Everywhere Is America

U2 @ Madison Square Garden 7/18/2015
The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) / The Electric Co. / Vertigo / I Will Follow / Iris (Hold Me Close) / Cedarwood Road / Song for Someone / Sunday Bloody Sunday / Raised by Wolves / Until the End of the World / [The Fly remix intermission] / Invisible / Even Better Than the Real Thing / Mysterious Ways / Elevation / Ordinary Love / October / Every Breaking Wave / With or Without You / City of Blinding Lights / Bullet the Blue Sky / The Hands That Built America -> Pride (In the Name of Love) // Beautiful Day / Mother and Child Reunion -> Where the Streets Have No Name / One

• This was my 9th time seeing U2. I’ve seen them on every tour from Popmart onward, and I think this may have been the best U2 show I’ve seen. It’s definitely the best in terms of staging and lighting design – this was, BY FAR, the most immersive concert experience I’ve ever had in an arena – but I think I also just got lucky to see them on a particularly good night.

• The staging for this tour, along with what Nine Inch Nails was doing on the Tension arena tour in 2013, is very far ahead of the curve of what pretty much anyone else performing in arenas is up to. U2 have always been major innovators of the arena concert – the now standard mid-show b-stage and acoustic mini-set was invented by U2 on the Zoo TV tour in 1991. But what they have going on this time around is brilliant, and the logical next step from what they were doing on the Elevation and Vertigo tours. Basically, they have a minimal main stage on one end of the floor, and a smaller round stage at the other end, and the two are connected by a runway that bisects the general admission area. The runway is sometimes just a runway, but as the show goes on, there’s also a huge screen that sometimes has video art, and other times serves as a massive jumbotron equivalent. The are two levels when the screen is down, so Bono can walk around in the center of an animated image and interact with it, or the entire band can perform within the screen and appear or disappear inside the imagery. I’m not a big fan of the animation style they are using, but the craft is impeccable and at least a decade ahead of anyone aside from NIN.

• One of the things that makes the Innocence + Experience tour work so well is that unlike the Elevation, Vertigo, and 360 tours, there is an actual reason for U2 to play their new songs aside from promoting a new record. There is a clear narrative arc to this show, and even if songs like “Iris” and “Song for Someone” aren’t necessarily the band’s best work, they are compelling and moving in this context. The latter, a sorta schmaltzy ballad about Bono meeting his wife when they were teens in Dublin, gains some emotional weight from a visual that places him in the humble surroundings of his youth. That moment of gentle sweetness transitions directly into a particularly grim reworking of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and a dramatization of domestic terrorism just before the excellent “Raised by Wolves,” and it’s genuinely jarring. Bono singing about being a young punk fan can seem a bit indulgent, but this recollection of being suddenly shoved from “innocence” to “experience” is powerful, and gets to the core of why they’d spend an entire record looking back on this phase of their youth.

• “Until the End of the World” follows “Raised by Wolves,” and the new context gives it some new meaning. This time around, it’s as though the older Bono is singing to his younger self, and it’s about becoming hardened, cynical, and defeatist in the aftermath of tragedy. It’s about the end of innocence, and in doing so, giving in to despair. The song closes the first act of the show with flood imagery, and suddenly this song that was originally written about Judas and Jesus Christ is brought back into the Old Testament.

• “Bullet the Blue Sky” is back in U2’s set for the first time in a decade, which is another way of saying it was left out of the 360 tour. (You really have to see U2 when they come around, since they only seem to tour every four or five years now.) The band have a long history of reinventing “Bullet” on each tour, and making it about something else – on Zoo TV it was about racism, it was about the military industrial complex for Popmart, on Elevation it was about gun violence, and it was about violence inspired by religious extremism for Vertigo. Now it’s about money, and the Americanization of the world, and Bono imagining how a young version of himself would think of the old, rich Bono of today. It’s about feeling guilty for his wealth, and mocking his excesses. “I can see those fighter planes” from the original version is replaced with a snarky “I can see those private planes.” I think this take works really well, in large part because he’s dramatizing his mixed feelings about his success and what that means, and his complex feelings about the United States and what America is an idea vs. what the country is in reality. Bono shouted out recent events in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, and it didn’t come off as cheap. It was his way of confronting a very white and affluent audience, and pushing them to consider a grim reality that can be easily ignored if you feel safe and complacent in your own life.