No Career On the Horizon

I listened to No Line on the Horizon again last night, or at least tried to. If there is one thing U2 have proved on David Letterman this week, it has been that they can still create a massive amount of energy playing live and make it catch fire, spreading from person to person in the space before them. That's cool to see. But if there's another thing they've proven, it's that they're really over. I hate to say this. I don't take delight in writing negative things about deified bands on the internet. I really don't. But as someone who has passionately loved U2 for about thirteen years, I have to say that it is painful both to see what Bono has become (as a singer) and to listen to the new album.

Last night was my third listen, and it was also the first time I couldn't even get through it. Why was I trying to listen to an album that made me feel angry, disappointed, sore, and thoroughly upset the first time and that left little impression the second time? Because I had listened to Neko Case's new, wonderful, amazing, "magnificent" Middle Cyclone for the second time of the day (I usually listen to it four or five times a day, leaving the crickets playing maybe one of those times) and I had found many more reasons to love the album and also found myself unable to concentrate on anything else at the same time. So, tempted as I was to listen to what may well be the best album of the year so far (a mighty statement given how many great albums are already out), I wanted to read The Tempest and I was reminded of what I heard my cousin had said. A passionate U2 fan himself who also faced hard facts when he heard "Get On Yr Boots" and called a spade a spade, he reported that there was a lot more to get out of the album listening to it on headphones. Knowing Eno and Lanois had manned the decks, this seemed highly plausible.

But, alas, what I found was crap. I went looking for Larry Mullen, Jr.'s exceptional drumming and found utterly forgettable drumming smothered under a bunch of syrupy keyboards. I went looking for something fresh and I found U2 trying to recreate Zooropa and The Unforgettable Fire. They came close to the former with the agreeable "Magnificent," with the exception that there was some croaker fronting the band for that song while an Orpheic god had fronted the band for the earlier album, making it a sexy affair at the same time it was experimental. As for the second album, they didn't come close to touching it. Frankly put, Bono cannot sing anymore. It breaks my heart every time to watch him try or listen to this new album. Some people get broken that way, and move on in a way that inspires awe. Dylan sounds like he's about to send part of his lung in your face as he roars against his "Lonesome Day Blues" on "Love and Theft." I went looking for the voice that had lifted my unnameable emotions in my guts and heart over and over again in the past and found that voice gone. I went looking for the sexiest, most understated bass lines this side of the post-punk explosion of which they were a vibrant part and found something more like—dare I say it—noodling. I went looking for the shimmering, mountainous, occasionally surprising Edge and I found David Gilmour. Did they take the guitar parts from On An Island or The Division Bell and superimpose them? When he did sound like The Edge, he sounded too much like The Edge. I know: damned if you do, damned if you don't. I went looking for memorable lyrics you love to quote. I got "Force Escape Move to Trash," stuff about punching in pin codes in ATM machines, lines about submarines and gasoline, and most annoyingly, some line about ego not being the enemy but rather a baby trying to cross the highway. WHAT?! The ego is not a cute version of Frogger. It is almost indestructible, unlike the frail innocent vision he paints here. When things come along to correct or trash the ego, it explodes in a supernovaic rage, becoming more deadly and more all-consuming. The ego is where landslides begin. Remember, Bono? By track eight or nine, "Fez—Being Born" or "White as Snow," I still hadn't found what I was looking for and I had developed a headache from the effort of trying to like the album and trying to comprehend late-period Shakespeare syntax at the same time, and I ran screaming to the freezer for ice cream as a way to lick my wounds.

Now, many fans of the new album are going to speak up, "Oh man, you missed the best song—'Cedars of Lebanon.'" No, I did not miss the best song. I missed U2 running out of clean clothes and going to play in their father's closet. And it feels dirty. "Cedars of Lebanon" takes elements from ambient Eno music and puts down spoken word on top of it with a lazy, hesitant drum beat. The composition that Eno seems to be selling into slavery for U2 here is one of my all time favorites. It is the numinous conclusion to Ambient 4: On Land, "Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960"mildly altered. Since that is my favorite piece on my favorite Eno album, I have no interest in hearing U2 at the lowest point of their career messing it up. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, the song abruptly stops, and with it the album. I like abrupt stops, when done right. I end many of my songs that way. It especially works well for short, heavy songs. It does not work well for ambient album-closers. What it reveals is that the last song, like every other song on the album except the first, is an unfinished idea, an unrealized song.

