The Importance of Being Earnest: Part Two
I went to the Sphere. I saw U2. I have thoughts.
On-brand as ever, last month, Holly & I went to see U2’s fancy new residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas. I can’t usually handle Vegas proper (the U2 part is the on-brand thing, not the Vegas part) for more than about 24 hours, but we did two days and snuck in some pool time and elite meals in between the second-hand smoke and passalong cards of women in various states of undress.
You might be tempted to assume that we went specifically to see the spectacle that is the new $2.3 billion concert venue, The Sphere. And reasonably so. But our motivation was actually rooted half a decade ago in our exit from The Rose Bowl, where we’d just watched U2 play their (your ranking here) album The Joshua Tree in its entirety. We agreed, “If they ever do the full-album concert with Achtung Baby, we have to go.” It was settled then and there1.
And that’s what this was.
So, whether it was in The Sphere or The Rose Bowl or Urban Lounge, we were gonna be there.
The Sphere was incidental. Achtung Baby was the thing.
The show—a multi-date residency boasting “the best concert sound ever” and “an immersive video experience like no other”—had debuted a week or two before. Initially, I deliberately avoided any photos or videos, thinking I’d prefer to be surprised in the moment. No spoilers!
But I caved.
Someone posted a photo of the apex musical moment of U2’s hit (and song I will listen to, start-to-finish, whenever it comes on) “With Or Without You.” You know the part: the song is cresting and Bono comes in, belting “Whoa-oh-oh-oh! Whoa-oh-oh oh!”2 It’s intended to be cathartic. It’s extremely dramatic. And it’s U2 in a nutshell.
No band that’s concerned with “cool” has this kind of grandiosely earnest moment in their songs. The cool band? They’d be embarrassed by its naked ambition (to become a huge singalong in concert, which it was, as the whole Sphere became a Whoa-Oh-Oh-Oh Choir) and its utter sincerity (uncloaked emotion in monosyllabic form). There’s no cool there. Just earnest emotion.
U2 has always been a band for the grand gestures. Whether it’s waving a giant white flag or revealing the stars & stripes of the American flag sewn into his jacket in the aftermath of 9/11 (see below). Slow-dancing with an audience member. Calling the White House over the PA during concerts. Entering the stage from inside an absurdly gigantic lemon.
You get the idea. Drama. Theatricality.
The trick to pulling off that kind of stuff is belief. You have to believe in what you’re doing. You can’t wonder if it’s a good idea. Or do it just to be a good sport3. You have to believe. Have conviction. Which Bono does. In loys4.
Anyway, as I watched this “With Or Without You” video on my little phone’s screen and the whole in-Sphere audience became the Whoa-Oh-Oh-Oh Choir, joining in on the big “whoa-oh-oh-oh”s, I got real chills. I was hundreds of miles away, a day or two after the fact, not even in the actual room, on cruddy iPhone audio… and I got chills.
It was another reminder that, while I would love to be cool and irony-drenched and hipper-than-thou and all that, I guess I’m a sucker for some well-placed earnestness.
Sincere? Guilty as charged.
A week or so later, we were inside The Sphere, certainly the wildest5 (and far & away most spherical) concert venue I’ve ever been to.
My three word review: I loved it.
More words?
The show was—as promised—an absolute spectacle, and a gorgeous one at that. They knocked it out of the park with the visuals; it made me wonder what their budget was for motion graphics. I wished I could pause and zoom in on some of the imagery to really examine it more closely. Like this Bollywood-influenced moving collage, which featured multiple Elvises (Elvi?) and Vegas showgirls and shiny neon lights and Vegas iconography and visual overstimulation beyond the max.
It’s insane.
Sometimes, though, it felt not all that dissimilar from watching… Laser Zeppelin down at the local Planetarium or something, with a live band providing the music. The visual element was even overstimulating at times. Sometimes I'd be so distracted by the (insane) visual spectacle, that I'd realize I wasn't connecting with the music as much, that the music felt somehow secondary. For example, the amazing visual collages above? I couldn’t readily recall which song they accompanied (“Even Better Than The Real Thing”). That’s how dizzy-lost in the pictures I got. And that—getting lost in the pictures—kind of bummed me out, as music has always been the piece that really moves me. The pictures and images augmented—and sometimes elevated—the music but sometimes distracted too.
Call me a purist. Call me old. But it was true.
Which brings me to my second point: the band felt de-emphasized. And maybe that’s the direction live music has gone in the age of EDM and DJs playing to light shows and rampant pyrotechnics and hologram Tupac and lip-sync Super Bowl halftimes.
