U2 are genuinely so marvelous that a certain amount of music penetrated through the sound at Croke Park last weekend. But, basically, there were slow numbers, fast numbers, and very fast numbers. You couldn’t hear the words – not that it mattered, since everyone knew the words.
What survived the massive amplification and the concrete reverberations of the stands were tempo and beat. You lost the intros because the crowd had started cheering in recognition. You lost the closing chords, because they’d started cheering again. You lost the middles, because the songs were so well-known to the audience that they were singing along, so that your experience of “With or Without You” was far more of the two girls beside you bellowing it out in a Westmeath accent, slightly behind Bono’s beat, than of Bono singing it.
Rock critics wrote about the concerts as if they were LPs, as if nuance was detectable. But whatever Croke Park was about, it was not about listening to music. What, indeed, was it about? For all the thousands and thousands of words I’ve read about last weekend’s concerts, nobody seems able to explain just why U2 is the voice of the Zeitgeist. This is not to question the individual brilliance of the band’s members. They are, each, wonderfully talented. But what are these orchestrations, these tempi, these developments of an opening theme, this level of difficulty or easiness, these sentiments – all that comes out of Bono and the others as they invent and shape a song – why is this meaningful all over the world? By what process does significance leave one kind of music or one performer or one band, so that it suddenly seems old-fashioned and irrelevant, and what happens to make the new band seem significant? On what level does rock music work? The audiences in Milan and Cork and Boston are quite different from each other: what is it in U2 that is meaningful to all of them? The words? The level of performance? Something no one can explain?
What journalism does, vaguely aware that there’s a mystery here, is to divide the answer between descriptions of the music, “the Edge’s driving guitar soars past the most committed drum solo that even Larry has ever attempted” kind of thing, and the biographical “Bono stared out into the hot New Mexico night” kind of thing. But these don’t add up to any kind of intelligible discussion. Given the overwhelming importance of rock music in popular culture, it is a great pity that the newspapers, in particular, don’t give more space to thoughtful writing about rock.
The “color-piece” writers, too, seemed to be in the grip of a benign myth, so much so that they referred to Sunday’s rain, which made you wet, the same as any other rain, as “a light drizzle.” The crowds were celebratory, welcoming their own back, cheerful, joyful, etc. Well, as a matter of fact, the concert I was at was a distinctly poignant occasion, precisely because U2 are from Dublin, and were the only four millionaires there. The kids in the audience looked so poor. They are poor. They were by far the least privileged crowd U2 have so far played to (Belfast at least is in a welfare state). In comparison to playing in Basel, it must have been like playing in Soweto. They were awfully young and thin and plain, as far as the eye could see, ungainly when they danced, keeping to their own groups, generally humble. The one thing they had was energy. It is a stirring sight to see 40,000 people jumping up and down in unison, but the unison would be just as complete for Ronnie Drew and “Alive, Alive O-O” as it was for “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Unison isn’t of itself about anything: you get it in Croke Park at a great goal the same as you get it at U2.
So what was distinctively “U2-ish” about the occasion? In what ways was it different from any other very popular, very well-hyped rock concert? The answer surely is only in a sad way, really. The members of the band are even more not one of us than, say, the Rolling Stones, because they were, once, one of us. The gap between them and their audience is felt, no doubt on both sides. The bouncers, terrifying as Alsatians, mark the boundary of worlds. Bono can bend toward us from the ramp, but never come among us. People talk of “national pride” being evoked by U2, but it is difficult to see just how any nation can take any credit for their talent or their luck. Rock concerts are a conspiracy to make musicians – the buildup, the lights, the shrieks – seem like superior beings, but how do you believe in superior beings from Artane? The relationship between Ireland and U2 is far more complex than journalism admits.
The Irish Times, July 4, 1987