(Every Monday at Tragically Hipster we'll feature a look at a band, performance, or vague musical concept, with an accompanying virtual mixtape for your listening pleasure. Muxtapes will be kept online only until the next week's column is up, so listen while you can. There's no need to thank us; it's just one more service we like to provide for you, our dedicated readers. Most of whom also write for this site.)
(Since this is a longer-than-normal column this week, you may just want to skip on down to the actual Muxtape portion toward the bottom. Go ahead. We won't judge you.)
The first single I ever bought was a double A-side of U2's "New Year's Day" and "Two Hearts Beat as One"1. I didn't know much about the band -- this was in their pre-Joshua Tree mega-stardom days -- I just knew that "New Year's Day" had a lot of bass in it, and I've always had a strange kind of love for that frequently under-appreciated instrument.
I took the single home and played it so often that I all but wore out the grooves. At the time I knew nothing about the Polish solidarity movement that inspired the song (and truth be told, I still don't know much about it), but I knew that there was something haunting about its darkly aggressive opening notes. I doubt I was more than seven or eight at the time -- certainly not old enough to have a real handle on my feelings -- and yet something in me responded instinctually to Bono's yearning croon
That we can break through
Though torn in two
We can be one
And for the next fifteen years or so, U2 was my band.
In a very real sense, U2 taught me how to love music. After I played the "New Year's Day" single down into near-incomprehensibility, I moved on to the album that it issued from, War, and was delighted to discover that the version of "New Year's Day" contained therein was a full minute-and-a-half longer than the one found on the seven inch. The idea of a "single edit," that a song could be cut and cropped for distribution to different mediums, seemed enticingly exotic to me, like I had discovered some secret about how musicians worked that no one else was privy to. I listened to each one of their tracks with an intensive concentration, studying every note lest they should betray some larger, heretofore unhinted-at secret.
There were no further technical revelations to follow, but my attention to detail paid off in other ways. After a while it occurred to me to think about why they would use certain instruments in one song but not in another, to question why a turn of phrase in the lyrics of War's first song would be repeated in its last. And slowly over the years that followed, I began to put together an understanding of music that went beyond gosh I like how this song sounds and delved into issues of intent and meaning, of purpose and art. It was an autodidact's music appreciation course, centered on the albums of four lads from
I became a rabid fan, consuming everything the band released. Not just albums and singles, but guest appearances, charity compilation albums, movies soundtracks with slightly alternate mixes; my selection of U2 bootlegs is larger than my collection of most other bands' albums. In the days before artists' discographies were exhaustively cataloged on internet websites, I became my own sort of mini-expert on the band2.
The set that night had consisted of a hodge-podge of "classic" U2 tracks, mixed with a healthy smattering of tunes from Leave Behind, the first U2 album that I would have defined as "sub-par," but which had proven itself to be inexplicably popular. Just before the evening's mid-point, they launched into "New Year's Day" to a tumult of applause, when a unbidden revelation struck me: U2 wasn't a band any more. They were a nostalgia act.
With a strange, stark clarity, it became suddenly apparent to me that they weren't dusting off old tracks from their previous albums and giving them a healthy workout as they had in tours past; this time they were simply working their way dutifully through the back-catalog, much like a Vegas revival act or, more charitably, a second-generation Rolling Stones. Like the album which the tour was accompanying, this was U2 on autopilot; a giant, pulsing two-hour version of a high school reunion "remember when?" conversation, where you sit around rehashing the details of a shared past not because it was such a glorious time in all your lives, but because otherwise none of you would have a thing to say to one another. There was something achingly depressing about this realization, as though I were one of those stifled housewives in Victorian novels who wake up one day and finally see themselves to be leading a loveless, oppressed existence.
I couldn't listen to U2 for a long time after that. I just didn't see the point.
Every time I put on one of their albums it felt like I was vainly trying to recapture the magic of those early years of infatuation. Maybe U2 was just a phase, and I had finally grown out of them, like being love-sick over an oblivious girl in high school. You grow up; learn not to waste your time on those who don't return your affections; and hopefully move on to fuller, more mature relationships that are still alight with passion, though perhaps not that unique brand of passion that so controlled your world during your teenage years.
When U2 announced last year that they were re-releasing their first three albums in deluxe remastered editions, I wasn't particularly interested. I hadn't listened to a U2 album in six years, and while both Boy and October were interesting records, they were never amongst the best of the band's output to begin with.
But War had been an immensely formative album for me, and my CD copy was scratched and skipping from years of abuse. Almost on a whim I put in a pre-order on Amazon.com. When the album came a few weeks ago, I put it on out of fiscal obligation more than anything else, expecting to hit the stop button before I reached the end of the first track.
