The idea of rock’n’roll as a living countercultural force is pretty much discredited now. Experience has taught us that music is a lifestyle accoutrement, not the lifeblood of social change as it might still have been in the 1970s, when the young U2 were coming of age.
Then, rock’n’roll would have seemed a terrific way out of the tense dreariness in which Ireland, with its religious wars and stringent sexual taboos, seemed mired. U2’s 13th album casts its glance back to the band’s formative influences and early memories. “It was a war zone in my teens,” sings Bono of Cedarwood Road, his childhood address, over a swaggering riff. Shock-released on iTunes last week (all iTunes users got one, whether they wanted it or not), Songs of Innocence is being billed as U2’s most personal album ever, stuffed with confessional biography rather than flag-waving, or attempts to toy with the stadium form, as U2 did in their Zooropa years.
As with rock, so with tech. The idea of the tech sector unseating the status quo with its youth, smarts and in-built liberalism, meanwhile, is almost bankrupt too. Those would-be revolutionary enablers have overseen a regime in which privacy is a distant memory and the daily monitoring of citizens by commercial entities a reality. That’s not the California dreaming the Beach Boys sang about – a sound distantly echoed here on California (There Is No End to Love), with its little repetition of “Santa Barbara”, subtly echoing the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann.
It is both ironic and fitting, then, that Songs of Innocence should be stealth-released by a California tech giant like Apple, a name that used to stand for radical innovation in the face of the functional, grey Microsoft establishment. Both Apple and U2 are now the status quo, pumping out lifestyle product (in this case, the Apple Watch and iPhone 6, whose launch occasioned this album’s release). You could argue that U2’s frontman, Bono, has genuinely been committed to changing lives as well as supplying lifestyle accoutrements. But his global good works have been set in some relief in recent years by U2’s tax affairs.
Songs of Innocence – a William Blake reference – accurately describes these rearward glances, insofar as they hark back to a time when U2 were young. The album kicks off with The Miracle (of Joey Ramone), in which Bono finds his own voice in Joey’s tuneful sneer, the “storm in me” reflected in punk’s urgency. But the tune still sounds like U2, albeit with the odd chewy riff. Can you imagine U2 trying to sound punk now? Neither can they.
There are songs even closer to home. Iris (Hold Me Close) is about Bono’s mother, who died when he was 14. It would be safe to assume Song for Someone – a soppy, iPhones aloft moment – is about Ali, Bono’s childhood sweetheart and wife. Most arrestingly, Raised By Wolves talks of exploding bombs and disbelief, both in the religious and lay senses. Musically, there is a lot going on here: tense keyboards, percussive breaths and distant gospel choirs, making it easily the most intriguing song on the record. (Women want to write on Bono with tattoo needles, but his body’s not “a toilet wall”, he counters.) Pained Swede Lykke Li turns up to sing backing vocals on album-closer The Troubles, which has the good grace to not actually be about the Troubles, per se, but about inner strife.
But the facts of this release feel more like a Song of Experience, in the sense Blake imagined – a state of post-lapsarian knowing, of being tainted by worldliness. Contrast Infant Joy, from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, about the unbridled joy of new life, with Infant Sorrow, from Songs of Experience, with its description of a truculent, scheming newborn, “sulk[ing] upon [his] mother’s breast”, slyly calculating his best moves. The rough-and-ready, vinyl-aping album artwork smacks particularly of phoneyness. This album was delivered as a series of 1s and 0s.
The goal for U2 here is presumably renewed relevance, rather than immediate returns (the album is free to iTunes users, we don’t know how much Apple paid for distribution rights), and a better critical ride than their last record, the ambivalently received No Line on the Horizon. As well as Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, who could have helped U2 sound more like the Black Keys, U2 have worked with a slew of A-list pop producers to make music that sounds correct in a marketplace dominated by Maroon 5 – people like American Adele and Maroon 5 collaborator Ryan Tedder, and British super-producer Paul Epworth. So there is an echo-chamber effect here, in which U2 reflect the zeitgeist while refracting it to sound like themselves. The bittersweet Every Breaking Wave creates a little fold in the time-space continuum, by sounding like Coldplay sounding like U2. The whole album starts with “woah-oh-oh”s, the lingua franca of stadium rock, a chorus used all too frequently by Coldplay.
With Songs of Innocence, U2 find themselves in good company, mining their distant youth for material, a tactic of Paul McCartney’s last album. What fanbase wouldn’t want to hear their band’s most personal album ever? But while Songs of Innocence is more succinct, glossy and nimble than recent U2 outings, there is very little of the rawness, directness or spontaneity of youth to it – and precious little innocence.
