U2: They Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, by Paul Shirley

The problem with U2 is that Bono is an insufferable, self-important blowhard.

Or that’s what most people think the problem is, anyway.

On a recent summer night in St. Louis, where U2 was playing in front of 50,000 people in a baseball stadium, the time-worn criticisms of Bono seemed appropriate. The massive screens that the band would eventually use to bombard the audience with images of itself alongside varied cartoons, videos, and messages from space stations were also used, before the show, to bombard the audience with depressing facts about human consumption.

Add to this the usual early-, mid-, and late-show calls to arms in the name of peace, love and cures for the High-Five, and eyes were rolling harder than the University of Alabama in a late-seventies Sugar Bowl.

But Bono’s insufferableness is forgivable. Lead singers are egotistical anyway; tell a man that he’s at the front of the biggest band in the world and it’s only natural that he will begin to think that he is the biggest man in the world.

Further than forgivable: Bono The Human has surely done plenty of good for the world. My beef with Bono’s transition from diplomatic rock star to rock star diplomat isn’t with his god complex. My concern is musical. Someone else could have done all the missionary work in Africa.

Bono could have concentrated on making U2 what it could have been: so much better than they are.

My love affair with U2 started on the bus to school in seventh grade, when I heard “Mysterious Ways” for the first time. I became a fan retroactively; after buying Achtung Baby, I found out that Joshua Tree had ALL THESE SONGS I LIKE, MOM! and added it to my Columbia House queue. Then came Boy and War and The Unforgettable Fire and Rattle And Hum. Eventually, I even dipped into October, that mostly-impenetrable mess that die-hards claim to love.

When Zooropa came out in July of 1993, I was one month from starting tenth grade and had just moved into the basement of my family’s house in rural Kansas. I was terrified of both transitions; I was leaving my brothers upstairs…and in middle school – the oldest son sent out to conquer the world. (Or so I felt at the time.)

Zooropa served as the soundtrack to my transition from little boy to teenager. I listened to it over and over in that basement bedroom as I wondered why Girl X didn’t like me or why being good at math wasn’t considered a boon to my social standing.

Back then, my dedication to U2 made me an oddity among friends who were expressing their teen angst by listening to Rage Against The Machine and Alice In Chains. And even though U2 was getting steadily weirder in the 90s, they were still associated more with their Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum days. As in, with the overwrought pop/rock of the early eighties. As in, not cool anymore.  But I had a sense that something was going on with this band that had caused me to push all my chips into the middle on its behalf.

What was going on was that U2 was getting good. Not good in the “With Or Without You” sense. Good in the “pushing the envelope, ahead of their time” sense. I felt like I had discovered a dance partner of hidden beauty – like the girl in that one (every) high school movie: she’s got glasses and her hair up but really she’s Lindsay Lohan in disguise. Everyone thought U2 was one thing while, in reality, they were another thing entirely.

Our dance lasted long into the night, through the release of Pop, during my freshman year of college, and into my first U2 concert, two months later.

That first U2 show – U2’s fifth on the PopMart Tour – was like nothing I’d ever seen, in large part because I hadn’t seen many concerts. I watched the show alone; my friend Jeff, who had called me nine months prior to ask if I could afford the $55 ticket, had bailed thanks to his sister’s eighth-grade promotion and when I tromped onto the field to meet the friends of his that were supposed to be waiting at our seats, I learned that those seats had been moved. Because this was pre-cell phone, I had no way to contact Jeff’s friends, so I exchanged my ticket for a new one and watched the show next to three very drunk Irishmen who danced along with every song.

For U2 and me, that was the high point.

At the time, I was sure that my dedication to my underappreciated musical sweetheart was going to pay dividends. After all, U2 had committed to three albums that had gotten successively stranger; surely they wouldn’t turn their backs on what was making them great.

My faith was misplaced; my girl got popular and, unlike the movie, left me standing by the punch bowl.

Sometime before the release of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, I read an interview with Bono in which he billed U2’s latest album as a return to the band’s roots. My antennae sprung into action. My suspicion was well-placed: ATYCLB was mostly adult-contemporary trash – more Train than U2 – made even worse when that album was co-opted as some sort of soundtrack to healing from September 11.

U2 had returned to being the biggest band in the world. But they had forgotten about being any good.

In St. Louis, U2 opened the show with four songs from Achtung Baby. All four nearly brought me to tears, for all the reasons that nostalgia for our teen years does: I thought back to how I was then, how I am now, and how similar those two really are.

But then, quicker than The Edge’s fingers on the frets of that guitar he plays so well, it was over. The band launched into the real concert – the Vertigos and Beautiful Days and the songs I don’t even know because they’re from the band’s latest crap albums.

And, okay, they played “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me.” And the intro to “Where The Streets Have No Name” gave me chills, just like it was supposed to. But I wanted Bono to turn those songs into a medley and say, “We’re actually quite aware that the best music we ever made was in the years that we got weird, so we’re going to play some of those songs.” And then he would launch into “Wake Up, Dead Man” or “Daddy’s Going To Pay For Your Crashed Car” or “Zoo Station.”

That wasn’t going to happen. The People don’t want weird. Or at least, they think they don’t. The problem with what they think is that they’re wrong. We think we want bands to stay the same; we assume we want The Strokes to make the same album, over and over. But what we really want bands to move forward. There is no going backward; there’s no such thing as “returning to our roots.”

U2 could only make the songs that people now love (here I’m thinking of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and the like) because they were different. It’s true that those songs now sound conventional, but that’s only in retrospect. The hummingbird shit that U2 is releasing now already sounds conventional. They wouldn’t be a band that can sell out a baseball stadium if their best song was “Vertigo;” people only accept “Vertigo” because it reminds them of the songs they liked, all those years ago, when U2 was being weird.

As I stood on the infield at Busch Stadium, I couldn’t help but feel heartbroken for the lost potential. U2 isn’t that old, really – at least not in this day and age. Bono looked about the same as he did in 1997 and nothing would have stopped U2 from being a latter-day Radiohead, if they had wanted it. (If you think this an extravagant claim, take your hand out of Thom Yorke’s pants and have a listen to “Some Days Are Better Than Others”.)

But it’s probably too late for that. U2’s career trajectory is to surf its fame all the way into the beach. There will be another couple of stadium tours along the way. And Bono will keep trying to cure AIDS in Africa, slash, save political prisoners in Burma, slash, make people feel bad about the Chevy Tahoes they drove to his concerts.

Then, it will be over. And when it is, people will be left to put U2 in its historical place. There will be those who think of them as a decent Irish rock band who put together some hits in the eighties. And, unfortunately, there will be those who think of them as old men who put out bloated pop songs late in their career.

And then there will be the people like me – people who will be left to wonder what might have been, if only the Biggest Band In The World had decided to become the Best Band In The World.

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