U2: in and out of love, rinse and repeat

In 2017, I reached a point in my life when I had this somewhat random urge to listen to U2 again. Maybe it’s my mid-life crisis, maybe it’s the fact I was writing a book about another band of high school friends who maintained the same lineup over more than 30 years, a band who decided a few years back to tour behind a reissue of their greatest commercial success.

I regretted not going to see U2 on their Joshua Tree tour—in 2017, that is. Because the one in 1987 also happened to be the first arena show I ever saw, with Los Lobos and Little Steven, at the CNE Stadium in Toronto. It was fantastic. I still have the T-shirt—it still fits. But any goodwill toward U2 I had in June 2017 had dissipated once I heard the new record.

U2 – The Joshua Tree (Island)

(reviewed June 8, 2017)

It’s been 30 years since the release of this record, one of only about a dozen records from the ’80s that warrant this kind of celebration on a mass scale. Three decades later, it still sounds fantastic, and “With or Without You” still jumps out of a radio mix, a sparse masterpiece that mixes the Velvet Underground with Philip Glass and Brian Eno, all in service of what could be a ’50s pop ballad.

Much like the 2017 remastering of Sgt. Pepper’s, however, this is yet another reissue of an album that already had a 20^th anniversary deluxe edition, which included a disc of B-Sides and a live show from Paris. This time out there’s some kind of seven-disc/LP extravaganza with much of that same material, substituting a New York City show for Paris; a stripped down set contains just the original album and the NYC show.

That show, however, is stunning: much more so than anything heard on the more bombastic Rattle and Hum—which was recorded on the same tour. In fact, the Rattle and Hum version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” recorded with the New Voices of Freedom gospel choir comes from this show; Bono claims that he stumbled across the choir singing his song, while strolling through Harlem earlier in the day before his Madison Square Gardens show. A good story, if highly unlikely. Most of the expected material is here, but the revelation is “Exit,” buried deep on Joshua Tree’s second side, which comes alive on the stage.

The band is playing the entire album on tour this summer; headlines were made when it didn’t sell out instantly, like every U2 tour for at least, I don’t know, the last 30 years? (Almost all the shows did sell out shortly afterwards, though.) U2 has been in denial about the fact that they’ve been a “legacy” act for at least the last 15 years, if not 20; no one is itching to hear their new music. They could do a lot worse than revisiting the last great album they made before they started second-guessing and micromanaging every move they made. 

Stream: “Exit/Gloria (live),” “Running to Stand Still (live),” “With or Without You”

That review ran on June 8, 2017. Six months later, after writing a book about another band with a 30-year career—a career filled with peaks and valleys, that ended on a creative high note—I reviewed the new U2 album.

U2 – Songs of Experience (Universal)

(reviewed Dec. 8. 2017)

“Nothing can stop this being the best day ever.” Say what you will about Bono, but the opening line of U2’s new album proves once again that the man is an optimist. Or is he? “Love, and love, is all we have left,” he sings on the chorus of that song. He’s gonna need a lotta love—because there’s not much left in U2’s tool box.

It’s not easy being a U2 fan. It can be hard to remember when they were game-changers, when they were an antidote to the mainstream, when they were truly inspiring—because they most definitely were all of those things a long, long, long time ago. For the last 25 years, however, they’ve missed the mark again and again—and not for lack of trying.

The problem is not that they continue to try, it’s that they try so goddam hard that it hurts. Never trusting their own instincts, U2 chase trends, hire trendy producers who do them no favours, and offer only glimpses of what ever gained them glory in the first place. Those glimpses are what keep us listening at all, the reason their album launches are still media events, the reason why I’m writing this review in the first place. For all the ill will generated by a misfired marketing campaign with iTunes for 2014’s Songs of Innocence, the album was nowhere near as dreadful as it was made out to be—but it was no comeback, either. Even there, as on 2009’s promising No Line on the Horizon, there were glimpses that kept fans going.

Patience runs out now. Songs of Experience is dreadful, top to bottom. What’s worse is that Bono seems to know it, based on his lyrics here. The second song has a chorus that goes: “Free yourself to be yourself / if only you could see yourself.” Can he see himself? Can he hear himself? The next track, “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” notes that “the best things are easy to destroy.” No shit, Sherlock. Despite being one of the only half-decent tracks here, this song threatens to destroy the two best things about U2: their talent and the size of their audience.

The third track is “Get Out of Your Own Way”—how can this band not be taking their own advice? Neil Young’s favourite producer, David Briggs, had a maxim he used while speaking of spontaneity: “You think, you stink.” U2 should pay heed. Get out of their own way. And for the love of their beloved Christ, someone has to tell Bono he should never, ever, ever write a line like the colossal clunker that appears in “American Soul”: “Will you be my sanctuary, refu-Jesus?”

If U2 begat Radiohead who begat Coldplay, then why does U2 in 2017 sound like a third-rate Coldplay? Musically, this milquetoast doesn’t cut the mustard anywhere on that spectrum. When racists bemoan the lack of so-called “rock” music up for Album of the Year at the next Grammy awards, take a look at the standard-bearers of the genre that are visible to the mainstream, and wonder to yourself whether rock music is worth saving—and whether U2 will ever be the ones to save it (again). The answer to both those questions is a definitive no. (Unless you work for Rolling Stone, which laughably placed this record at No. 3 on its year-end list.)

