DATE | WEEKS |
January 15, 2005 | 1 |
When I went to Stuyvesant High School in the early 2000s, I'd take the A train from my house in Queens to Chambers Street in Manhattan each morning, and then back again that afternoon. Assuming no delays, the train took about 40 minutes each way, and when I went home, it usually wasn't crowded. That meant I got a seat, but it also meant that at some point traveling through Brooklyn, someone would get in my car and start telling everyone they needed to accept Jesus in their hearts or they'd go to hell. OK, maybe that's a little reductive, but you get the point. Evangelists love a captive audience whenever they can find one.
By this point in my life, I was a decided atheist. Six years of Catholic Sunday school can do that to you. So perhaps it was a little weird that I decided U2 was my favorite artist around this time. Because U2 is arguably the most successful Christian rock band of all time. Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr. are avowed Christians. And several of the band's best and most well-known songs are paeans to their faith.
Bono may not care very much for televangelists (one listen to "Bullet the Blue Sky" could tell you as much), but he may have more in common with them than he'd care to admit. How else can you explain why, as part of the rollout for U2's brilliant 11th album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, they filmed themselves performing on a flatbed truck driving through Manhattan for the video for "All Because of You", the second single from the album, and most recent #1 for U2 on my top 40.
Bono has never said "All Because of You" is about God, but he's never said it's not about God, either. On the surface, the lyrics could be about devotion to a romantic partner, or even a parent. Bono's narrator describes his love for someone and how that relationship has changed who they are as a person. "I was born a child of grace. Nothing else about the place. Everything was ugly but your beautiful face, and it left me no illusion." Bono's narrator is aware of his shortcomings, and realizes this person can see past them and can even make him rise above them. "Some people get squashed crossing the tracks. Some people got high rises on their backs. I'm not broke but you can see the cracks. You can make me perfect again."
There was a long time where I felt like I would never find someone to spend my life with. My flaws felt too innumerable to overcome. What I didn't realize was that when I finally found someone who might be able to look past those flaws, that I would have to do the same to them. No one is perfect, and that takes a lot of pressure off trying to minimize traits that you can perceive as flaws but are really just aspects of your personality. When I realized that this was happening with the woman who became my wife, that's when I knew I was in love.
I love that note The Edge plays to open the song. It commands your attention. The song is a real rocker, pushing the pace relentlessly. The Edge loves to use distortion pedals in U2's songs, and I think this is a good example of him using them to great effect. It would've been easy for U2 to go with a softer song to follow up "Vertigo", but I like that they chose this song,, playing up the high level of musicianship on the record.
The arguments for the song being about God come from scripture. Bono sings in the chorus, "All because of you, I am." In Exodus 3:14, when Moses is charged with leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and he asks God what name he should call him, "God said to Moses, 'I am who I am.'" And in Mark 14:62, when the Jewish high priest asks Jesus if he is the Messiah, "And Jesus said, 'I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.'"
I have far too little knowledge in theology to make an argument that "All Because of You" is about God or Jesus. My feeling is the love Bono describes in the song could be applied to almost anything, earthly or otherwise. But there were plenty of songs in the early U2 catalog that spoke to the band members' Christian faith. The band almost broke up in 1981 because Bono and The Edge were contemplating joining the church.
Maybe that's what makes the music video so compelling in all of this. For context, this wasn't the first time U2 filmed a video out amongst the general public. The video for their 1987 hit "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" saw the band wandering the streets of Las Vegas, back when it was far less sanitized than it is today, mingling with people outside casinos. It's a deep concept when you think about it. It's a deeply introspective song about searching for enlightenment, and they chose to shoot the video in the least introspective city on the planet, whose purpose for existence is entertainment and avarice.
A better analogue would be another single from The Joshua Tree. "Where the Streets Have No Name" is easily one of my favorite U2 songs, and arguably one of their best. For that video, the band set up on the roof of a liquor store in Los Angeles next to the Cecil Hotel. The police informed the production team that the shoot needed to be shut down, but U2 carried on with the performance regardless, as approximately 30,000 fans on the street look on. The video was intended to evoke The Beatles' legendary 1969 rooftop concert, although U2 advertised the video shoot ahead of time.
U2 were already in New York to perform on an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Luke Wilson. For the "All Because of You" video, U2 rode on the back of a flatbed truck from upper Manhattan all the way to the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge, where they filmed a brief concert. There's no reports that there was any danger of the stunt being shut down, and fans can be seen cheering the band on and following them as they journey through Manhattan. U2 weren't the first artist to do something like this for a video. In 1993, Bjork did the same concept for the video for her song "Big Time Sensuality". But if you watch that video, no one is batting an eye to Bjork's video shoot. As great as Bjork is, she can't move the needle the way U2 can.
I remember hearing about the shoot the day it happened and feeling an intense case of FOMO. I was living in Bremerton, Washington at the time, and deeply missing New York. I've always felt like New York is where the action is, so to be living in a sleepy Seattle suburb while my favorite band is cruising through Manhattan on the back of a truck to film a video was very painful. It probably deepened my resolve to head back to the east coast.
