How about dismantling U2 and leaving them dismantled for 2005 and beyond? Can we do that? Their one-chord-per-song bombast was overbearing crap when it was post-punk adolescent posturing. The solemnity of the marketing that attended the release of The Joshua Tree was worse. Then came the self-serious crapulence of Rattle and Hum (and why wasn’t there a sequel, Hum and Hummer?) wherein Paul Hewson and David Evans hoped to introduce a generation of people to musical titans and genres that fell outside the confines of, well, overbearing, adolescent hectoring with a single chord per song. But they just keep grinding onward. Cancuklehead video channel MuchMusic has been running promos nonstop for a special “exclusive” interview with Hewson and drummer Larry Mullen, Junior about this latest record, which will sound exactly like every other record before it and exactly like the hundreds still to come, each of which will sound like every other U2 record.
U2 in general — and Bono, Holy Bono in particular — try so hard to be good, to be with it, to be groovy and politically correct and on the side of good. But their work is to music what McDonald’s is to food. They make the same thing over and over and over again, which is probably why a lot of people like it: it will never surprise or shock or take an unexpected turn. Maybe musical theorists who appreciate the work of people like Philip Glass and Steve Reich get a kick out of U2. Their career has been like Reich or Glass pieces that go on for twenty or thirty minutes and in which single notes in a chord sequence are changed one by one. By the time you get to the end of the piece, the “deedle-a, deedle-a-deedle-a” in, say, A flat major has mutated into “doodle-a-weedle-a” in D minor or something. Maybe that’s what U2’s doing: releasing the same record with the same songs on it, but changed so imperceptibly that at the end of their 30-year project, the record will be different from their first.
But don’t bet on much difference. That U2 will be releasing another record identical to the dozens that preceded it thirty years after they started, I expect.