I listened to War twice that night, all the way through.
The next day, I listened to it again. And then the day after, once more.
What a fucking great album.
Like every band worth the trouble, U2 evolved over the years through a number of distinct phases. Their first three albums form what I like to think of as their "Christian Warrior" trilogy. These albums feature a kind of passionate aggression not seen on U2's later albums, fueled in large part by Bono and The Edge's intense faith, not simply in religion as a personal experience, but in religion as a transformative political force.
Here "peace" is not an idea or a restive state of being, but a breathing, beating thing that must be fought for, a teething philosophy that is sometimes a struggle to accept, with the easy allure of violence readily at hand. Though it's tempting to dismiss U2's politics as pretentious or eye-rollingly simplistic, I'm struck, listening to these albums decades later, by just how cynical the band really was. Indeed, most of their early songs spit and howl at the injustice of the world around them, and what optimism there is to be found comes not from the naïve belief that activism will make the world a better place, but from the decision to fight on anyway, if only so as to go out kicking:
I believe in the atomic bomb
I believe in the Powers That Be
Lyrically, Bono has always had a gift for album-long metaphors that he plays with and expands upon in each track, without falling into the trap of making a direct "concept" album. On War, he uses a motif of divided lovers as a stand-in for a divided
I doubt I'll ever see U2 in concert again. Their last album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, was if anything even less impressive than All That You Can't Leave Behind. When I can bring myself to check out the set lists for their recent shows, they seem filled with the same "hey folks, you might remember this little ditty"-type mentality that finally broke me seven years ago.
But that's alright. Even if my fandom is only an echo of what it used to be, I'm delighted to find that I can still take immense joy from their earlier albums, not as a remember-how-good-it-once-was nostalgia trip, but as works in their own right, still as vital and pulsing today as they were when first released.
And my breathe still catches, just a tiny little bit, every time I hear the opening bass line to "New Year's Day."
1) I Will Follow (%)
2) A Celebration (#)
3) Seconds (&)
4) 11 O'Clock Tick Tock (Single Mix) (%)
5) New Year's Day (7" Single Edit) (&)
6) The Electric Co. (%)
7) Like a Song... (&)
8) Trash, Trampoline and the Party Girl (#)
9) Gloria (#)
10) Two Hearts Beat as One (&)
11) October (#)
12) "40" (&)
% = From the Boy Deluxe Edition reissue
# = From the October Deluxe Edition reissue
& = From the War Deluxe Edition reissue
Quick Notes on Select Songs:
*Martin Hannett was one of the most innovative producers of the post-punk period, putting his indelible stamp on everyone from Joy Division to the Psychedelic Furs. "11 O'Clock Tick Tock" is the only U2 song to be produced by Hannett, and one of only two songs (the other being "A Celebration") that were released as singles but which never made an appearance on any album.
*The original plan for October was to record a series of modern psalms, paeans of faith in a modern world sorely lacking in direction and values. But then the notebook containing the only copy of the as-yet-unrecorded album's lyrics were stolen by a fan during a concert in
*"40" is based on the fortieth Psalm, and hence the title. The Edge and Adam Clayton swapped places for its recording, with Edge playing bass and Clayton the guitar. Back when "40" was a staple of their live act, the two would repeat the swap for the show's finale.
[1] I also purchased a seven-inch of Huey Lewis' "The Heart of Rock and Roll" the same day, but there began and ended my flirtation with The News
[2] Even today, I barely have to reach into my memory to pluck out dozens of tidbits of meaningless trivia, the kind of pointless minutiae that only seems to really matter to you when you're young and in love. With only a cursory look at the tracklistings for the new Deluxe Edition reissues of Boy, October and War, I can tell you that they seem to have left off the instrumental and remixed versions of "October" done for the documentary They Call It an Accident, and that the versions of "Seconds" and "Like a Song..." featured on War are both slightly shorter than the ones on the MFSL "gold" CD pressings done in the mid-90's. I can tell you that in the nearly 30 years since its release as a single, "A Celebration" has never before been issued on compact disc, and that the "remix" version of "Tomorrow" found on October is actually a re-recording done in 1998 for the Common Ground compilation. There are only a handful of bands whose discographies I can claim to have such an intimate familiarity with, and almost without exception they're all bands I started listening to in high school or earlier, back in the halcyon days of my youthful passions.
[3] From "A Celebration," on the October rarities disc.
LINKS:
U2 Muxtape
Boy
Deluxe Edition
October
Deluxe Edition
War
Deluxe Edition
U2 Deluxe Edition Box Set
1 comment:
...and the entire Muxtape website went offline less than an hour after I posted this. Muxtape Mondays, we hardly knew ye.
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