Thirteen Birds vs. The Record Desk

From Art Into Pop (1987) by Simon Frith and Howard Horne –

Epstein and Oldham, then, made exactly the same ‘compromises’ with the pop process (even if John Lennon was to resent the fact that the Stones, not the Beatles, got to act out rebellion). Where they differed was in how they presented what they were doing (and their own roles in doing it). For the self-effacing Epstein the point of the sales pitch was that no one should notice it being made – the Beatles just were the zany foursome they were sold to be. For the youthful Oldham, by contrast, just as determined to be a star as the Stones themselves, the packaging of the Stones was an art – his art – to be celebrated for its cunning and cleverness. The Stones, unlike the Beatles, remained ‘authentic’ artists not because their music was more rootsy nor because their image was more rebellious but because they were clearly in charge of their own selling-out process. (Page 102)

Quite possibly, rock’s last great gasp was the creative explosion of the 1990s (though I would be more than happy to have this bold assertion proved wrong). Of course, *the* face of ‘90s rock is Kurt Cobain whose own experience of the push/pull of the underground vs. the mainstream remains a key part of his myth as a recent viewing of the interview-doc About a Son reminded me. As the story – and the cheeky documentary title – goes Nirvana’s breakout success was proof that 1991 was the “year that punk broke.” (Interesting when you consider that “broke” could very well cut both ways.) Still, I think this tale is fundamentally true when you consider that “punk” is essentially an upending of typical rock “values” in favor of some kind of snarky, smartipanced antagonism – often with a side-order of celebratory, art school amateurism. 1991 is the year when mainstream American rock audiences saw what had previously been “alternative” become the dominant popular form of rock music.

What the Frith and Horne book is all about is the how the British art and design school tradition influenced rock music from the ‘60s through the 1980s. Essentially, it examines the impact of art theory and art school methods on popular music. It goes into some detail on the extent to which Sex Pistol’s mastermind Malcolm McLaren was influenced by the French situationists in his conception of punk as a means of discombobulating the standard hit-making process while promoting his Bizarro-world pop group. In many ways, the ‘90s saw the triumph of these perverse un-rock/punk values of widespread mock and purposeful artifice. Nevermind the Bullocks reasserted as the plain-old American Nevermind.

Of course the American arty- and sloppy-rock underground as established by REM, Sonic Youth, the Replacements, and the Pixies had a great deal to do with the sound and sensibility of ‘90s rock. However, no discussion of popular music in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s can ignore the Irish media colossus that is U2. As Bono seems intent on reminding everyone, U2 pretty much put a chokehold on the “best and biggest thing since the Beatles” title sometime during the Reagan era. In their first superstar-flavored incarnation, U2 was a VERY SINCERE AND IMPORTANT GROUP. At their ardent peak, they stole “Helter Skelter” back from Charles Manson, recorded a sequel to John Lennon’s “God,” and re-recorded their hymn-like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” with a GOSPEL CHOIR just in case you missed the point.

Yeah. They freaking MEANT IT.

A funny thing happened to U2 in the ‘90s – they sprouted a sense of humor. The much ballyhooed Achtung Baby found the band embracing Bowie and Factory Records and all sorts of “cool” influences. (Bono described it as “the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree.”) The accompanying ZOO TV tour was even more of a revelation. Bono and company started toying with personas and satire. The big rock and roll spectacle was used to skewer not only the outside, non-rock world but the very business of rock stardom. The ZOO TV version of U2 was all media flux and pre-millennial angst. It was about the bloated, pointless business of rockstarness. As a hugely-popular mainstream band, U2 was inviting the masses to creep to the edge and peer into the vast cavern of nothingness that was modern rock celebrity. Here was the “World’s Biggest Band” echoing the anti-rockstar gripes of the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams of the world. The Fly, MacPhisto, the Mirror Ball Man – all of them proof that it was better to die before one became Pete Townshend.

The album that came out of U2’s newfound smarts and style was, of course, Zooropa.

