I think All That You Can't Leave Behind is the last album that actually adds something to their body of work -- and it was risky, in the sense that the band had never before distilled their musical identity, and it could have failed spectacularly as an obvious attempt to regain popular support, if the songs weren't there and quite well-suited to the post-9/11 world a year after its release.

But POP is truly the last time U2 displayed any verve. The album is a little undercooked; it suffered from the focus on a stadium tour (I think the same happened with No Line on the Horizon); and the band has NEVER gotten out of the shadow of Achtung Baby, but it's bold.

And Discotheque is a criminally underrated gem, quite serious lyrics over a thousand layers of great beats.

You take what you can get
'Cause it's all that you can find,
You know there's something more,
But tonight, tonight, tonight...

I still submit, as I did then, that New Year's Day is at least as conservative as Gloria. Inspired by the Solidarity movement, the song asserts the fundamentally conservative skepticism of revolutionary utopianism.

"Nothing changes on New Year's Day."

But on the other hand, Bullet the Blue Sky mars a near masterpiece with its atrocious worldview. It would have been bad enough to assert a false equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States in their actions in Latin America, but the song completely ignores the Cold War context to treat American intervention in El Salvador as simply evil.

(Achtung Baby is their greatest album in part because it's personal rather than political, and confessional rather than polemical. When U2 actually tried to be subtle, they succeeded.)

The song has since been reused in concerts to protest gun ownership (I do wonder if U2's own bodygaurds are unarmed) and the war in Iraq. In the case of the latter, the band projected (and Bono wore a blindfold displaying) the simplistic "COEXIST" logo. Bono personally housed Salman Rushdie when a fatwa threatened his very life: he ought to know better than to imply that the problem is a general intolerance rather than an ideology associated with a particular religion.

The band, in its own business practices, show an aversion to the punitive taxes on which their preferred policies depend, their last two albums have been mediocre retreads, and Bono has shown a willingness to dare work with progressive Republicans (like George W. Bush) who have been willing to open our pocketbooks for us, to bankroll his causes.

But in terms of disposition and especially politics, there's not much with the band that is even arguably conservative. A band known for a (relatively) bold willingness to confound expectations wearily conforms to the pieties of the left; I doubt they would risk doing anything else, and I believe they're true believers of leftist politics who aren't interested in doing anything else.

It's not their politics but their Christian faith -- and their willingness to grapple with it in their songs -- that makes their music transcendent. They're honest about our need for God, our "God-shaped hole," and they tend to look beyond the merely political to satisfy that need.

In a sermon I heard recently -- thanks to the mp3s available at All Souls, where he preached -- the late John Stott observed that Christ Himself was radical AND conservative, very radical in His willingness to challenge the mere human traditions of the surrounding culture and very conservative in His affirming the authority of Scripture.

The Christian good news is inherently radical, teaching that we are in such dire straits that God had to intervene in the most dramatic way to save us, becoming a human and humbling Himself even to death to die the sin we deserve and offer us new life through His indwelling Spirit.

(Stott again, I believe on Galatians 4:1-7, wrote that God sent His Son to die in the world and sent His Spirit to live in our hearts, all to secure our holiness.)

The political left goes completely off the rails by looking to the State to satisfy our need for a radical solution to the world's problems, along with our need for belonging.

Just as we were made to belong as members of Christ's body rather than units in a collective, the radical solution to man's dire situation is Christ's death on the cross, not some pathetic political revolution: nothing changes on New Year's Day.

I'm obviously a huge fan and give them a great deal of the benefit of the doubt, but if U2 ever became crystal clear on that distinction, the other cultural elites would turn on them.

Here ya go:

External Link 

Most of the mp3s are accessible only after free registration, but a few Stott sermons were made VERY easily accesible available without registration, after his passing earlier this year:

External Link 

(The first link lets you find mp3 links to download, rather than just the pop-up player, but even the player's HTML gives away the .mp3 location.)

He also wrote quite a few books. Basic Christianity is a good complement to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity; The Cross of Christ is a great overview of the substitutionary atonement; and he wrote a few commentaries for InterVarsity Press' Bible Speaks Today series, which he co-edited.

Of those commentaries, The Sermon on the Mount, Ephesians, I & II Thessalonians, and ESPECIALLY Romans have really had an real impact on me.

You're welcome. :-)

zzzzzzzzz. Here's (part 1 of 6 pieces on Youtube of) a BBC4 documentaty about certain musicians who, according to narrator Howard Goodall (a British composer and television host), stand with Beethoven, Wagner, Handel and Bach, towering over the likes of U2:

External Link 

Thanks for that link. Quite interesting.

The most overrated band in rock history. Could write a great song, or a good hook, if their lives depened on it. Give me Nirvana, or REM any day of the week.