I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For 4 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

I spent most of my twenties in smoky bars watching mediocre indie rock bands play at ungodly hours, standing almost motionless in the dwindling crowd, hands gratefully occupied with beer and cigarette.

I swear it was the only reason I smoked: to have something to do at rock shows. If you weren’t smoking and drinking, your body might be tempted to respond to the music, and one does not dance at an indie rock show, one observes with a raised eyebrow and a sharp critical eye seeking the first embarrassing hint of earnestness.

If the show was really great, I might have acknowledged it with a slight rhythmic nodding of my head. But I would never have allowed the music to transport me, to take me anywhere beyond my own cynicism. Eventually I forgot that rock shows used to be fun. No wonder I gave them up when Charlotte was born.

My own parents kept ticket stubs taped to their double vanity mirrors like holy cards: The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Fleetwood Mac. I wasn’t allowed to touch them. Or maybe I only believed that I wasn’t allowed to touch them. Music seemed to be the most important thing in my parents’ life, and only in writing this have I realized that I often approached that long oak dresser like an altar.

When my mom died, my dad became a born-again Christian and torched his record collection. But when my sister and I were little they took us to see every band we loved. The day after Duran Duran, I woke up genuinely depressed. I’d found a state of bliss only to be rudely returned to my mundane life. I spent the day clutching my souvenir t-shirt. My mom nodded her head sympathetically, understanding my longing, even if I didn’t. I was seven.

This has all been a very long set up to tell you that I went to see U2 last week on the Charlottesville, Virginia, stop of their 360 tour, and that my hopes were incredibly high. If any band could give me the kind of transporting experience, it would be U2. Bono, for all his God complex, knows the potential for a rock show to mimic religious experience, to transcend secular time and space.

The 360 tour is the biggest stage show in the history of rock, and though I raised my aging indie-rock eyebrow at the images of “The Claw”—the apparatus that suspends all the equipment and allows the band to perform in the round, so there are no obstructed views in the stadium—I was eager to suspend my disbelief. I wanted, desperately, to be moved.

I didn’t want to admit it at first, but the show left me cold. Loving U2 is pretty much an article of faith for those with Irish Catholic roots, as predictable as loving Notre Dame Football. Both loves thrive on a sort of mythology. For U2, it’s exemplified in the old hits: the militant stomp of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and the defiant howl of “Pride (In the Name of Love)” tempered by the painful humility of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

But I realized, watching the show, just how thin the “we’re just four boys from Dublin” story has worn. Bono even laughed when he trotted it out between opening songs. There was a similar sense of discomfort with the back catalogue: They phoned in “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and Bono let the crowd sing “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” For the eighth show in a row, they didn’t even play “Pride.”

I don’t want to condemn any band to a life of Greatest Hits tours, but underselling those signature songs made for an uneven show, a jarring shift between the past and present, the old U2 (the four boys from Dublin) and the new U2 (who arrive onstage in a spaceship), which made it impossible to lose myself in the moment.

Maybe it was that those old songs, full of wonder, pain, and questions, just didn’t stand up under the alien glow of The Claw. They are not the songs of a mega-band broadcasting its signal into deep space. But in this context, “Beautiful Day” was startlingly moving, and otherwise forgettable songs from No Line on the Horizon soared.

This ambivalence toward what many U2 fans hold sacred wasn’t the only problem, though, or even the most serious. Earlier I wrote that Bono knows the potential for a rock show to mimic religious experience. I would like to revise that sentence. Bono believes a U2 show is a religious experience.

I think that’s where I get off the spaceship. At several points in the show—when Bono encouraged everyone to turn on their cell phones and let their lights shine; when he called out a troupe of UVA students wearing masks of a wrongfully imprisoned woman and then asked us to “lift her up”; when he repeatedly told us to be sure and look out for the people taking donations for Project Red on campus—I thought we were headed for an altar call.

Add in the big-screen graphics and the greetings from the space station, and in the end, the concert was no more transcendent than the announcements after communion—a little liturgical dance, and don’t forget the fish fry next Friday!—full of unnecessary distractions and interruptions, no longer a sanctuary from worldly concerns.