Exploring U2 by Scott Calhoun

Author:Scott Calhoun [Calhoun, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

III

Take This Soul

9

Playing the Tart

Contexts and Intertexts for “Until the End of the World”

Daniel T. Kline

Open your hearts to the Holy Spirit

For Christ’s sake.

We’ll be back to you in a moment

After this commercial break.1

If you had been a pre-War fan, as I was, you probably knew U2 as a band of spiritual commitment as well as political critique, but when Achtung Baby was released in November 1991, more than a few of us were—how shall I say it?—befuddled. After all, we followed when Bono kneeled in “Gloria,” waved the white flag of War, praised Martin Luther King Jr. in “Pride (In the Name of Love),” decried American imperialism in “Bullet the Blue Sky,” and helped us find what we were looking for. What we purists didn’t understand then was that Achtung Baby represented “the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree,” according to Bono,2 and that Bono’s shape-shifting marked a return to the Dadaist-inspired street theater of Lypton Village, the self-created community of the band’s Dublin adolescence.3 Achtung Baby was no aberration; it was a return.

But what the hell was up with Bono? Black leather, cigarillo and shades, and a smirk? Where was “Our Band for the 1980s,” as Rolling Stone dubbed them? We wanted our Bono pure and mulleted, as God intended. When I asked a friend, a New Testament scholar, about the Zoo TV Atlanta show, she sighed and said, “They’ve lost their political content.” Of course, U2’s politics had not disappeared. It had been relocated. Sure, we’d heard the Point Depot show at the end of the 1988–1989 Lovetown tour, when Bono remarked, “I was explaining to people the other night, but I might’ve got it a bit wrong—this is just the end of something for U2. And that’s why we’re playing these concerts—and we’re throwing a party for ourselves and you. It’s no big deal, it’s just—we have to go away and . . . and dream it all up again.”4 A rumor circulated that the band was breaking up, but we thought that Bono had simply seized on the symbolism of the moment, the start of a new decade, to indicate a new direction for the band. However, this was different. Something else was going on. It seemed that Bono and the band were systematically alienating their most devoted fans and betraying our idea of the band by becoming what they were: rock stars (gasp!). For some of us, Bono was no longer a visionary leader. He’d had betrayed us. Bono was a Judas.

Undoubtedly, Bono had been thinking about Judas for a while. “Pride” identified the nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr. with Jesus, the “one man betrayed with a kiss,” the Judas kiss. U2’s “Until the End of the World” (UTEOTW), on Achtung Baby (1991), is one of its most popular and durable songs, played at 420 shows since 1992, the thirteenth-most-played song in the U2 catalog.5 It is also perhaps one of the band’s most important,

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