It’s telling that two of the best tracks here, “The Blackout” and the “extraordinary mix” of the “Ordinary Love” track—the original came out four years ago, and was nominated for an Oscar for the Mandela biopic—both echo “Discotheque,” which was the last time that U2 seemed to be in on their own joke.

It’s not easy for any long-time-running band to maintain mass interest through to their 14^th album, but U2’s acts of self-sabotage are now beyond belief. That’s even before any discussion of Bono’s offshore investments and tax dodges that surfaced recently in the Panama Papers, which is more than damaging for an activist who tries to get governments to spend tax dollars on foreign aid. U2 have always made it easy for cynical critics to attack them; now it’s easy for everyone else, too.

U2 delayed the release of this album so they could tour behind a 30^th anniversary reissue of The Joshua Tree—and now we know why. They need all the goodwill they can get right now.

Stream: “Love is All We Have Left,” “Ordinary Love (Extraordinary Mix), “The Blackout”

TuneYards - I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life

Tune-Yards – I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life (4AD/Beggars)

Bummed out by Bjork’s latest turn toward the turgid? Merrill Garbus of TuneYards creates the kind of joyous, genre-busting dance music that’s a spiritual sister to Bjork’s earliest, carefree days; their approaches are quite different, but they share a delight in exploring the full range of their voices, set to a smorgasbord of sound and insistent grooves. Melodies are stretched up and down the scale, going wherever they can—because the woman in charge can do just about anything.

It’s Garbus’s voice that draws you in, but it’s the seemingly endless musical invention underneath her that keeps you coming back. With bassist Nate Brenner, she jumps all over the map: reggae basslines and West African grooves and Balkan harmonies, all filtered through an electronic lens that embraces glitchiness and distortion. As a result, all that globetrotting never feels tied to any particular place. If that seems like that could be a bit of a mess, it’s not. Far from it: Garbus and Brenner never clutter the basic groove, and every song is full of pop hooks that could easily be schoolyard skipping rhymes.

It’s avant-garde pop music that succeeds on every level, and without compromise. It’s what hundreds of other artists try to achieve and can’t. Best of all, Tune-Yards never tries to draw attention to its own cleverness: none of those weird little bits are a distraction. They enhance all the excellence that’s already there.

That’s the music. Lyrically, Garbus is considerably more self-conscious than she is musically or vocally. Cognizant of the fact she’s a white American woman enamoured with African music, dance and fashion, she embarks on some serious self-examination, questioning her “white centrality” in the lyrics. While well-intentioned, there’s a great danger of these lyrics sounding like a hectoring lecture on intersectionality, a semiotic ouroboros of white guilt eating itself: “I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories of travels with African men.” But again, Garbus sidesteps this pitfall: she communicates big ideas with ease, not just with the economy of her words, but with welcoming melodies and her inherent charisma: “I don’t want to be a woman if it means not being human” is set to a melody that could easily be a Beyoncé hit. In a song where the chorus is as basic as you can get—“ABC 123 LMNOP”—she starts off with this cheery couplet: "Fan the fire or face the crowd / California's burning down / Sitting in the middle of the sixth extinction / Silenting suggesting the investment in a generator."

Yes, it seems like the world is ending. No, that shouldn’t be a reason to stop dancing and singing at the top of your lungs, cognizant of the world around you and choosing to embrace every possibility at your disposal. Whether the music of TuneYards would feel as urgent or as necessary in any other geopolitical context is hard to say. But in the dark days of early 2018, it’s a life-saver. (Jan. 26)

TuneYards play the Danforth Music Hall on March 6. 

Stream: “Heart Attack,” “ABC 123,” “Home”

Beth Ditto - Fake Sugar

Beth Ditto – Fake Sugar (Virgin)

This Arkansas native is one of the most electrifying vocalists of the last 20 years—and yet if she has any celebrity at all (which she does in Britain) it’s as a style icon, a self-identified “fat” activist, a queer role model, and just about anything except the singer of dance-punk trio the Gossip, who only recently announced their split, five years after their last record.

It’s important to remember why anyone paid attention to Beth Ditto in the first place: she’s one of the most charismatic front people in rock’n’roll history, able to whip crowds into a sweaty mess within the first three songs of any set, whether the audience is 30 people or 30,000. And it’s not just through the force of her personality: it’s her voice, that all-American blend of country, R&B, gospel and punk, capable of heartbreaking subtlety and righteous hellfire. It’s a voice with the confidence to conquer small towns and narrow minds, a voice that is and was a beacon to bullied freaks everywhere.

The Gossip were a trio that began based in the blues, eventually morphing into Euro dance-pop—in ways that few similar bands, with the exception of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, have ever done successfully. Now that she’s on her own, Ditto doesn’t feel pinned down by any sound: chart pop, new country, sappy ballads (in the best possible way), and of course everything the Gossip always did so well. Meanwhile, “We Could Run” sounds like the best track that didn’t make it on to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. The title track is a perfect ’80s soft-rock hit that wouldn’t be out of place on Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night. Throughout, Ditto shows off her maturity as a vocalist by exploring softer shades that didn’t always shine through on her earlier work.

