Why I Love U2

U2 is my all time, hands-down, far-and-away [insert some other definitive superlative here] favorite band, and has been since I was in high school. I love U2. I love U2 because clearly, U2 loves U2. They are the band I would always love to be in - spending the rest of my life making rock-and-roll with my high school friends. As a devotee, I spend an exorbitant amount of time reading any interview with the band, including 2006’s autobiography, U2 by U2. What one realizes when reading about the band is that they spend a great deal of time talking about … being in U2. And while plenty of bands and artists and musicians waste plenty of ink prattling on about themselves, and, to paraphrase Reggie Jackson, the magnitude of themselves, I never find the band’s near constant self-mythologizing and self-analysis to be cloying or annoying. Ego-centric? Sure. But in a good way, in a way that I would want my favorite band to be. I would like to think that the four guys take the stage, look around, and still think, after 30 years, “Jay-sus, I’m in U2! This is effing awesome!”

U2 seem to truly, deeply, madly care about being in U2. And that’s why I love them. I’m a high school teacher, and teaching is my passion, with music being a very close second. I listen to anything and everything; if it has voice, guitar, bass, and drums, I’ll check it out. But I have yet to fall in love with another band that seems to care so much about each other and the band itself. No band seems to take being in a band, and playing music, as seriously as U2 does. As a high school teacher, I can’t afford the luxury of cynicism; in my line of work, hopelessness get kids seriously hurt, and gets adults burnt out. I have to deal in aspiration and striving, and this is always what U2 has done, in their music, in their lyrics, and in their lives. Their new album, No Line on the Horizon, is a perfect example of this. After 33 years as a band, they’re still restless, still striving and aspiring to be the next big thing, your new favorite band. They still haven’t found … well, you get the point. Their new album is messy, disjointed, and sounds nothing like their last two albums, but somehow, unmistakably, just like U2. The issue of whether this is a good album is almost secondary to the fact that they made an album like this at all at this point in their career - they could have recorded All That You Can’t Leave Behind Pt. II, and called it a day (although some critics might argue that they did do this already, and titled it How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb). But instead, they decided to travel the path of more resistance, and put out a spiky, weirder, experimental album. I’ll be honest - I’ve listened to the album a number of times on their MySpace page, and I’m still trying to get into it completely. I don’t think that it will ever sit on the shelf in my heart with The Joshua Tree, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, or with their masterpiece, Achtung Baby. But that’s not the point. From all that I’ve read about the making of the album in various U.S. and U.K. music magazines, Bono, Edge, Larry, and Adam all seem pleased with how the songs, if not the entire album, turned out. After all these years, all the songs, all the recording, all of the touring, they still get a kick out of turning each other on with music. We should all be so lucky to live lives like that, and have careers like that. I love U2 almost as much as U2 loves U2.