While the focus of this blog is primarily situated upon the mediocrity inherent in mass media, I think it is necessary to shift gears every now and again. After all, with the often overwhelming "good enough" state of affairs in the various outputs of modern media it is, I believe, important to examine the rare gems that from time to time emerge as being exemplary, interesting or uniquely provocative.
The outlier in this post is interestingly paradoxical, highly provocative and, depending on your personal opinion, an epitome of the utmost exemplary or an incarnation of utter inferiority. The outlier is the Irish rock band U2; and no matter your opinion about their music, their politics, their preaching, or Bono's sunglasses, the one label you cannot stick them with is mediocre.
Mediocre? The stage on their last tour was a massive neon space ship.
In a piece written just over two decades ago for Rolling Stone, the magazine of repute for defining what is musically "cool", the now long time producer of U2, Brian Eno, wrote about just what it is that has made the band so incredibly pervasive and polarizing. Eno's article is stuck in amongst the various other columns written by the magazine's permanent staff of rock journalists -- the self-appointed guardians of culture -- and like a lead foot to a bass drum he kicks off the piece with a loud statement.
"Cool, the definitive '80s compliment," he wrote, "sums up just about everything U2 isn't. The band is positive where cool is cynical, involved where it is detached, open where it is evasive. When you think about it, in fact, cool isn't a notion that you'd often apply to the Irish... the Irish [are] terminally uncool: cool people stay 'round the edges and observe the mistakes and triumphs of uncool people." -- Rolling Stone, Nov. 1991
When he stated that U2 is pretty much uncool, Brian Eno made a massive understatement; the band is incredibly uncool. Make no mistake about it either, this is a man who understands what it takes to be cool. An established guru of rock and roll, Eno's credibility on the issue is immutable, established by his masterful work on albums such as the Talking Heads' absorbingly detached Remain In Light, and David Bowie's seminally experimental Berlin Trilogy. U2 is a band that has never been cool, they have absolutely no chance of ever becoming cool, and that is an integral factor in defining their unique paradox. Bono, the Edge, Larry Mullen Jr, and Adam Clayton are four of the most uncool people on the planet but together they comprise one of the best selling, most played, highly discussed bands in rock and roll history.
This uncool collage of individuals who together create one of the largest musical acts the world has ever known is not the only paradoxical situation the band finds itself in. U2 is a group perpetuated throughout nearly every single medium that mass media has to offer; physical albums, digital singles, movies, music videos, picture books, autobiographies, t-shirts, billboards, radio play, the list continues ad infinitum. Yet, for a band so firmly entrenched in the mainstream, they are constantly breaking out of its wake. Tracing back through the early releases of their discography, a clear understanding and appreciation can be gained for just how outside of the mainstream the music of this, paradoxically, mainstream band is.
Boy (1980) & October (1981)
U2's first and second albums. Both are potent mixtures of adolescent frustration laced with sexual undertones and the spirituality of Christian theology and ideologies. Frustration and sex are fairly typical archetypes for the albums of any rock and roll band; but by mixing in aspects of religion and then infusing them with melodies and lyrics stemmed from the raw emotion of the death of Bono's mother when he was 14, U2 -- true to their uncool fashion -- cracked the mold.
War (1983)
The third album. War took the musical mold which had already been cracked by Boy and October, smashed it with a hammer, threw the pieces down in the middle of the road and promptly drove over them with a semi-truck. Then threw the semi-truck in reverse just for good measure. A politically overt album composed of militaristic drumbeats and harsh guitar riffs, speaking on incidents such as the Bloody Sunday massacre in Ireland's second largest city as well as the Polish Solidarity movement, the album stood in a stark contrast to the youth and spirituality so inherent in the bands previous releases and marked the beginning of the first 180 degree turn U2 would make in their career.
The Unforgettable Fire (1984)
Enter: Brian Eno. The Unforgettable Fire was a marked change from previous releases and carried on the musical shift begun by War. An album of abstract experimentation, it combines the ambient sounds of perverted pop music with the storytelling of an operatic crescendo. The subverted pop marches of its opening tracks, A Sort Of Homecoming and Pride, continue and build over the length of the album until the records closing hymn, a rock and roll Ave Maria which Schubert himself would admire, MLK.
