Stung U2 retreats to success of Joshua Tree
Rock band’s decline means return to bulletproof classic will bring on the adoration
U2 might be one of the most popular and most bankable rock acts in the history of the genre, but U2 is also ferociously needy.
U2 wants to be loved. U2 needs to know, to hear that it is still loved. This is why frontman Bono, whose outsized ego no doubt harbours an unendingly voracious appetite for approval, has made a habit of asking, “So, are we the biggest band in the world?” from the stage during past tours. He’s like the endangered “screamapillar” that turned up in the Simpsons’ backyard a few seasons ago with instructions for its care that included “without constant reassurance, it will die.” Adoration sustains him.
It must have stung, then, when the masses turned on U2 in the wake of the band’s (business) decision to “gift” half a billion iTunes users with a free download of its last album, “Songs of Innocence,” in September 2014. As it turned out, not all of those people thought it tremendous good fortune to find a new U2 album — and a mediocre one, at that — on their hard drives one morning.
The band’s generosity was seen in many quarters as foisting “malware” upon the public, and the ensuing online proliferation of stepby-step “how to” instructions on how to delete the remarkably unkillable “Songs of Innocence” from one’s iTunes library was probably not as hilarious to the band as it was to everyone else. I mean, the members of U2 still had their buckets of Apple money to console them, but their egos had to take a bit of a bruising.
This is, one suspects, why the promised sequel to “Songs of Innocence,” “Songs of Experience,” has yet to make an appearance while U2 this year has turned its attention backward in time to the 30th anniversary of its critical and commercial high-water mark, “The Joshua Tree.”
The Irish quartet will play the record in its entirety before some 50,000 fans at the Rogers Centre on Friday on a tour supporting the recent “deluxe” box-set reissue of that landmark 1987 album — the second reissue of “The Joshua Tree” to come along in the past 10 years — that had, according to Billboard, already grossed a whopping $62-million 10 dates after its May 12 kickoff at Vancouver’s BC Place stadium. The jaunt has already been extended into the fall. U2 is secure in the knowledge that it is still loved.
Not that 2015’s “Innocence + Experience” tour was a washout or anything, but the band’s Air Canada Centre shows in July of that year definitely had an air of trying too hard.
It was as if, after nearly two decades of diminishing returns in the studio, the band could sense its once very real importance waning. And is has been waning for some time; the wheels came off with 1997’s “Pop” and have mostly stayed off since, “Beautiful Day” notwithstanding, reaching a proper nadir with 2009’s listless “No Line on the Horizon” — the first real bomb in the U2 catalogue and the album for which the gift of “Songs of Innocence” was probably, in part, to atone.
So what to do next? Flash back to when you were at your most important, to the 25-million-selling record that rocketed you to stadium status for the first time.
It’s not a bad gambit, actually. Whatever U2 might have done to irritate us in the years hence, “The Joshua Tree” remains an untouchable classic and the closing Great Statement of its first phase. There were excellent records before — 1983’s “War” and 1984’s gorgeous “The Unforgettable Fire” are just as good, albeit less refined — and there were excellent records to follow with the bold stylistic remodellings of 1991’s “Achtung Baby” and 1993’s underrated “Zooropa,” but the unapologetically grandiose “The Joshua Tree” was the one that caught the zeitgeist. And it’s aged very well.
You might not need to hear “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You” ever again, but those gargantuan singles make for one of the most striking introductory suites ever laid down on record and, amazingly, “The Joshua Tree” mostly maintains that same standard of quality for the rest of its running time. The grinding “Bullet the Blue Sky” and the grim late-album tirade “Exit” rank among the most powerful pieces of music the band has ever recorded, while the aching, opiated ballad “Running to Stand Still” and the elegiac closer “Mothers of the Disappeared” — one of the tracks that bears the most audible stamp of visionary production collaborators Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois — stand as two of the most beautiful.
I don’t know how the subtleties of the latter three will play in a baseball stadium, but they’re definitely worthy of exhumation. “Bullet the Blue Sky” is always a live killer, but its Reagan-era themes of warlike American bullying abroad should gain new fire with an even bigger bully in the White House.
So, yes, this is probably the best thing U2 could do right now.
“We didn’t know if we could pull off a tour that honours ‘The Joshua Tree’ without it being nostalgic. That’s an oxymoron,” Bono recently told Rolling Stone. “It’s like the album has just come out. Nobody is talking about it as an historical thing. People are talking about its relevance now.”
Good news for U2 in the moment, then, but “Songs of Experience” is going to have a hard act to follow after this trip down memory lane. If the band can’t pull it back together in the studio this time, people might start talking about U2’s lack of relevance now.