U2 finished two shows at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts last night. I caught Sunday night's performance. It was my fifth, and most underwhelming, U2 concert. Hearing The Unforgettable Fire, Walk On, and Ultraviolet was worth the price of admission, but I could have done without the predictable "greatest hits" set list interspliced with new songs that will be forgotten as soon as this tour concludes.
That's the price of thirty years of fame: everyone knows your songs, has favorites, and is letdown when you don't play them. So bands feel compelled to play the hits. It's safe. But there is a downside to this. When you play the songs that a focus group identifies as the must-hear U2 songs, the setlist becomes predictable and stale. I read the other day that U2's three-concert streak of not playing "Pride" was its longest since the song's release in 1985. Unlike, say, Bruce Springsteen, who can offer a different concert every night, U2 performs the same songs night after night with a change here and there. It's telling that, up until Monday night, the opening four numbers have been the same throughout the tour. Like so much of what sucks in our society, there is little to differentiate Chicago from Foxboro, and Foxboro from East Rutherford. It's a cookie-cutter concert, one size fits all cities.
Though not a hater of supersized stadium shows, this particular stadium show fit into the stereotype of lacking intimacy--with a twist. Whereas this complaint typically centers around the lack of intimacy between artist and audience, here it concerns the lack of intimacy between the players themselves. The in-the-round stage (get it: the U2 360 Tour), which featured roving catwalks to an outer ring, penetrates so deep into the audience that the players at times seemed as far away as Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra. They needn't be artificially crammed as though the venue were a garage. But it strikes the audience as unnatural if the bass player is on the twenty-five-yard left hash mark and the singer is by the right endzone pylon.
I went to a concert rather than church on Sunday, but I still got preached to. Bishop Desmond Tutu presided over the ceremonies, sermonizing about AIDS drugs and foreign aid. A procession of volunteers wearing Aung San Suu Kyi's masks invaded the stage to highlight her imprisonment in Burma. Bono lectured about an injustice that, even had the sound system reached the upperdeck with clarity, still would have sounded incoherent. To what end? Is a drunken football stadium going to depart from the pews and change the world or will they just find the posturing mildly annoying?
The stage set, a massive claw grasping the enormous stage below, doesn't make any sense. Bono calls it a spaceship, but what does a spaceship have to do with U2 music? They're not spacey like Pink Floyd and they don't actually sing about alien abductions like The Pixies. The two other tours in which I caught U2 concerts featured sets that thematically meshed with the music. The multitude of televisions flashing subliminal messages during the Zoo TV Tour and the faux-McDonalds arch that greeted concert goers to the PopMart Tour jibed with the overall concepts of mass communications and commercialism, respectively. But what's with the claw? It is utilitarian in that it holds up speakers and a wraparound videoscreen, but it doesn't seem to have an artistic purpose.
And that lack of an artistic purpose is my overarching complaint with U2's 360 Tour. Playing the same, focus-group friendly songs night after night is more befitting of muzak than a rock band.
I was at Monday's show. I love U2, but the show sucked. They played maybe 5-6 songs I wanted to hear. It was actually weird. The sad thing is I paid a fortune for the tickets. Fool me once shame on you... won't get fooled again... (sorry to quote "W").
"Bono lectured about an injustice..."
I just hope he walked away feeling good about himself because that's what it's all about for these guys.
Funny, like most other people, he hated Bush but took his (read:OUR) money for the cause.
Shut up and play comes to mind.
Congratulations, Mac, on making it home to post by 12:39 a.m. after the concert. One of the drawbacks to this show that I didn't mention in the article was the horrible traffic situation, which helped to keep me from my bed until 3:30 a.m. after the concert. There's a major concert venue a walk from my house, where I caught Neil Young/Wilco last year. My odyssey from Foxboro may keep me closer to home next time around.
I wouldn't cross the street to see those yahoo's. The band's made millions lecturing the U. S. while they put their revenues into tax havens. Stereotypical liberal hypocrites.
