Forgive the diversion into yet another discussion of the biggest rock band in the world. But this Gen Xer fell down a wormhole a few months ago and I am, uh, stuck in a moment I can’t get out of. Sometimes that wormhole leads me to very strange places I never knew existed:
And some strange places I’d forgotten existed:
So yes, this edition of the newsletter is going to be about U2. If you’re looking for Toronto live music listings, they can be found in the last newsletter here.
U2’s first album was called Boy. They were 19 years old when they made it.
U2’s new album is called Songs of Surrender. They’re now in their 60s.
They’re a legacy act consigned to victory laps. And they’re owning it.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard a lot of grumbling from friends and former fans about this album of 40 “reimagined” songs from the U2 catalogue, rendered acoustically. How it’s a cheap unplugged retread. How they’re out of ideas. How they should just fade away.
But wouldn’t you rather hear them act their age rather than trying to save rock’n’roll?
It’s all right there in the title: these are Songs of Surrender. Not as in “giving up,” but as in: humility. Which is not something people normally associate with the singer known as Bono Vox, but it’s true. (He took his name from a hearing-aid store in his Dublin neighbourhood.) Parse his lyrics through the years and you’ll witness a Christian who believes the meek will inherit the Earth, who believes in surrendering the self to something larger. “You can only have it all / if you give it all away,” he sings on a new version of “Bad.”
Now of course, Bono is a man who is both a) rich, and b) rich with contradictions (i.e. offshore tax evasion). Which is a whole other conversation. Too much talk about U2 is about everything but the music itself. This album, if nothing else, strips everything away to be just about the music. For the first time in their career, they’re not trying to be relevant or to be the biggest band in the world or… whatever it is by the time their next record arrives.
Here they’re not, in their own words, “chasing every breaking wave.”
This is a bunch of old men taking stock of their life and career. More power to them.
Why these 40 songs? It’s not the playlist from Bono’s recent book Surrender, where
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