Have a beautiful day

U2 offer us pie in the sky

by Jeffrey Gantz

U2 are in a state of grace. The traffic may be stuck, but it's a "Beautiful Day" out there, and the lads are ready for some "Elevation." Forget about being "Stuck in a Moment" --when they look at the world, they're primed to "Walk On." All they'll be taking with them, their new CD (Interscope) assures us, is All That You Can't Leave Behind -- as "Walk On" explains, "The only baggage that you can bring/Is all that you can't leave behind." Funny, that -- on "Gone" (from Pop, their previous album), they'd told us, "And what you leave behind you don't miss anyway."

Well, that's U2 for you. The CD liner shows our heroes standing around in an airport with just hand baggage (but did they check the real stuff?) and looking as if they couldn't decide where to go. Maybe they're trying to make up their minds about what their name really means. (Francis Gary Powers? "You come too"?) Or whether it's Dylan or the Beatles they're trying to emulate. Or what the lyrics to "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" are all about.

Or maybe they're just trying to get back to The Million Dollar Hotel. The soundtrack for Wim Wenders's latest film (yet to find a US distributor) has two new songs credited to U2 and three to Bono, plus "The First Time," from Zooropa. Too bad the U2 pair don't grace All That You Can't Leave Behind. Named for Salman Rushdie's rock-and-roll novel, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" (which does appear on the UK version, as the last track) locates the point "where two roads meet," addressing both Bono's search for the sacred in the profane ("For what I worshipped stole my love away/It was the ground beneath her feet") and U2's search for a sensibility that can embrace rock and pop. And what better adjective than "Stateless" to describe a band who so often find themselves physically and spiritually stranded: "I've got no home in this world/Just gravity, luck, and time/I've got no hope in this world/Just you, and you are not mine." Gospel redemption enters at the 2:20 mark and Bono finds an updraft -- "You can cover a world with your thought/Still so big, so bright, so beautiful" -- but it's the fade-out that tells the real story: "Weightless, hateless." No gravity, no grief.

This is all encapsulated in the opening sequence of The Million Dollar Hotel (whose Nicholas Klein screenplay is based on a "story" by Klein and Bono), where after Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies) jumps off the hotel roof, we hear him musing on the way down: "Wow. After I jumped, it occurred to me, life is perfect, life is the best, full of magic, beauty, opportunity . . . and television. And surprises, lots of surprises, yeah. And then there's the best, of course, better than anything anyone ever made up, 'cause it's real." Credited to Bono and Klein, those are the words that open "Never Let Me Go." The rest of the song -- like the other two Bono contributions, "Falling at Your Feet" and "Dancin' Shoes" -- has no weight, no matter; it's this intro that's down to earth, with its ode to an unidentified "real" (love?) and its paradox that the free-falling Tom Tom must, after what seems an eternity over streets with no name, indeed collide with the cement below, just one more angel hitting the ground.

THAT'S THE DIALECTIC on All That You Can't Leave Behind: Bono soaring out of time, out of space, often out of control, Edge, Adam, and Larry trying to put the immanent back into the transcendent. When it works, it's, well, elevating. "Beautiful Day," the album's first single, opens with a Philip Glass keyboard lick and Bono telling us, "You're out of luck/And the reason that you had to care/The traffic is stuck/And you're not movin' anywhere" -- we're not gettin' out of town (i.e., this world), so we might as well enjoy life. The chorus -- "It's a beautiful day/Don't let it get away" -- is made-for-Disney-animation material; what purges it is the band's naked flame, Edge slashing away like the archangel Michael in Brueghel's The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Larry getting apocalyptic on snare drum. Finally even Bono hops aboard the fiery chariot: "Take me to that other place." Fifteen seconds from the end the band ascend in a whirlwind, leaving only Edge's now postdiluvian guitar riff, and we're momentarily floating, as if we'd just jumped off the Million Dollar Hotel roof ourselves.

Problem is, Bono doesn't want us to come down -- left to his own devices, he's apt to extemporize himself into the void. "Stuck in a Moment" is stuck in its gospel-bluesy-preachy mode from the get-go, and Bono sounds as if he were stuck for words (shades of October's "Gloria"): "I'm just trying to find a decent melody/A song that I can sing/In my own company." When he finally figures out what he wants to say, it turns out to be more pop/pap Disney: "You gotta stand up straight/Carry your own weight. . . ./You've got stuck in a moment/And now you can't get out of it." This time there's no rock salvation; instead we get a cheesy-churchy organ riff and bluesy discords that resolve before you can blink. Even the Million Dollar Hotel reference -- "I wasn't jumpin'/For me it was a fall/It's a long way down to nothing at all" -- makes a soft landing in gospel-choir reassurance: "And if your way should falter/Along the stony pass/It's just a moment/This time will pass."

Things look up again with the hip-hoppy "Elevation," where over a jackhammer buzz, a porno-pumping backbeat, and ghostly underwater sonar Bono in his Simon LeBon voice goes for perihelion: "High, higher than the sun/You shoot me from a gun/I need you to elevate me." The carpenter from Nazareth? Not this time: "At the corner of your lips/As the orbit of your hips/
Eclipse/You elevate my soul." This elevator goes the other direction too: "A mole/Diggin' in a hole/Diggin' up my soul now/Goin' down/Excavation." A repeated descending three-note figure on Adam's bass keeps the big dig going; Bono's afforded an out-of-body quickie -- "Love/Lift me out of these blues/Won't you tell me something true/I believe in you" -- before the guitars bring him back and everybody settles into the orbit of those hips.

