DATE | WEEKS |
November 20, 2004 | 3 |
It starts "one, two, three, fourteen" in Spanish.
If any other artist tried to start a song that way, I probably would have given them an endless amount of derision. And I'm sure there were a fair amount of music fans, perhaps even U2 fans, who did find that intro pretentious or lame. That I wasn't one of them speaks to the power U2 held over me in 2004. They had already secured their place as my favorite artist by that point. Twenty years later, I can't deny that they're still my favorite artist.
I had always been aware of U2 for as long as I listened to music. But by the early 2000s, something had clicked inside of me with them. I dug into their catalog and was mesmerized by one masterpiece after another. Some of their albums connected with me at the deepest level. So when their eleventh studio album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was being primed for release in the fall of 2004, my excitement couldn't be measured.
U2 have always seemed to occupy a unique place in the cultural zeitgeist. The band has existed as a going concern for over four decades with the same lineup. Maybe that continuity is why, for better or worse, they've always found a way to stay relevant. While most other bands would be satisfied resting on their laurels, U2 have always tried to push their limits. It hasn't always worked, of course, and sometimes they've failed spectacularly. But they've always been in the conversation.
Nevertheless, "Vertigo" feels like an inflection point in U2's career. It was the lead single from the last truly prestigious album in the band's catalog. It was marked with a massive rollout in an ad campaign for Apple's nascent iTunes Store. And it coincided with the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It feels like it was the last time, for me anyway, that a new U2 song felt vital to my personal soundtrack.
U2 have felt like such an enormous enterprise over the decades that it seems hard to believe the band essentially started in a Dublin kitchen in 1976. Larry Mullen Jr. posted an advertisement at his school looking for classmates to form a band. Among the kids who responded to the ad were Adam Clayton, David "The Edge" Evans, and Paul Hewson. Hewson had already been going by the nickname "Bono Vox" by this point, which he later shortened to just "Bono". The group initially called themselves Feedback, but changed their name to U2 because it was the name they disagreed upon the least.
After winning a talent show in Limerick in 1978, the band was introduced to Paul McGuiness, who tried to secure a record contract for the band while the built a following across Ireland. U2 played a relatively large show at a boxing arena in Dublin, where an A&R rep for Island Records was in attendance, which led to the band signing a four-album contract with the label.
Steve Lillywhite, who had already produced early records for Siouxsie & the Banshees and XTC, and would go on to work with many foundational new wave bands of the era, was brought on to produce U2's debut album. Boy is a concussive miracle of an album. It's more polished than some of the punk bands the group was influenced by, but it still packs an urgency that probably could only occur because no one in the band knew any better (no one in the band was older than 20 when the album was released).
Boy was released in the UK and Ireland in October 1980, and the US the following year. It did decent business on both sides of the Atlantic, and U2 toured relentlessly in the early 1980s. They cranked out four albums between 1980 and 1984, three of which can validly be considered amongst the best albums of all time for me. Coming along around the same time as MTV also helped the band steadily increase their following.
But about those albums? October might be the closest the band has ever come to Christian rock, and it's not amongst my favorite U2 albums, even if a song like "Gloria" kicks all kinds of ass. War and The Unforgettable Fire, on the other hand, are fucking amazing. They're focused and showcase the band exploring the wider world around them as their success and fame grew. Their profile grew to the point that they featured prominently at the London leg of 1985's Live Aid concert, and their performance went down as the stuff of legend.
This all culminated in 1987's The Joshua Tree. U2 were bona fide stars at this point, and managed to make a record that cashed in on that fame, while somehow not deviating from what got them there in the first place. While that album probably ranks in the middle of the pack for me in their catalog, it still has a few absolute classics. To critics, it was a masterpiece, and the album won the Grammy for Album of the Year, in addition to spinning off their only two #1 singles on the Hot 100.
At the same time, however, people were beginning to sense that the band had their heads way up their asses, something that wasn't dispelled by the concert film and accompanying album Rattle and Hum that was released the following year. At a concert in Dublin on New Year's Eve 1989, Bono declared to the crowd that U2 had to "go away and... just dream it up all over again."
What this meant in practice was traveling to Berlin after the reunification of Germany and working with Brian Eno on their next album. Bono and The Edge were influenced by industrial music around this time and wanted to take the band's sound in that direction. This caused immense friction between the band members, to the point that the band nearly split up. That changed when The Edge came up with a rudimentary version of the song that eventually became "One". This allowed the band to keep moving forward, relocating to Dublin to finish the album that became Achtung Baby.
I'm not going to jerk you around on this: Achtung Baby is my favorite album of all time. It's a perfectly paced album; the structure and order of the songs goes from throttling to soothing you, but it's never jarring or abrupt. And honestly, several of the songs on the record are just bangers. It would be easier to list the songs that aren't among my top U2 songs, than the ones that are.
I was 16 when I first listened to the Achtung Baby CD that I received as a birthday present. I had to go to summer school after failing English, and was utterly humiliated. For whatever reason, listening to the CD on the subway that summer caused a deep connection to the album for me. Maybe it was the idea of reinvention or resilience within the album that spoke to me. It's one of those things that deserves its own column because that's how significant it was for me.
U2 supported the album with the massive Zoo TV tour, a spectacle that saw multiple video screens on stage, prank phone calls to President George H.W. Bush, and Bono sauntering around the stage as his characters The Fly and MacPhisto. In the midst of the tour, U2 recorded their follow-up album, 1993's Zooropa, a pretty underrated album as far as I'm concerned. After the tour ended, the band took a long break. When they reconvened for their next album, the result was the even more dance-heavy Pop. Pop was considered a critical disappointment when it was released in 1997, though I think it too is somewhat underrated today.
