You may have read some of my impressions on U2, their staying power, and the sense of urgency in their music.
What stood out to me about the show itself, by contrast, was the cleanness and effectiveness of it all. As I mentioned to a few friends, the performance was not about U2, but more like a celebration of music and life, and also a call to the audience to both a higher and a deeper perspective about life–that’s what all their music is about to me.
I really liked when the Sikh gentleman with the American flag and the young boy were brought on stage by Bono. I also loved the statements on the band’s democracy. These guys clearly have things to do in the world, and their music is a platform for that.
Yet, in everything they did, I felt appreciated and well-served as a fan. I could see the temptation for them to try to use their fans in their political agenda–as if to show the world the size of their movement. But they don’t do that, and they don’t manipulate.
But they do communicate. And that is fantastic. They are about music–and more than just their music. There is an elegant interplay there that makes them entirely unique, and I believe that sets them apart from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, or our other favorite pure rock bands.
I very much felt a part of all that last night, and gladly so. It was about being part of something larger than myself, but being able to be myself in that, and even so how I fit, if that makes sense.
U2 seems to get get that they are a medium for their fans to look out to the world and its specific issues, and also a medium of life’s deep, complex issues–and its highest hopes–out to their fans. A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.
Even the lighting and the screen seemed to communicate something clean and profound, without being in your face. The video screens interconnected sort of accordian-style. When the screens were together, they were an amplifier to give close ups to the farthest seats, but when the screens broke down, they became transparent the closer they got to the ground and to the band itself. Behind the screens was this center beam, which I believe represented a rocket.
It all seemed a commentary on the TV and marketing worlds in which we live, in contrast to the substance of their music, and of the good human potential available behind all the facades that have ordered human culture up to this point–this point of departure. “Every generation gets a chance to change the world…the sweetest melody is the one we haven’t heard.”
And yet, in Magnificent, it’s clear that they know that in one sense, the sweetest melody is the One we have already heard:
Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love unites our hearts
Justified, till we die you and I will magnify, oh, oh
Magnificent, magnificent, magnificent
Magnificent show, and magnificent viewpoint (pardon the bad iPhone pic):
