Sweetest Thing, U2

When a band tries simply to render an artistic vision and fame is a side-benefit that they didn’t see coming and have an ambiguous relationship at best with, we applaud them. When they start out telling people “we’re gonna be the biggest band in the world” and then, well, become the biggest band in the world, doing entire concerts from inside a giant lemon, we call them U2 and we say they’re wankers. At least we do if we’re online.

Once upon a time, I became a regular visitor to the website New Order Online, and by “regular” I mean “I spent hours there arguing the merits of various late-twentieth-century popular music artists such as a certain Irish quartet who you may have heard of. In fact, if you’ve never heard of New Order, you probably don’t want to visit that particular website; we would’ve reamed you for your lack of knowledge. New Order, in brief Cliff’s Notes version, once was a post-punk outfit named Joy Division, until Ian Curtis (the lead singer) killed himself and his bandmates had to decide whether or not to carry on. In one of history’s nice little coincidences, AC/DC were going through the same period of grief versus practical concerns that same year, 1980. They got Brian Johnson, who sounded a lot like Bon Scott, and went on to be even bigger. Joy Division changed to New Order, elected guitarist Bernard Sumner to front-man position, and went electronic. And they were great; trust me, a blind download of “Substance” (their best-of circa 1987) would be worth your money. But they never got to be as big as they should have.

Or as big as U2 became…

You’ve heard of U2; from the beginning, they made quite a racket, and they’re still at it. I don’t even have to pretend to offer a history lesson or highlight any of their songs, because you’ve heard them. In fact, they’re so omnipresent that I think this is part of why people absolutely hate them. It’s far more fashionable (and frankly more fun) to mock Bono’s pretensions at being a world statesman (though it turns out he’s pretty good at it) or consider the band as a whole as merely imitators and not innovators, benefiting from America’s fascination with anything that has a foreign accent, seems exotic without being threatening, and rocks in an arena-rock, balls-to-the-wall way.

And I was right there at the barricades, bagging on Bono and the boys even as…well, even as I had to admit that I liked their music. Most of these essays are about music that was big during my youth, and I think that’s the way a lot of people’s iPod songlists are: as much as you want to think you’re hip and with it, the songs you listen to the most are the ones you grew up with or associate with different times in your life (thus the autobiographical nature of many of these essays). U2 might be the Train of the Eighties, except for the fact that they did great, great songs. My cousin Brandon is a big U2 fan, with zero trace of irony in his fandom.

But being a fan doesn’t mean you can’t hold the band’s feet to the fire when they do something you can’t get behind. I’m sure if you asked him, he could name a few times when U2 let him down, or released something that wasn’t up to their previous standards. But something that I’ve noticed with even the songs that I didn’t care for first time around: eventually they grow on you. For every fist-pumping “Bad” that snares you in from the first lyrics or drum break, there’s a “Sweetest Thing” that seems nice enough but nothing to write home about, until it worms its way into your cerebral complex and makes its case.

For all the bombast that they’re known for, U2 can be surprisingly quiet when they want to be. Even “One” is more restrained, I think, than the usual crowd-pleaser. And “Sweetest Thing” is that rarest of U2 songs past a certain point in their recording history: it’s just a love song, albeit with an edge (get it? “Edge!”) of melancholy. Once upon a time, U2 sang simple songs about simple emotions in a complicated way. Oh, and Bono is one of the best singers in rock history. Yes, he really is, and “Sweetest Thing” is a good reminder of that. I think so, anyway.

Picking on a popular artist is fun, no doubt, and I enjoy bagging on so many bands and artists that I can’t really say I’d ever really like even in an ironic way. But I like U2, I don’t love them but I like them, and I like some if not all of their music. I may envy them their money, fame, ability to help charity, lack of a day job, and so on. But I like them, enough to mock them on occasion. But you know I don’t really mean it.