U2: Now What?
What do you think we should do?”
On a cloudy afternoon in Dublin, U2 isn’t acting much like the band with all the answers. Instead, the members of the group are acting more like four guys who are themselves trying to answer a few important questions, and the main question — which Bono poses within minutes of the time he sits down in a pub and orders a pint of Guinness — is what this band should do on the heels of Rattle and Hum.
If they don’t have an answer, at least they finally have the free time to think about it. That’s something that’s been in short supply for the past two years, from the release of their 1987 breakthrough album, The Joshua Tree, through the subsequent international tour, to the recording and filming of the controversial two-record set and motion picture Rattle and Hum.
“The last few years,” says Bono, with his customary intensity — but also with a distracted air that suggests he’s groping to put a rather deep-seated confusion into words — “have been such a merry-go-round that when you get off and you’re on dry land, it keeps spinning. And we haven’t quite come to terms with being at home. I have to be strapped in at night, you know? There’s this thing of wanting to move….”
He trails off, then looks around at his three band mates. “Wanderlust, I suppose,” he says. “That’s been with the group for a few years, in many ways, and I suppose it’s what Rattle and Hum is about. Not just in terms of locations — towns and cities and places — but musical wanderlust. So now we’re in detox.
“We would be lying, I think, if we said that everything is okay these days. Everything’s not okay, you know? Even talking about U2, we really don’t know how to talk about U2 anymore.”
Bono shrugs. “I think it’s really important to preface your article by saying that one of the reasons we haven’t done many interviews lately is that we don’t really have that much to say.”
You voted them Artist of the Year and Band of the Year for the second year in a row, but lots of you are going to complain that we put them on the cover. A good number of letters, in all likelihood, will say the same thing: “Not them again!”
As Rattle and Hum the movie heads for videocassette and Rattle and Hum the album continues its stay in the Top Ten, it’s clear that U2’s problem is more than simple overexposure. After years of favorable fan and press reaction to the band’s music; years of dramatic stage performances; years in which underground credibility turned into mass success; years of articles based on intense conversations with a hyperbolic, socially minded lead singer and his three more retiring band mates; years of grainy black-and-white photos of deadly serious, brooding faces, growing from dewy-cheeked youth to bestubbled adulthood; after all that, the U2 backlash has set in.
It always arrives, sooner or later, with this level of success; just ask old hands like Madonna and Michael Jackson or the newly dethroned Bruce Springsteen. But in U2’s case, the backlash may have hit harder and faster than usual, and it also may be harder to shake off. And that’s due, simply enough, to the way this band has always conducted itself.
From their debut with Boy nine years ago, the members of U2 have made it clear that they are dead serious, extraordinarily ambitious and convinced of the importance of what they achieve — or, more accurately, the importance of what they are trying to achieve. Emerging from the high-energy, fraying integrity and fashionable nihilism of a rapidly fragmenting punk scene, these three young Christians and the token nonbeliever wanted to make rock & roll matter again. Even back then, Bono was the kind of frontman who’d return a compliment like “Great album!” with a serious “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” — and what originally sounded ingenuous and endearing slowly became problematic. At the same time, though, more and more people began to agree that U2’s albums were great. Two years ago, the band released the critically applauded, top-selling, Grammy-winning album The Joshua Tree, went on its biggest international tour and had its all-but-official coronation as the World’s Biggest Rock Band.
Enter the Rattle and Hum juggernaut: a two-record set, part live versions of old songs and part new tunes recorded in the studio; a major motion picture, complete with a big push from the hottest Hollywood movie studio of the past few years; splashy benefit premières in Madrid, Dublin, London, New York and Los Angeles; a collection of songs written by, written about, performed by or recorded with the help of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King and Billie Holiday; a work that includes shouted declarations that the band is stealing “Helter Skelter” back from Charles Manson, that it’s armed with “three chords and the truth”; a souvenir book to accompany the whole thing, which, with Eamon Dunphy’s Unforgettable Fire, makes two officially commissioned U2 books within a year; T-shirts sold in theater lobbies; and an ABC television special about the making of Rattle and Hum, featuring interviews and behind-the-scenes footage linked by Robbie Robertson’s narration, which practically canonizes the four band members.
Trouble is, the television special never aired. (According to Rattle and Hum director Phil Joanou, the show was delivered to ABC too late for a timely airing.) And while the book sold well, the movie performed about as well as you can expect a concert movie to perform: it had a good opening week, but its business fell by half each subsequent week before it quickly dropped out of theaters.
In the end, the movie will no doubt recoup its $5 million cost and be remembered as a dramatic concert documentary that contributed to the air of hubris surrounding U2. Designed as a look at U2 as the band encountered America during the Joshua Tree tour, Phil Joanou’s movie plays like a homage to U2’s importance, from the backstage scene in which B.B. King tells Bono how heavy his lyrics are to the lovingly photographed concert footage. The performances are often riveting, and the camera work is remarkable, but the finished product seems more self-serving than rock films like The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense.
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