U2 above, Across, and Beyond by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 6

Transgressive Theology

The Sacred and the Profane at U2’s PopMart

Theodore Louis Trost

For most listeners, including some members of the band, the Pop album marks the moment when U2 went too far. The word “excess” is often associated with the album and the tour that promoted it. The auricular experimentation amounts to a sonic assault, a breaking of the sound barrier, a soniferous boom and bust. The album offers too much glitz and glitter; it’s an immersion in the momentary; it seems a celebration—or it is a seamy celebration—of the transient. As the authorized lore goes, U2 regrouped after Pop, returned to their roots, and started writing recognizable songs again. In short, they came to their senses.1

But there is another way to see the matter. One could, as I recommend in this essay, regard Pop as the extra push over the cliff that the famed fictional guitarist Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap cherished as the essence of rock ‘n’ roll. On this album, U2 “goes up to 11.”2 While Pop challenges and breaks many musical boundaries for the band (supersonic guitar expeditions, funkified percussion, techno dance rhythms, drum loops, bits of sampled and synthesized esoterica, the short wave distortion weaving in and out of “Wake Up Dead Man,” etc.), its most endearing (and enduring) quality is the theological leap, the “leap of faith,” as it were, that this collection of songs exercises and exemplifies. In the tradition of Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, and Ronald Reagan (in very different contexts), the rhetorical force of Pop resolves into the plea: “tear down the wall.”3 Following in an act of theological criticism as delineated by Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwald, Jr. in their treatments of religion and popular film, whereby theological criticism, according to Martin, “studies the . . . ways in which films express classic religious concerns, sensibilities, and themes” with the assumption that “there must be some moral, ethical, or theological position upon which the meaning of the [work of art] depends,” I will argue here that U2’s art—in this case the twelve songs on Pop (1997)—transforms the den of thieves that constitute the “PopMart” into hallowed ground.4 On Pop, U2 transgress the borders between spirit and flesh, sacred and profane, high and low, caché and cliché. To be extreme about it, U2’s Pop testifies to the revelation that God is Pop.

TRANSGRESSING THE BORDER BETWEEN RELIGION AND ROCK

The propensity for dividing up the world into the sacred and the profane—us and them, insider and outsider, the eternal and the temporal—is a characteristic, perhaps the characteristic, of religion, according to sociologist Emile Durkheim. For Durkheim, the sacred refers to those practices, objects, stories, and people that are set apart from everyday life. The profane, on the other hand, is the mundane: the workaday world with its routines, casual clothes, crosstown traffic, the marketplace, etc. Religion marks off and maintains the distance between these two realms. Rituals, for example, reaffirm the meaning of the sacred by delineating its separateness, such as when,

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