The new U2 album, No Line on the Horizon, is pretty good I guess. It’s okay. My first-listen reaction is that it’s better than How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and much better than career-worst All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The lyrics get pretty dire, as you’d expect these days–Bono needs to ban the word “beautiful” from his repertoire for a while, just like there was a period where the band agreed they weren’t allowed to use “streets”–and the Edge’s rockin’-out riffs are kind of forced and gutless. Regardless, “Get On Your Boots” is stuck in my head pretty frequently.
Anyway I write this because I have a bad feeling that some people are going to refer to certain tracks on the record as “experimental,” particularly in light of the comparatively straightforward songs on the past two albums. Let’s not forget that we know what actually experimental U2 actually sounds like, from back when the lead singer of the biggest band in the world dressed in platform heels, gold lamé suits, devil horns, and kabuki make-up and called himself “MacPhisto.”
“Lemon” is my favorite U2 song. Interestingly, I really loved it and the rest of Zooropa from the moment it came out, way before I listened to electronic or dance music generally. I think that even then I was excited to see the band try something so very different, and even then I was excited to see them do it well. I also contextualized Zooropa as the Magical Mystery Tour to Achtung Baby‘s Sgt. Pepper–a denser, deeper, weirder, braver exploration of the territory they’d just opened up an album ago.
As a song, with its techno shimmer (when I first started hearing electronic dance music I called all of it “techno” and it’s tough to shake) and falsetto vocals that most rock fans instantly associate with disco, “Lemon” is superficially quite confrontational versus the rest of the band’s catalog–the aural equivalent of what the names Pop and “Discoteque” and the Village People costumes they wore in the video were a few years later. But like all the best of their ’90s material, “Lemon”‘s addresses the same kind of spiritual, capital-R Romantic yearning that the band’s big rock hits did, only fed through filters of uncertainty and self-consciousness. So, the lemon itself, the symbol that represents the magical mystery woman du jour, is big and bright and juicy and natural as one might expect, but it’s also sour and maybe a little blinding and associated with the sterile advert artifice of “lemon fresh” sloganeering.
The song describes man’s attempts to create art as guilelessly self-obsessed, his attempts at transcendence ultimately self-reflexive and driven by the usual preoccupations:
A man makes a picture
A moving picture
Through the light projected
He can see himself up close
A man captures colour
A man likes to stare
He turns his money into light to look for her
The motif is repeated:
A man builds a city
With banks and cathedrals
A man melts the sand so he can
See the world outside
A man makes a car
And builds roads to run them on
A man dreams of leaving
But he always stays behind
In both cases, the question seems to be whether the creative act is even necessary, whether we’re introducing unnecessary intermediaries into an observational process that’s really as simple as opening our eyes.
Meanwhile, despair (“I feel like I’m drifting, drifting, drifting from the shore”; “these are the days when our world has come asunder”) yields to hope of respite (“I feel like I’m swimming out to her”; “these are the days when we look for something other”); indeed, the latter is not possible without the former. This is perhaps best expressed by the epigrammatic “chorus” of the song: “Midnight is where the day begins.” The music itself ebbs and flows in a similar fashion, with the uplift of the chorus’s piano-plunking drifting back down into melancholy cello. But our final glimpse of the enigmatic “she” reveals that “she is the dreamer, she’s imagination/She had heaven, she wore lemon,” so maybe we’re right to try; maybe everything doesn’t collapse in upon itself, and there is something great out there waiting to be captured.