Before I self-consciously thought about the “meaning” of rock, I was simply a teenager buying records, looking for sounds and songs I liked. Like most teenagers, my willingness to try new things came in fits and starts – simultaneously prompted by and hemmed in by peer approval and the need to fit in. Like a lot of dumbass teenage suburban boys, my ideas of what was musically appropriate was guided by how much something “rocked.” For instance, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC “rocked.” REM did not. In junior high, I mostly played at “rocking.” I mean, I dug Aerosmith and Ozzy and Van Halen, but I really couldn’t get into Slayer and Metallica. And I was sneaking REM and the Beatles on the side pretty early on. I knew that I liked the force and the volume of “heavy” music, but I also liked songs and smarts and melodies. In many ways, ‘90s “alternarock” – with it’s marriage of classic and punk rock approaches – was made for me.

So in 1993 I was still sorting out what “type” of listener I was. More than any other record, Zooropa hooked then fifteen-year-old me on what I would later learn were the big ideas of “irony” and “post-modernism” and the “unreliable narrator.” I remember what a shock the album’s newness and modernness was – especially compare to the guitar-heavy ‘70s and ‘80s rock that had comprised the bulk of my listening just a few years ago. I learned about rock and roll from my dad who was very much of the “disco sucks” persuasion. I knew next to nothing about dance music and post-punk and sissy synthesizer music. U2’s reconfigured and mainstreamed Euro-dance sounds was a big change from what your average Midwestern suburban rock-listener kid knew about. Add in all the Eno-inflected glam artifice and you’ve got something completely foreign and weird – something as otherworldly and interesting as the White Album (which was my FAVORITE album for years and years; I spent the better part of 1992 listening to nothing but the White Album).

I suppose what appealed to me about Zooropa even then was the album’s layers of sincerity. “Numb” had the same unreliable calm as the double-speak in my sophomore-year reading assignment 1984. “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car” and “The First Time” reminded my Catholic-prep-school self of parables – though with very different lessons. Advertising slogans and grim apocalyptic doom, inescapable mortality and throbbing disco breaks – Zooropa isn’t really an emotionally-tidy record.

In many ways, Zooropa is the record that taught me to stop worrying and love the bomb. I think it helped reinforce those Lennon lessons about how an “artist” can toy with an audience’s expectations. I started to see how booksmart ideas about symbolism and allusion weren’t restricted to the classroom. You could apply them to the songs and movies and books that happened outside of school.

Mixing Pop and Politics…

Of course I now know that Zooropa-era U2 was borrowing from Eno and Bowie to craft some kind of half-kidding knowingly-sold-out disco-punk attempt at critiquing rampant consumerism and neverending omnimedia glut. But I didn’t know that when I was fifteen because I was dumb and sheltered and didn’t know shit about rock and roll shinola. Zooropa helped me get here from there. And it introduced me to Johnny Cash. And it’s still the smartest, neatest sounding record that U2 ever made.

When this record hit the pre-millennial streets, U2 were at the top of the pile and were setting the paces by ditching rock in favor of “going techno.” For those readers who might not recall, “going techno” was the pretty much the bubonic plague of the post-Cobain world. Basically, the entertainment powers that be were all looking for the *next* Nirvana — a paradigm shift that would likewise shift units. “Techno” was the great Eurodisco menace that *might* be able to convert an American audience that was vaguely aware of rave culture and technofuturism. That “wicked firestarter” fellow from the Prodigy was going to be the next Johnny Rotten. In retrospect, “techno” was the Y2K of musical trends, a lot of sound and fury signifying nary a blip or twitter — for better or worse, mind you. The US college-age music audience did embrace Phish and Creed instead.

Anyway, many alt-rock types were almost burnt at the stake for going techno, but the big dog in the “we dig the new sounds” controversy was U2. After all, the stellar Achtung Baby and Zooropa records used beats and looping and other dance music sleight-of-hand. If any band could pull the reactionary arena rock audience into the block-rockin’ future, it would be the reconfigured, reinvigorated post-maudlin, post-modern U2.

Too bad the band gave up on the future with Pop. Rather than embracing the new, the band retreated into its mid-80s finger-pointing mode, gussying up the tracks with some nifty bangs and whooshes hoping no one would notice.

