Posts Tagged ‘U2’
the existentialist’s burden November 7th, 2008
I must confess, that U2’s Pop album has always been my favorite. It had the panache of Achtung Baby and Zooropa, tempered with the memory of the innocence of The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum. Pop was genius, it was also a spectacular show. The fault lines of the self, only glimpsed in early U2 were laid bare in Pop. It was an almost Nietzschean rejection of all that came before, and in that sense, probably a catharsis that the late ’90s demanded, before they rebooted, with All that you can’t leave behind and How to dismantle an atomic bomb.
Within that record however, Please has always been my favorite. I like to call it the existentialist’s burden. How does one become an existentialist? Most of us are engendered into some religious way of thinking, long before we ever engage with Sartre or Camus or Heidegger or Kierkegaard.
Please raises an interesting question, in that; whether you take Camus’ endless dances of master-slave relationships, or go back to Nietzsche’s unflinching embrace of life; you more-or-less do away with the notion of ‘faith’. The Lion of “I Will” defying the Dragon of “thou shalt”.
Love on the other hand, is best explained with a grounding in faith of some form, faith being integral to its constitution. On the one hand, Camus didn’t see a problem with it; on the other, Sartre did, and went along a rather destructive path of the unflinching deconstruction of the various forms of it.
Nothing profound, just an observation.
lyrics:
Please stop fighting, please
Let’s talk, please
So you never knew love
Until you’d crossed the line of grace
And you never felt wanted
Till you’d someone slap your face
And you never felt alive
Until you’d almost wasted away
You had to win, you couldn’t just pass
The smartest ass at the top of the class
Your flying colours, your family tree
And all your lessons in history
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Leave it out
So you never knew how low you’d stoop
To make that call
And you never knew what was on the ground
Until they made you crawl
So you never knew that the heaven you keep
You stole
Your Catholic blues, your convent shoes
Your stick-on tattoos, now they’re making the news
Your holy war, your northern star
Your sermon on the mount from the boot of your car
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Leave it out
‘Cause love is big and love is tough
But love is not what you’re thinking of
September, streets capsizing
Spilling over and down the drain
Shards of glass, splinters like rain
But you could only feel your own pain
October, talk getting nowhere
November, December
Remember, are we just starting again
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please
‘Cause love is big, it’s bigger than us
But love is not what you’re thinking of
It’s what lovers deal, it’s what lovers steal
You know I found it hard to recieve
‘Cause you, my love, I could never believe
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Please, please, please
Please
Tags: existentialism, faith, life, logic, love, Music, philosophy, please, U2
Posted in Music, Politics/Ideas | Comments (0)
from father to son May 22nd, 2008
stumbled across a live version of Dirty Day
It got me thinking of the progression of U2’s music. I don’t come from the Joshua Tree generation. My first introduction to U2 was the audacity and spectacle of Zoo TV and PopMart. Then you track back to Achtung Baby and Rattle and Hum, before you get to The Joshua Tree.
The idealism of The Joshua Tree seems to have been transcended, hardened (from “I’ll see you again, when the stars fall from the sky”; to “Still lookin’ for the face I had before the World was made”), melted away, and replaced with a (dual) infusion of pragmatism and despair (from One, to Gone) on the one hand, to the absurdism of Dirty Day, Mofo, or Lemon.
The progression from Achtung Baby, to Zooropa, to Pop seems to be that of the development of the son into the father, while still trying to remain the son. Neither here nor there, but with the burden of both roles.
Tags: absurdism, Achtung Baby, Dirty Day, life, Music, Pop, PopMart, progression, U2, Zoo TV, Zooropa
Posted in Music, Opinion, Politics/Ideas | Comments (0)