But that's as high as the CD gets. A we-shall-overcome backbeat and pealing guitar riffs can't keep "Walk On" from falling into step with "You'll Never Walk Alone": "I know it aches/And your heart it breaks/
You can only take so much/Walk on." The song is dedicated to Burmese/Myanmari dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who's been under virtual house arrest in Rangoon since 1995 -- but Edge's searing, locust-wind solo says more than Bono's anthemic platitudes, or the Fab Four-style choral fade-out saluting Ecclesiastes: "All that you fashion, all that you make/All that you build, all that you break/All that you measure, all that you feel/All this you can leave behind." "Kite" squanders the elevating possibilities of its metaphor on swoony-steel synth and lighter-than-air lyrics: "Who's to say where the wind will take you/Who's to say what it is will break you/I don't know/Which way the wind will blow." Bono sending a lover out into the world? A friend? A kite? "In a Little While," bluesy with a hint of harmonica, has Bono testifying Al Green style -- "In a little while/I won't be blown by every breeze/Friday night running/To Sunday on my knees" -- but to this jury it sounds as if he were making it up as he goes along. The strummy "Wild Honey" devolves into the banality of pop, with its monkey swinging from the trees and stealing wild honey -- on the Disney scale, this one wouldn't even make The Jungle Book.

Back to Bono basics: over bell-like chiming, "Peace on Earth" stumbles through a minefield of improvised instant clichés (how does he do it?) until the chorus, when the backbeat becomes a quickstep funeral march and Bono hits his stride: "Jesus can you take the time/To throw a drowning man a line/Peace on earth." And when he sings, "She never got to say goodbye/To see the colour in his eyes/Now he's in the dirt," the music shimmers like a holiday truce. The song ends on a plaintive note: "You hear it every Christmastime/But hope and history won't rhyme/So what's it worth?/This peace on earth?", the bells tolling for Omagh, for us all.

Maybe that one should have been the album closer. Over a nursery-rhyme ostinato and a child's whine, "When I Look at the World" has Bono's Dylan wanna-be pointing his finger at those who don't even blink at the walking lame: "It's no use/I can't see what you see/When I look at the world"; but where Dylan seethed like Elijah, Bono whines like Job -- it's only the instrumental break that conjures the fire on Mount Carmel. On to "New York," where over the drum-loop hustle and bustle Bono discovers that "In New York summers get hot/Well into the hundreds" (how does he do it?). "Subterranean Homesick Blues" this ain't. Then Larry goes into bullet-train mode and Bono starts crooning. But he's no Sinatra, and no O. Henry, either: "Irish, Italians, Jews, and Hispanics/Religious nuts, political fanatics/In the stew/Living happily not like me and you." A reference to "Alphaville" (Jean-Luc Godard's? Alphabet City?) and the cryptic last verse about Titanic help, but I keep wondering whether the band actually touched down in the Big Apple or only grabbed the tabloids and a few postcards at JFK.

Still, when you have "Grace," what else matters? A picked guitar over a loping bass theme (are we sampling the Rio Bravo soundtrack?) gets the first minute to itself before we arrive in synth country heaven and Bono, now possessed of the peace that passeth understanding, explains that "Grace/It's a name for a girl/It's also a thought that/Changed the world." Blessed are the meek -- but this homily is a rosebush without thorns in the desert where U2 found their Joshua tree of pain, a self-righteous voice crying in the wilderness after the Judas & Jesus show of Achtung Baby's "Until the End of the World" and the heavenly gates of Pop's "The Playboy Mansion." Bono might also have thought to bend the knee to that other lux in tenebris lady, the one the boys serenade on October. U2's "Gloria" will never erase memories of the Cadillacs' hit, or for that matter Vivaldi's, but when they shout out her name, the archangel (Gabriel this time) comes to ground. Annunciation, incarnation -- exaltation.

I WAS A LATE CONVERT to U2 -- and I keep lapsing in and out of faith. Achtung Baby's "Zoo Station" grabbed my attention with its techno-roar, the whoosh of the U-Bahn, the endless possibilities of the new Berlin, the new Europe. It didn't bother me that the U-Bahn doesn't really whoosh, that the band (like Wim Wenders in Wings of Desire) seemed to have only a nodding acquaintance with my favorite city, or even that the rest of the album deserted it altogether. Achtung Baby was, after the spiritual temptations of The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, a real rock record. And surely the real U2.

Nine years and just three albums later, it's not so clear which U2 is the real thing. Zooropa turned out to be Achtung Baby's techno twin, Pop its dance-club cousin, both albums continuing the quest for parousia among the palm trees. Bono went through personae faster than God sends his angels: the Fly, Mirrorball Man, Mister MacPhisto. Clearly the band still hadn't found what they were looking for. The new album, Bono joked to the London music magazine NME, should have been called Actually Pop -- and he's right. Hailed as a return to form by everyone from Rolling Stone to Q, All That You Can't Leave Behind leaves too much behind, deserting the tortured straight-and-narrow for easy street. Bono's up there on Berlin's Victory Column (or the Eiffel Tower, or the Statue of Liberty) looking down at us when he needed to shed his wings and descend (maybe crash-land) like Wenders's angels, Damiel and Cassiel and Tom Tom. Over the past 20 years, U2 have aspired higher than any of their peers -- but to keep the bang and the clatter going, or the rattle and hum, you have to worship the ground beneath your feet. Even if it steals your love away.