The calculated, sensible All That You Can’t Leave Behind is often credited as U2’s return to mainstream form. However, that return begins with Pop — a hectoring, preachy record that subtracts the apocalyptic glee of Achtung/Zooropa and piles on the morning-after self-pity.

Damnation and salvation lurk in the shadows of all three of U2’s 1990s albums. Achtung Baby is the “Let’s ride out this hell train” record, all dark sexuality and sardonic humor. Zooropa is the purgatory record — all numbness and vague notions of having been vain and frivolous. The clearest morality comes through the voice of Johnny Cash’s “The Wanderer.” And all that business about a “bible and a gun” is hardly hopeful. These are ambiguous records.

If Achtung and Zooropa are the Inferno and the Purgatorio (and I don’t think they intentionally are), then Pop is the Paradiso — the boring one full of high-minded metaphysics and moralizing. “Discotheque” is the only fun track on the album, and this song is interrupted by a reminder that it’s time to get right with the great disco ball in the sky.

You’re looking for the one
But you know you’re somewhere else instead
You want to be the song
Be the song that you hear in your head

The should-be-naughty-but-isn’t “Mofo” is all about spiritual questing as well. Rock and roll (not techno!) is posited as part of the salvation process.

Looking for to save my save my soul
Looking in the places where no flowers grow
Looking for to fill that God shaped hole
Mother…mother sucking rock and roll (Mother…)

Additionally, the speaker (ostensibly Bono) is trying to find himself after a period of hedonism (perhaps whilst wearing devil horns and a gilded suit) — “Looking for the father of my two little girls.”

The hits just keep on coming, too. Much was made about U2’s gargantuan PopMart tour in support of this album. The advance word was that the band was embracing Warholian pop art and American-style bigness much in the same way the ZOO TV tour made art out of new Europe meets old Europe sleaze. However, the tone of the tour — with its giant yellow arch and Dean Martin-sized martini olive seemed less fun-loving and more finger-wagging. It’s not just the props — take for instance “Miami” — gone is “Zooropa’s” ambiguous, campy play with advertising clichés –

Zooropa…a bluer kind of white
Zooropa…it could be yours tonight
We’re mild and green
And squeaky clean

Zooropa…better by design
Zooropa…fly the friendly skies
Through appliance of science
We’ve got that ring of confidence

Instead, U2 uses “Miami” to paint a wholly unflattering portrait of modern American values.

Weather ’round here chopping and changing
Surgery in the air
Print shirts and southern accents
Cigars and big hair
We got the wheels, petrol is cheap
We only went there for a week
Got the sun got the sand
Got the batteries in the handycam…

Her eyes all swimming pool blue
Dumb bells on a diving board
Baby’s always attracted to the things she’s afraid of
Big girl with the sweet tooth
Watches the skinny girl in the photo shoot
Freshmen squeaky clean
She tastes of chlorine
Miami, my mammy

Similarly, the lyrics go for the hard moral sell in “The Playboy Mansion.”

If OJ is more than a drink
And a Big Mac bigger than you think
If perfume is an obsession
And talk shows, confession
What have we got to lose
Another push and we’ll be through
The gates of that mansion

Basically, the sense of play and new values that U2 toyed with on Achtung/Zooropa is pitched out in favor of attacking obvious wrongs. With Pop U2 attempts to reclaim their mantle as rock’s progressive-ish conscience. The traditionalist modern rock of All That You Can’t Leave Behind helped this kind of strident material go down easier with U2’s mainstream audience. But Pop was the beginning of U2’s retreat from modernity and weirdness. The album closes with the unmistakably serious “Wake Up Deadman,” a song that actually asks Jesus to “rewind it just once more.” If that isn’t a retreat from the scary jumble of contemporary living, I don’t know what is. It took U2 another album for the music to match the nostalgia of Bono’s lyrics. However, U2 as a forward-looking band was pretty much over with this trend-hopping, problematic record.

“You can keep this suit of lights,” indeed.