I've just watched the
Culture Show interview with
U2 about their new album,
No Line On The Horizon, and thought this would be a good point to post up an essay that I wrote on the spirituality of U2 shortly after the release of
All That You Can't Leave Behind.
The essay was written for a competition where it won a prize and it was then abridged as an article for the
Arts Centre Group journal,
AM, where it was published alongside a piece on the band by
Steve Turner. In the essay I set out what I saw as the main characteristics of U2’s spirituality, examined their roots, made links between their spirituality and themes in contemporary theology and, considered three reasons why U2’s spirituality has connected with popular culture.
On Borderland We RunU2’s spirituality is characterised firstly by movement. In
‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ the imagery is of running:
“I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for”.
They seek and when they find, what they find sends them out to seek all over again. Running is about forward movement – positive goals, further exploration and continual striving.
This belief in the value of running forward has been embodied by U2 in the way they have sought to re-invent themselves as a band. At regular intervals they have publicly claimed that they are going away to dream it all up all over again. In doing so, their career trajectory has run from the ‘New Wave’ through stadium rock, roots rock and techno irony to the point where they now feel able to mine their own past.
Then there is the falling down. This is about failure - seeking and not finding, but seeking nonetheless.
‘I Fall Down’ is a song in which both their movement themes are brought together:
“Julie says,
I’m getting nowhere
I wrote this letter
Hope to get to someplace soon.
I want to get up
When I wake up
When I get up
I fall down.
Julie wake up,
Julie tell the story.
You wrote the letter
You said you were gonna
Get there someday.
Gonna walk in the sun
And the wind and the rain
Now you fall down.”
The central character is not being criticised for having a goal or for falling down on the way towards it. The narrator is empathetic and the song ends on that note – “When you fall down, I fall down”.
U2 songs are commonly songs of inarticulation and failure and this is particularly so when they speak of spirituality:
“I try to sing this song now
I try to stand up but I can’t find my feet
I try, I try to speak up
But only in you, I’m complete.
Gloria in eo Domine.”
They sense the glory of the divine and of a reconciled future but articulating that vision in the light of their own inadequacies and the injustice within the world seems impossible, and yet they try.
This sense of failure is also there in their performances and symbolic gestures.
Barney Hoskyns tells a story of one such incident when, during a performance, Bono threw a white flag into the crowd and, when a fight for this flag developed, said:
“There’s been too much foitin’ over flags … Maybe won day we’ll all just share the same flag …”
Hoskyns’ story highlights the inarticulation of this symbolic action. There is both an awareness that dramatising reconciliation is more powerful than preaching it and, the fact that this dramatisation does not work because it provokes, rather than resolves, confrontation.
Nevertheless U2 are impelled to make the attempt, acknowledge some of the contradictions involved and learn through reflection on the results.
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U2 -
Gloria.
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