I mention here the first song, so let me clarify. The album opens with wonderful strength. "No Line on the Horizon" is an excellent song that takes its worthy place among U2's career of excellent songs. It is by no means very original; it takes a very familiar musical motif that I love and does it well. Most importantly, Bono sounds like he is really trying with everything he has left in that song. I have no doubt that Bono is very conscious of the twilight of his powers and is rightfully depressed about it. In this song, he rages against the dying of the light. Had this album been eight songs just like "No Line On the Horizon," the song that gives the album its name, it would have been a great album. But the cover tells us everything we need to know.

The title of the album is No Line on the Horizon. Yet we see, very clearly, that there is a thick gray line on the horizon. This means the title is a lie. Therefore, whatever the title track sounds like is not going to be indicative of what the cover really represents. So what does the cover really represent?



It represents U2's fervent desire to go back. To recreate the past. To be back at the peak of their powers. A return to the boyhood of their band. The first album's cover is also done in soft shades of gray and white, with a minimal amount from the black side of the spectrum. A circular shape occupies a little over half of both covers. A horizontal line intersects the middle of both images. The darker, grayer side of theBoy image occupies the upper half of the picture. This makes sense for the album because the songs on Boy explore the transition from childhood to manhood, from innocence to experience. This transition has everything to do with the observations the maturing mind makes and what it does with them. For many, it creates a darker reality. On the new album's cover, we see the patterns of the image's reverse. Here, the mostly white, mostly light space occupies the upper half and the mostly dark space, oceanic, occupies the bottom half. The light circle reflects the upper half. Whereas in childhood, the body's natural curiosity and love of play is so much a part of the innocence that Bono is mourning the loss of on U2's unsurpassable first album, now the body is dark because it represents sin, and the mind, conventionally located in and around the head, is united with soul as animus, the body's and self's only link to God. The body is liberated from this sinful nature when it relfects God's light. This is the old Western duality anyway, and we can see it all over the new U2 album. On the first song, Bono quotes some woman as saying "Time is irrelevant; it is not linear," before she goes on to stick her tongue in his ear. The woman's tongue that says something interesting and wise before going on to hit up my ear with some pleasant action is usually a source of joy for me, but Bono does not sound happy as he sings these lines. Is it because the woman is not Ali? This would give creedence to a notion that the lower half is the darker half, only capable of light when governed by the mind unified with the soul. U2 has always sung about God and God as Love. In the past, they have done this in interesting ways. Stuart Davis once described U2's work in the eighties as a Trojan Horse sneaking mysticism into the pop world. On this album, it becomes very simple. Love, Love, ohohoh. "Only love can leave such a mark." Boy is an album for the body and the darkening mind, and it succeeds on every level. The new album is supposed to be an album for the soul, a soul that transcends time and wants to occupy the same moments as when it participated in the creation of Boy, The Unforgettable Fire, and Zooropa. But the past is inaccessible to and irreproducible. U2 wants to have it both ways. They want to make experimental albums and be revered as the greatest band on earth. They didn't get that treatment after Pop, which is a good album. They want to make saccharine pop-by-numbers pop albums and still have the respect of long time fans who know what the band is capable of when they take chances, songs like "Your Blue Room" and "Miss Sarajevo." Caught in a circle of response to inevitable criticism and lacking an actual direction, the new album tries to both and succeeds as neither. There is nothing truly experimental about the "experimental" songs, and there is nothing catchy and moving about the pop songs. We got neither the radiant white of the sky or the dark depths of the ocean, just a barely discernible straight gray line on the horizon.

What the cover tells us about the new album is that it is an attempt to go back in time that went horribly wrong, like Jeff Goldlbum trying to teleport in The Fly. It took the wonderful human elements out and gave us failed high-art pretension. It took the youthful vigor out and gave us something dull. So we get an inverse image of the first album.


Having gone to bed feeling sick again from No Line, I woke up this morning and decided I needed to do something to remedy what I was feeling. I can't stand being mad or feeling upset by a favorite band. Feeling like I had a bad piece of steak for dinner and spending an ill-rested night, I made myself a piece of filet mignon for breakfast—I listened to Boy.

And you know what?

It never gets old.