In the evolution of U2’s music, many things become clear if seen in the light of the new world tour. The key passage is the one from the penultimate album, Pop, released in the spring of 1997, and the last one, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, released at the end of October 2000.
In the evolution of U2’s music, many things become clear if seen in the light of the new world tour. The key passage is the one from the penultimate album, Pop, released in the spring of 1997, and the last one, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, released at the end of October 2000.
A brief account of the events: before Pop was released, part of the audience and the press expressed doubts toward U2’s possible fall in style. The fear was due to the album title, but also to the contribution of Howie B., wizard of electronic dance music, to the production. “Discothèque,” the single that anticipated the album, fanned the flame, starting from its title. The release of the album did not confirm these expectations: the electronic components of Pop were not disturbing, especially after Zooropa (1993), and it was clear that U2 had not committed to techno music. Pop was followed by a world tour, the “PopMart,” which amplified those special effects (wide screens, lights, electronics, enlarged proportions) that had been features of the previous tour, the “ZooTV.”
The hard-core U2 fans were not certainly disturbed by the changes in style. It must be said that Pop even had an unexpected success in this circle: enthusiasm for both the album and the new tour’s concerts. Nevertheless, after the “PopMart” the Irish band wanted to project an even different image of itself, dominated by a spirit of retrenchment and return to the past. At first it sounded as a self-excuse for the excess of Pop, although without denying anything of what had been done: just a way of reassure the “historical” fans (the ones bound to the production of the ‘80s) without upsetting the hard core (fans that might be called “absolute,” those who follow the band in its whole evolution). Result of this change of perspective was first of all the double album The Best of 1980-1990 & B-Sides, of 1998; following, the launch of the last album – a sort of “long launch,” which started at least one year in advance, with official and unofficial news.
Now, at the end of the “Elevation Tour 2001,” we can estimate what the last two albums have represented in terms of production of meaning. Pop could be called spiritual in a negative way. On the one hand, a musical system that parts from the U2 tradition, as the top of a process started in 1991 with Achtung Baby and pushed farther in Zooropa, but that at the same time sums up and elaborates the musical features of the last two or three decades. On the other hand, lyrics that leave, at least at first sight, the classical themes of love, social issues and inner self, and become fragments of a life that does not resemble the real one. Worse than that, it looks like an upside-down world, where nothing is at the right place, where negative elements become source of pleasure and accomplishment. Truth lies in appearance, wealth is the top value, Santa Claus (Father Christmas) is a beggar and the madonna a drug dealer, while Christ, caught in other business, does not answer even if invoked. This is just the way the world that is presented works, and no judgments are given. This is why we can speak of negative spirituality: it’s not a lack of spirituality, but rather a search for the divine in those places and in those behaviors where it usually would not be found.
Symptoms of these kinds of themes were already present, although less consistent, in Achtung Baby and Zooropa, which nonetheless kept a sort of clear distinction with the real world, or with a world that followed the rules. Pop, on the contrary, works as an allegory, which, in order to express what has to be demonstrated, must first of all show the fallibility of the world as we know it – and the possible existence of an alternative world, which exhibits and amplifies all the features that could bring to its destruction.
The last album, in itself, resizes Pop’s excess. Rhythm and sound are generally more modest, sometimes even expectable, the refrains are catchy and much more “pop,” and there is an overall sense of greater uniformity. What in Pop was variable, different, sometimes irritating, in All That You Can’t Leave Behind becomes soft, similar, and above all intimate. On the lyrics side, then, there is little room for doubts of interpretation: what is built (or what is thought as possible) is a new world based on past mistakes, on the ruins of a wrong life that once again is sifted and judged, clearly compared to the way things should be and to what it might have been in an ancient golden age. Zooropa’s “Dirty Day” becomes, passing through Pop, “Beautiful Day,” sign of a change in perspective.
Considering the last two albums as an evolution, the links between them are much stronger than it seems. All That You Can’t Leave Behind is not a return to the past as it was predicted, just as Pop was not an indulgence to techno as it had been feared. The pivot song between the two of them is “Elevation” (which has also given its name to the world tour, of which has opened every single concert), which reminds of the old “Discothèque” in both music and lyrics. The main difference is that if everything in Pop aimed downwards, in a sort of “descent to hell,” in All That You Can’t Leave Behind the eyes are always turned to the sky. It speaks of elevation, ascent, opening and escape from the dark (blossoming flowers, doves, travels, kites), and it does so with intimate, discreet tones, that only from time to time – and particularly in the pivot song, “Elevation” – let go to something more intense. In the end, U2’s new world works the opposite way of Pop, but it’s totally consistent with it.
The stage of the last tour was also in tune with this vision: getting rid of the needless in order to give prominence to what matters – while the “PopMart,” market of appearance, gave prominence to everything, because everything, either positive or negative, had meaning and value. What matters is now physically represented by those few hundreds of people enclosed in the heart-shaped runway: in case it had not been clear before, this is the end of it all, and even the meaning of the album title is explained first of all in the cover graphics by the heart in a suitcase, and then in the lyrics of one song, “Walk On,” that says, “Love is not the easy thing, the only baggage you can bring, is All That You Can’t Leave Behind.”
There is no change of mind, then, in U2’s music. There is, rather, an evolution that connects the young and bare rock sound of Boy (1980) to the complex and sophisticated sounds of the albums of the ‘90s. It’s a rational evolution, considering those four years between the last two albums, even in that sort of revival of simplicity that’s the feature of All That You Can’t Leave Behind. A simplicity that lies not just in the way meaning is produced, which can’t part from and forget the recent past, but rather in the meaning itself, now more linear and direct.
The only reproach, so to speak, that could be moved to U2 concerns the choice of a lower level of risk taken with this album than with the previous two. In an overall perspective, Pop distilled everything good that had been done in the past, and proposed it so that it was necessary to make an interpretative effort in order to understand and assimilate it. The ease with which the first singles have been played on the radio proves, on the other hand, that the new album is less demanding, “drinkable” in a single gulp, even from an uncomfortable seat while an airplane takes us far above, far away.