"All Because of You" rode a wave of excitement for me about U2's new album, enough that it managed to displace "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers for a week from the top of my chart. Its legacy pales in comparison to "Vertigo" or other more famous U2 tracks, though. It only has a little more than seven million streams on Spotify, the fewest of any of the singles from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It managed to reach #6 on the Modern Rock chart, but quickly faded after it peaked.
U2's next single would be the more internal "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own", one of a few songs Bono wrote about his dad, who was dying of cancer. That got to #8 on my chart in the spring of 2005. A couple more singles followed afterward. "City of Blinding Lights" got to #12, and "Original of the Species" reached #22. If I ranked all the songs on HTDAAB, "City of Blinding Lights" is easily my second or third favorite, while "Original of the Species" is probably my second least favorite.
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb wound up being U2's second album to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating albums by Mariah Carey, Paul McCartney, Gwen Stefani, and Kanye West. I tend to believe the Grammys get things wrong way more often than they get it right, but I can't argue with that choice, my obvious bias aside. I'm sure some retroactive critics could make the case for Late Registration, and if Kanye hadn't gone MAGA batshit in the last few years, I would be inclined to pull that album up and see for myself. (Kanye West will eventually appear in this column.)
U2 kept busy in the months after those Grammy Awards. They collaborated with fellow Number Ones artist Green Day on a cover of the 1978 song "The Saints Are Coming" by The Skids, performing it the Superdome in 2006 prior to the New Orleans Saints' first home game since Hurricane Katrina. The also released the greatest hits compilation U218 Singles, which featured the new song "Window in the Skies". ("The Saints Are Coming" and "Window in the Skies" both peaked at #6 on my chart.)
As much as I love U2, I don't think a new album gotten me as hyped since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Their next album, 2009's No Line on the Horizon, didn't move the needle for me nearly as much, though I've come to like it a lot in the years that have passed. Lead single "Get on Your Boots" feels like a naked attempt to copy what they did with "Vertigo", but it fell short at the time, and only got to #3 on my chart. I thought that the next single, "Magnificent", was much better, even though that only reached #5.
U2's output has slowed considerably since then, even if their ambitions haven't. You probably remember the disastrous rollout for 2014's Songs of Innocence, where one day it suddenly appeared in everyone's iTunes libraries for free. At the time, I didn't see the big deal about it. You still had to download the album to actually listen to it. Now to be fair, if Taylor Swift had done the same thing with 1989, I probably would have shit a brick. That said, the album's release feels prescient by today's standards. Now everyone with a Spotify or Apple Music subscription can get the latest albums by anyone at a moment's notice. As for the album itself, it was pretty good, even if I haven't listened to it in a while. The first single was the awkwardly titled "The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)", which peaked at #6 on my chart. I preferred the second single, "Every Breaking Wave", and that reached #5.
2017's Songs of Experience might have been my least favorite U2 album to date. Don't get me wrong; the worst U2 album might still be better than a lot of artists' best albums. But there was still a leaden quality to a lot of the songs that just couldn't pull the album up for me. It was the first U2 not to produce a top 10 song on my chart, with lead single "You're the Best Thing About Me" peaking at #15.
As the 2020s began, U2's absence between albums felt much more noticeable. Bono wrote his autobiography Surrender, which was accompanied by 2023's Songs of Surrender, where U2 re-recorded the 40 songs Bono used as chapter titles for his book. If I was going to give Taylor Swift grief for re-recording all of her old albums, I couldn't handwave what U2 was doing, even if there was a more compelling creative reason for doing so. I think I made it three songs into that album before I couldn't take the uncanny valley nature of the songs.
U2 still haven't released a proper album since 2017, but there's no way I can say they won't be back in this column. In 2023, the band inaugurated The Sphere in Las Vegas with a 40 show residency where they played Achtung Baby in full. To commemorate that, they released the single "Atomic City", which might be the best song they've released in almost 20 years. It got all the way to #3 on my chart last year.
This Friday, they'll release the 20th anniversary remaster of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and accompanying it is How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb, which Bono described as a "shadow album" comprising 10 songs that didn't make the cut from the original recording sessions. One of the songs from those sessions, "Picture of You (X+W)" is currently sitting at #10 on my chart as of this writing. It may not make it to #1, but I can't get it out of my head, and it just brings back great memories of listening to U2 albums in the mid-2000s.
In 2015, I finally got to see U2 live in concert at Madison Square Garden on the Innocence and Experience Tour. Incredibly, this was the first concert I ever went to. The stage design was spectacular. During each of the eight shows they played at The Garden, a different guest came out to play with the band. One night it was Lady Gaga, another it was Bruce Springsteen. The night I went, Paul Simon came on stage during the encore to perform "Mother and Child Reunion". It wouldn't be overstating it to say it was a spiritual experience for me. To someone on the outside, maybe there isn't much difference between a U2 concert and a church service. I just think a U2 concert is a lot more fun.
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