U2 Takes the Fifth

I worry about U2. With sound commercial advice, these 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds could turn into an absolutely awful band. They’ve already got the makings. The acclaim: as Ireland’s best new rockers, although none of them is over 20 years old, they could easily go the way of former titleists like the Boomtown Rats, the Undertones or Horslips. The musical limitations: U2’s repertoire consists of long, loud songs, all but one of them in the key of either D or E, none of whose arrangements would exist without lots of reverb. Most of all, the pretensions: U2’s lyrics scan like first-person Kansas or de-Gibraned Moody Blues, with symbols on the order of “a tightrope” and “the Ocean.” I fully expect Boy, U2’s debut, to be their best album. And yet, and yet. On first hearing, I thought Boy eclipsed anything else in Britain’s existentialst (hardly psychedelic) revival, and since then I’ve grown inordinately fond of it. Their set last Saturday at the Ritz was even better than the album. For neurological, psychological, maybe even sentimental reasons, U2’s got me right now. Neurology first; without it, the rest wouldn’t matter. U2 happen to be a great drone band in the Velvets/Byrds/Who line (but without as many foreground distractions), and a good drone bypasses the rational faculties. Grandaddy minimalist composer La Monte Yound, who claims that “each harmonically related interval creates its own feeling which is intensified as the interval is sustained or repeated, recently performed his The Well-Tuned Piano, a four-piece that uses resonant tremolo chords sustained for up to half an hour. U2’s Ritz show gave me a similar buzz, only louder. (More kinetic, too; drummer Larry Mullen, like the Stones’ Charlie Watts can wallop one lick forever and keep it suspenseful.) Young should have planned U2’s set: a clump of songs in E, a break in which lead singer Bono Hewson addressed the crowd, a clump of songs in D, another break, a clump in E, exit, first encore in D, exit, second encore — the same song that opened the set — in E. In other words, three long drones and two reprises. The song order is different on Boy, so I won’t try to guess whether U2 deliberately grouped the songs for maximum drone live. Within their drones, U2 favors a specific interval: the perfect fifth. (Music theory note: the fifth is a stable interval, but a hollow-sounding one, because we’re used to hearing it filled in with the major or minor third that turns it into a chord.) Guitarist “The Edge” Evans is obsessed with the interval: given the chance, he strums fifths, not chords, as in “Stories for Boys.” When a lead seems called for, he tends to play a fifth and upper harmonics that could almost be overtones of the bass line. Like the Feelies’ guitarist, he’d rather reinforce the drone than solo on it. Meanwhile, Bono’s vocal lines often include leaps of a fifth, and when they don’t the bass lines do. The feeling the open fifth creates — a clear, empty, where’s the-rest-of-me anticipation — meshes exactly with U2’s lyrics. Their “I” is a hyper-sensitive adolescent boy on the terrifying cusp of adulthood, his feelings out of control, who can’t decide whether he should face the outside world or run for his life. Every song takes place in a void fraught with allegory — Everyteen’s mental landscape — where each step calls for an existential decision. Sometimes the boy seems to understand exactly what’s happening to him (“My body grows and grows/It’s frightening, you know”)and sometimes he’s hopelessly overwrought (“Are the leaves on the trees just a living disguise?”) U2 don’t reflect on “Growing Up” like Springsteen — they’re in it so deep they can’t imagine anything else. And the reason it gets me is that I think they mean every word: clever ones, goofy ones, insights, clinkers. The emotions are as cheap and universal as Goffin-King’s teen fantasies, but I lived ’em, and since you’re a Voice reader, you probably did too. I hesitate to suggest that any pro rock group is innocent, particularly when they’ve been homeland heroes for a year, but U2 sure act that way. Boy shows they don’t quite trust their drone instincts, as they allow producer Steve Lillywhite to add entangling glockenspiel hooks. And for all the noise they make, U2’s stage presence fits their rhetoric. They move like flotsam in their own music, taking two steps back or sideways for every tentative one forward; when Bono sings, his face looks like an astronaut’s distorted by G-forces. In his second speech to the audience, Bono asked humbly that they give back some “energy,” and concluded “This is a very important night for U2.”

When they outgrow adolescence, every moment won’t seem so important; after a few years on the circuit U2 are likely to become cynical, careerist, or worse, more self-absorbed. I worry about them looking back on Boy with embarrassment, and trying to repudiate it or exploit it. Was there ever a sequel to Peter Pan?

© The Village Voice, 1981. All rights reserved.