She’s 36 now, and playing the long game; these are songs she’ll still be singing when she’s 75—if her success in the fashion world doesn’t keep her away from a microphone. The world has always needed more Beth Ditto, but these days in particular her voice and her message is much more important than her taste in clothes. (June 22, 2017)

Beth Ditto plays the Mod Club in Toronto on March 17.

Stream: “In and Out,” “Oo La La,” “Do You Want Me To”

Jackie Shane - Any Other Way

Jackie Shane – Any Other Way (Numero)

“Jackie’s story is one that a Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t begin to invent,” writes Rob Bowman in the liner notes to this long-overdue anthology that encapsulates the career of one of the biggest mysteries in the history of Canadian music.

The story of Jackie Shane, a Nashville native who was one of Toronto’s top club attractions in the 1960s, is one that involves, says Bowman, “kidnapping, carnival side shows, con artist ministers, professional gambling, careers as a drummer, vocalist and dancer, fame in Toronto, Montreal and Boston… and a disappearing act to rival that of Houdini.” So far, that sounds like a great story. But what makes the ballad of Jackie Shane an important story is that she was “a black American woman born in a man’s body who had the courage, strength and soulfulness to lead her life in an open and honest manner at a time when doing so was extremely risky business.” That she did so in Toronto is even more surprising.

Jackie Shane was fearless. She started cross-dressing in public at the age of 13, got her start as a drummer, and was once kicked off a tour with Jackie Wilson in Florida for upstaging the headliner. Growing up queer in the American South in the 1950s, she took the advice of her friend Joe Tex, who told her, “You have everything that anyone could possibly want as an entertainer and as a musician. Get out of here if you really want to make it. You’re class, you got what it takes, but you’ll never make it here.”

So Shane joined a travelling carnival act. After a week in Cornwall, Ontario, she split and headed for Montreal, where she was amazed at the amount of nightlife on St. Laurent Boulevard, compared to her comparatively sleepy hometown of Nashville. She was 19. That bustling scene, she soon found out, was run by the Montreal mob; one gangster kidnapped her and smuggled her back across the border, promising to make her a star. She told him she was underage; that was enough to change his mind, and she soon settled comfortably into the Montreal scene. She met South Carolinian trumpet player Frank Motley, who invited her to front his band. They played all over the Eastern Seaboard, with Boston and Toronto their best markets. Toronto soon became home: the Brass Rail, the Sapphire, the Concord. “We had never seen anything up close like that in Toronto,” said Toronto-born Stax Records artist Eric Mercury. “It was like a tornado coming through the place.”

Shane did not spend much time in recording studios, and a series of bad business deals left most of her singles in obscurity. The exception was “Any Other Way,” which was a huge radio hit in Toronto and Boston; it sold 10,000 copies in Toronto alone, which is miraculous on several levels. She had some great musicians around her; note Chester Petty’s organ on “Stand Up Straight and Tall,” which appears on this lovingly curated compilation for the first time since its release. She turned down a chance to be on the Ed Sullivan Show, because the producers didn’t want her to perform with makeup. Atlantic Records and Motown were interested, but she gave them the cold shoulder as well.

For years, the only true recorded testament to her power was Jackie Shane Live, recorded at Toronto’s Sapphire Club in 1967, on which one gets a clear sense of her power over audiences. On both “Any Other Way” and a cover of Barry Gordy’s “Money,” she embarks on extended monologues extolling tolerance and everyday extravagance. Jackie Shane lived large, and she wanted her audience to do the same, on a live-and-let-live basis. One can only imagine what a galvanizing effect she must have had, in the early 1960s in WASPish Toronto, on those in her audience that weren’t as “square” as the rest of the town. Her entire recorded output is here, with her full participation, on the most important archival release in this country since Native North America and Jamaica to Toronto.

Shortly after the release of Jackie Shane Live, she was fed up with her bandleader, an increasingly drunk and belligerent Frank Motley, and told the rest of the band to follow one or the other. They chose her. Shane continued to tour and to play around town for four more years, including an opening slot for her friend Joe Tex at Massey Hall. In 1971, after spending a fair amount of time in Los Angeles with her mother, she returned to Toronto and reconciled with Motley, but that didn’t last long. At one fateful gig, he pulled a knife on Shane and refused to pay her after she said she was leaving him for good. Jackie Shane made her last Toronto appearance that December, and never came back. No one knew where she was. A vital piece of Canadian music history was missing.

Grammy-winning historian and York University prof Rob Bowman found her alive and well at the age of 77 in her native Nashville. In the thorough liner notes in this package, she have him her full story. “I hope I gave them something they will always remember,” she told him. “Something not only about the dancing and the laughing and that, but about life. I gave what I had. I talked to them and I was simply saying, ‘Live and let live. We all want a little piece of it and we all should have a little piece of it.’” We wouldn’t want it any other way.

Stream: “Any Other Way,” “Stand Up Straight and Tall” “Money (Live at the Sapphire)”