters and that I have the same amount of hair on my head as I did when Rick Astley pranced about in music videos in Mom jeans and a trench coat like an emasculated British superspy.
“We’ve never given ourselves the opportunity to celebrate our past because we’ve always as a band looked forward,” the Edge told Rolling Stone a few months earlier, repeating the word “relevant” about six times.
“But I think we felt that this was a special moment, and this was a very special record. This is The Joshua Tree 2017. It’s not The Joshua Tree 1986.”
What he really means to say is: “Our album sales are in the toilet, and none of our aging Gen X fans will pay to see us perform new music. It was either this or the night shift at Arby’s.”
Don’t feel too bad. U2 is simply following a timeless showbiz tradition: give the people what they want.
And what people want is to relive their high school days, and maybe their early 20s — definitely not anything postcollege/
university, when the musical part of their brain simply clicks off.
The real question, frankly, is why nostalgia has become such a big taboo, treated with such cringing disdain by cultural gatekeepers?
Why can’t things exist side by side — old and new?
Where is it written that artists must consistently strive to break new ground, even if — as with U2, who shelved their new album indefinitely — inspiration is in short supply?
“We didn’t know if we could pull off a tour that honours ‘The Joshua Tree’ without it being nostalgic,” Bono, 57, told Rolling Stone, and you can almost hear the angst as he trips over that horrible word. “That’s an oxymoron.”
Part of what plagues veteran bands like U2 is the misguided perception that the moment they place the spotlight on older material, they may as well don velvet tuxedos and retire to a Vegas nightclub.
It’s a zero sum game, because the same people who lambaste them for wallowing in the past will slam every new album that comes out as feeble, irrelevant and out of touch. So what are the options?
swing for the fences to appease a handful of nerds guarding the sanctity of rock while your loyal fans desert you.
play to your followers, make boatloads of money, buy that island in the Pacific and be written off as a mercenary sellout.
How did pop music become so temporally constrained?
Is it being overseen by a cabal of high school gym teachers from the 1970s?
With the entire history of music available at the click of a button, and pop classics endlessly recycled in Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows, the pull of the past has never been stronger, past and present melded together as one.
And frankly, if you’re gonna commemorate a 30-year-old album, you’d be hard-pressed to beat “The Joshua Tree.”
Like The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” two decades earlier, U2’s swaggering cinematic masterpiece about the soul of America blew the lid off prevailing notions of what pop music could be and — in the era of Whitney Houston and John Cougar Mellencamp — pushed the boundaries in exciting new directions.
“With or Without You,” “Where The Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
With grit, soul and a social conscience, this defiant band of Irish upstarts staked their claim as the world’s biggest band, and for a time, lived up to the hype.
That they can’t repeat that success 30 years later is less surprising than the fact their ideas about what it means to be cool haven’t evolved since they started their run at the tail end of the punk era.
Back then it was about pushing the envelope, fighting The Man and not selling out, worthy goals when you’re young, hungry and have nothing to lose.
Trying to re-create this headspace in your 50s — as U2 attempted with mediocre results on their last few albums — is a fool’s game.
The truth, after 37 years in the spotlight, is that U2 will never be hip again, just like your dad will never fit into those bell-bottomed golf pants he bought during the energy crisis in 1974.
So forget about relevance, a dubious concept at the best of times.
Embrace your past, as Bruce Springsteen (who toured “The River”), Roger Waters (“The Wall”) and Patti Smith (“Horses”) have done. Own it. Be proud. Yes, it’s nostalgia. It’s also a masterwork that resonates 30 years later, so quit whining to the ever-enabling press corps. “We don’t want to ever be a heritage act!” insisted the Edge to The Hollywood Reporter a couple of years ago. “It might happen, but we’ll go kicking and screaming into that mode.”
As the last great classic rock band struggles with its place in the pantheon of history, history chuckles from the sidelines, knowing the band’s legacy has already been written.