I’ve been listening to early U2 — the band’s first three albums have been remastered and re-released with B-sides and rarities, and it’s fun fun fun for a stone fan like me.
If you’ve listened to my Reality Break interview, you know I love any chance to witness art being made, to be a part of the moment when a human being makes that kind of meaning out of their heart and head and body, right in front of me. Almost as good is having a window into the artist’s response to their own work — it’s a different kind of jazz, the chance to watch the artist’s mind consider a part of themselves at some distance.
Here’s one of those chances: RollingStone.com posted a review of the re-issues, and Bono wandered over from whatever corner of the internet he’s currently in, and posted his own long and conversational response to the band’s first album, Boy.
Even if you’re not a stone U2 fan, perhaps you will enjoy watching the adult artist consider the boys who made Boy. For me there is something powerfully compelling about this fond and amused and in some ways ruthless assessment of one’s own work.
And then there’s this:
For us music was a sacrament â¦an even more demanding and sometimes more demeaning thing than music as ART, we wanted to make a music to take you in and out of your body, out of your comfort zone, out of your self, as well as your bedroom, a music that finds you looking under your bed for God to protect your innocenceâ¦
— Bono on RollingStone.com
This is why I love these guys whom I call my Irish brothers. Because in this way, we want the same things.
So here’s a song — “Tomorrow,” actually from October, the second album, but this is the song that’s taking me to the river today, the sacramental ecstatic song. Enjoy.
U2, “Tomorrow” from October, 1981
I’m not a stone fan of U2, but I am a fan. What your post made me think of was my view of my youth from a certain distance. I saw things in black and white then, and had lots of energy but no caution. I don’t have much caution even now, but I have learned to listen and pay attention. I have a good deal of affection for my younger self, but I think she was sometimes impulsive and dim, just from a lack of experience. I feel empathy and sympathy for kids because I haven’t forgotten what it was like to be young.
I have empathy too, particularly for people in their teens and twenties, which are in my perception a particularly hard time of life. Society expects responsible adult behavior from people whose brains are not finished hard-wiring, and at the same time constrains those people from getting the experiences they need to help them grow up…
I wish sometimes I could, I don’t know, take my experience and perspective and plug it into the brain of younger people I know, just as a way of saying Look, it really does get better, and oh by the way, here are a couple of ways not to be stupid right now. But that’s a fool’s game, and mostly I try to resist it. We all have to find our own way.