Still, the band realized they needed to go back to the drawing board. They spent all of 1999 and the first half of 2000 working on their tenth album All That You Can't Leave Behind. It marked a more back to basics approach for the band, as they rarely relied on the studio effects that their 90s catalog leaned on. This was the first U2 album that I remember being aware of its release as it happened. I didn't have a terribly strong opinion of the band other than thinking that they had some good songs that I'd hear from time to time. Then came "Beautiful Day".
Something about "Beautiful Day" just clicked inside me when I first heard it. It was an uplifting song at a time when things felt like they were starting to spiral downward for me. Even now, I can't help but feel a little better, lighter whenever I hear it. While U2 may have been trying to recall the sound and feel of their 80s material, the song still feels totally modern and forward-looking. It was released a few months prior to the start of my top 40 chart and was sitting at #3 on that very first chart. Had I started my chart a couple months earlier, it almost certainly would've been a #1 song.
All That You Can't Leave Behind had four singles, which all made the top 20 on my chart. Follow-ups "Walk On" and "Elevation" both peaked at #16, and "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", Bono's tribute to the late INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence, reached #9. The album became their third to be nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy, but it lost out to the soundtrack from the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, something I was supremely pissed about at the time. Much as I like the film, it still doesn't make any sense to me how a bluegrass album that soundtracked the 58th biggest film of 2001 was somehow the better than every other album eligible for the award. Though now I'd argue Outkast's Stankonia was the album that actually got screwed over by Grammy voters.
For U2's next album, Bono started out by listening to artists he was influenced by when he got started, specifically citing The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and Echo & the Bunnymen. Bono wanted a harder sounding record than All That You Can't Leave Behind, and while I don't know if that's what resulted, the inspiration didn't seem misguided. The band spent much of 2003 writing and recording, working with producer Chris Thomas, and Bono and The Edge felt they had something ready for release by the end of the year. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen disagreed, thinking that their previous record wasn't as deep as far as hit singles, and that they were going down a similar path again.
The band played the album for Steve Lillywhite, who felt like it had "the weight of the world on its shoulders". They subsequently enlisted him to take over production of the album, and basically went back to the drawing board. The finished product is a lot more guitar-driven than ATYCLB. It feels more urgent, possibly reflecting the more tenuous state of the world that existed compared to 2000. The title How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb seems pretty appropriate in that context.
"Vertigo" was the first single from the album. The song came together from demos of two other songs called "Full Metal Jacket" and "Native Son", the latter being where much of the instrumentation derived from. "Native Son" was inspired by the story of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was controversially convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975. Even though the band was excited by the song, Bono realized it might not be the best song to perform every night for 20,000 people. When they reworked the song with Lillywhite, Bono rewrote the lyrics to the entire song.
That "Uno, dos, tres, catorce" line was apparently just the result of Bono getting drunk one night. However it emerged, it symbolizes the freedom the band allowed themselves once they started working with Lillywhite. "Vertigo" is basically U2 wanting to rock out, and if that was the goal, they hit it out of the park.
There really isn't any kind of story in the "Vertigo" lyrics. If anything, it's probably the feeling Bono had going to clubs to see punk bands as a teenager. "Bullets rip the sky of ink with gold. They twinkle as the boys play rock and roll. They know that they can't dance, at least they know." The lyrics capture the feeling a song gives you when you have a deep connection with a song, especially one you hear live. "It's everything I wish I didn't know, but you give me something I can feel."
Considering how much I loved and respected U2 in 2004, it would've taken a real clunker for them to not even reach #1 with a brand new single. And to the band's credit, "Vertigo" sounds like something of its time. The Edge's guitar parts are crisp and urgent. In the chorus, everything feels cohesive. For as much as Bono can dominate the room in any U2 song, I feel like everyone gets to shine on this track.
Around the time of the album's release, U2 partnered with Apple to use "Vertigo" in commercials for the iTunes Store and the latest version of the iPod. As a poor 18-year-old at this time, I didn't have an iPod yet, so I was stuck bringing my CD player/radio around everywhere if I wanted to listen to music on the go. A year earlier, the Australian band Jet allowed Apple to use their song "Are You Gonna Be My Girl", which I really loathed, in an iPod commercial, greasing the wheels for that song to become a modest hit. (Jet's biggest hit on my chart, 2005's "Look What You've Done", peaked at #36.)
So when I saw the iPod commercial with "Vertigo" for the first time, it was jarring, to say the least. I rationalized it as U2 selling a product that fostered consumption of music, including their own catalog, so I didn't think much of it at the time. Now, of course, it's impossible to watch commercial television and not hear a popular song being licensed for advertisement. Artists gotta make money somehow, even if that wasn't U2's problem in 2004.
"Vertigo" wound up being a pretty sizable hit for the band. It went to #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart, their most recent #1 hit on the format. It didn't get a lot of pop airplay, but still managed to reach #31 on the Hot 100. When How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was released in November 2004, it sold over 800,000 copies in the US in its first week alone.
U2 always had the mission statement of wanting to be the biggest band in the world. By the end of 2004, it was hard to argue that they weren't. People may have had strong and defined opinions one way or the other of the band, or Bono at least, but that only seemed to solidify their standing in the musical firmament. And How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb wasn't done spinning off hits for me. We will see U2 back in this column very soon.
EXTRAS
Here's Bon Jovi performing "Vertigo" at a 2011 concert in Dublin:
(Bon Jovi's biggest hit on my chart, 2005's "Have a Nice Day", peaked at #17.)
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