Not surprisingly, each of U2’s early albums left an indelible mark on rock’s history. And while a few anthems, such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Like a Song”, or “Two Hearts Beat as One”, achieved notoriety for their attention to “rebellion” or “revolution”, the band shared less of the punk impulse to destroy what exists and more of the righteous urge to heal or rebuild what was broken. Born from punk, but bred with a heavy conscience, U2’s early music just sounded serious through its web of gothic guitar shrills, a stern and insistent snare, and lyrics that, though never as intellectual as many imagined them to be, sought to save us from some universally shared evil - be it nuclear war (“Seconds”), addiction (“Bad”), or sin (“40”). The music U2 made in the 1980s simply commanded your attention. ![]() It seems, more than anything, a celebration of U2 in all their former glory. Instead, the quartet spends the bulk of the evening slugging out new hits like “Beautiful Day” and “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”, juxtaposing them alongside the ’80s anthems they are meant to recall - rabble-rousers like “I Will Follow”, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Pride”, and “Where the Streets Have No Name”. We hear only one song from the band’s two previous albums, Pop, and Zooropa. It is also, as these same fans would gleefully report, the death knell to a decade that U2 appeared to have spent submerged in a racy Euro discotheque, shrouded by sunglasses and bathing in distorted house music, emerging only to snake across stadium stages clad in black, mocking the rock stardom and post-industrial age that they used to deplore with such sound and fury.įor the duration of the concert this is how it appears. To these fans, the success of the stripped-down, fist-pumping arena rock of the Elevation tour proves what they claimed to have known all along - that U2 never should have strayed from America’s embrace of The Joshua Tree‘s rootsy, self-righteous political spiritualism. The fans, as you might expect, are ecstatic, especially if one judges ecstasy by the incessant shrieks and the seemingly choreographed hip-shaking from the crowd that even caught the eye of United States Senator and fellow-concert goer Jesse Helms. For, as is obvious from both the minimalist stage set and the title of their latest album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 intend to give their fans the long-awaited follow-up to 1987’s The Joshua Tree, an overdue homecoming from ten years spent on a detour of experimental excess that much of their ardent rock base found enormously disconcerting. They stay on for the duration of the band’s opening number, which is, as one might suspect from the tour’s title, the rock song “Elevation”.Īll of this is, of course, purposeful. What you do see, curiously, are the arena house lights. ![]() Gone are the stacks of television screens, the Eastern European cars-as-spotlights, and the outlandish costumes. When U2 take the stage for their Elevation tour you are immediately struck by what you don’t see.
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