The Joshua Tree (1987)
U2's fifth studio release. A world-conquering album. 'Nuff said.
Rattle And Hum (1988)
A live studio album with companion rockumentary, it was largely a dead end for the band. Criticism was harsh, often denoting the album as being self-aggrandizing, pretentious, misguided and monotonous. It was also, true to form, thoroughly uncool; the film in particular with its scenes of Bono attempting to teach guitar to blues legend B.B. King and with images of drummer, Larry Mullen Jr, openly weeping at the grave of Elvis Presley. For any other band this would have been the beginning of end, they had reached their peak with The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree and were now destined to fade away having left their echo to the winds of the world.
But they did not fade away, instead U2 successfully pulled off a feat that few other bands in history have ever even attempted to undertake: a wholesale transformation. U2 emerged onto the music scene with their own unique and personal twist to the typical rock album, they developed it, experimented with it, and eventually mastered it. When they reached their apex and began to fall into a tumbling descent the band decided not to simply ride the path downward, cashing in for as long as possible along the way, but rather set out to create for themselves a new musical trajectory.
Recapturing the transformative powers and experimental ideas that lead them to global acclaim with their fourth and fifth studio albums, U2 went back into the recording booth. Three years after the Rattle And Hum disaster, a point at which any other band would have broken apart, given up or sold out, U2 reemerged in 1991 with Achtung Baby. This seventh studio album, a record which by all rights should have been an utterly spectacular flop, was received with open arms by critics heaping it with praise. It is no wonder the record was openly welcomed as the album features head-snappingly metallic guitar textures that are overlaid with the pristine and disarming feelings of a psychological breakthrough.
Bono. Before the band's psychological breakthrough.
Followed up by the release of Zooropa (1993), U2 proved once again that they were not going to settle for mediocrity and other bands took notice; after all, an album like Radiohead's Kid A (2000), an album of significant shift and from deep left field for the band, does not happen without the complete and overwhelming transformative influences -- and proof that such transformation can, in fact, be done successfully -- of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. U2 would soar higher than any band ever had, or they would sink to the bottom depths of the ocean, but on no account would they ever be willing to join the mass mindlessness of the majority of modern music.
A pattern of continued experimentation, fearlessness for reinvention, and willingness to risk failure continues throughout the rest of the bands discography. While some albums succeed where others flounder, these traits are what simultaneously make U2 incredibly uncool and extremely appealing; nobody is ever quite sure what the next album will be. Uncertainty is not cool, change is not cool, struggling is not cool, and U2 is a band that has always struggled to change itself even if its members are uncertain just what direction that change is going to take them.
This is the reason critics will hail them for an album like Zooropa and can forgive them for an album like Pop (1997). It is the reason their fans get both nervous and excited after hearing their latest album, No Line On The Horizon (2009), which is reminiscent of The Unforgettable Fire with its pop-march opening tracks and opera-esque finale. This particular structuring of No Line On The Horizon is perhaps a hint at the fact that its followup may be another world-conquerer in the same fashion as The Joshua Tree. It is the reason for understanding why Bono and the Edge would want to test out the waters of musical theatre by dipping their toes into a Broadway adaptation of Spiderman. It lends an appreciation to why the band would release a soundtrack to a movie that was never made; a film which never had any intent or plan for actually being made. (Original Soundtracks 1 was released by U2 under the alternate band name Passengers in 1995.)
Mediocrity is the antithesis of U2 and regardless of if you love them or hate them they are a band, one of the last in the world, that is still left from the album-oriented era of music and have not been sucked into the modern age of the 99¢ auto-tuned iPod single -- holding out like that, by the way, is pretty uncool of them. Forever the sworn enemy of that which is average, Bono himself put it better than I ever could when he accepted the Grammy Award for Zooropa in 1993 stating; "I'd like to give a message to the young people of America; we shall continue to abuse our position and fuck up the mainstream".
God speed U2, fuck up the mainstream of the world before it fucks us all up. God speed.
Most people won't lift a finger to fight mediocrity. Bono will.
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