I’m not arguing against the visuals altogether. I’m just saying that maybe the ratio of Live Band Actually Playing Music to Stunning Visuals was off. Maybe it would be ok to tilt back towards the Live Band Actually Playing Music side of things.
If I were the next act6 playing a series of shows in The Sphere, I would devote some time to thinking about ways to bump the band up in the hierarchy. I understand that the possibilities of The Sphere are the story here, but that doesn't mean that the band should feel like an afterthought. Which they did at times.
Third point: in a normal U2 setlist, the band has a “duty” to play certain songs. Their setlists simply aren’t as flexible and fluid as, say, the Grateful Dead (nor are their fans). So you simply aren’t going to hear much of a range of songs, except you’ll likely hear more from whatever their latest album is. For that reason, the deeper-cut Achtung Baby songs were my favorites of the Sphere show, by far. As someone who didn’t get to see U2 on the original Achtung Baby tour (lamented it then and continue to lament it now), it was incredible to get to hear some of those songs that aren't the big radio anthems. Really, those songs are the reason I went to the show.
What happened, with those songs, was that we got more inspired versions, because you’re not getting the muscle memory repetition of a song like “Beautiful Day” or “Where The Streets Have No Name” which have been played in nearly every concert since they were released (and were played at this one, and played well, to be fair).
”Trying To Throw Your Arms Around The World”
”Love Is Blindness”
”Acrobat”
"The Fly” (the moment of the night that most approximated the original Achtung Baby tour with its information overload)
Hearing the wailing, mournful solo at the end of “Love Is Blindness”, or the drive of “Acrobat”, or The Edge’s hammering “Fly” riff, or the audience singing along to the iconically Bono-ish line “…and a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Those were the gold for me. They made the night.
The venue’s sound, as advertised, was pristine. Not too loud. Bell clear. Vocals as clear as I've ever heard, especially in such a large setting. A marvel of engineering and sound design.
That said (here goes), I feel like some of the glory and magic of the band, particularlyThe Edge and his guitar work, was lost in translation. Like, there's something special about The Edge’s reverbed out, delayed-out guitars bouncing around and floating in the air, making planned and unplanned collisions with other sonic elements. The tone was there; gorgeous. But the visceral, in your guts part of it was missing. It felt, at times, like the guitar was a car with a rigid speed governor, where he couldn't push it to the stratosphere like he so often does because the power was gated, hitting a ceiling, a sedated tiger.
Beyond that, because the venue’s overall sound design was so good, the crowd noise never felt like it got intense. In fact, there were times I wondered if we were a bum crowd, if we were dragging the thing down. At a usual arena show, you get a lot of sound—like I said above—bouncing around and echoing and becoming much more than the sum of its decibelic parts. The roar of the crowd is typically comprised of more than just the initial yells and claps; it’s how they merge and bounce and amplify each other. The way The Sphere was designed, your shouts and yee-has and whooooots would just kinda decay the second they left your mouth. (Sad trombone, immediately decaying.)
In summary: it never got wild. Maybe for the people (I’m told there are many) on some kind of hallucinogenic, it did. But most of the night felt reined in. The possibility inherent in the night felt capped.
Which made the acoustic set, on a night when horrific events had broken out in Israel, all the more poignant. Always in touch with what’s going on in the world—war and peace, politics and policy—Bono wasn’t going to just ignore it all. And he didn’t. He got emotional, first tearing up, then choking up a bit. We got something wholly unrehearsed. Wholly real and in-the-moment. That patented earnestness.
For a moment, the cap was off.
I pick at nits. I overanalyze. But, the bottom line is that I loved it.
Would I have liked, as I put it above, less of a cap on the possibility, more likelihood of the improbable, more chance to it all, some wild (no pun intended) edges? Sure. But, ultimately, I loved it because of the sheer amount of care that went into the show.
You can’t pull off a massive show with that many moving parts, that much groundbreaking technology, without really caring. Caring a lot. Caring too much, even. The impartial, devil-may-care artist wouldn’t (and won’t) be bothered. The earnest, heart-on-sleeve, this-matters-so-much artist is the one that’ll go to the lengths it takes to make The Sphere feel like magic. To give each song (even the ones Paul forgets) its own flavor, its own visual world.
Earnestness gets a bad rap in the world of cool. But it puts on a hell of a compelling show.
Even when I saw the terrible promotional art. TERRIBLE. So bad, I don’t even wanna comment. Just…terrible.
Bono’s part is great and all. But the heroes, to me, are the changeup on Larry’s drums (and the fill he plays into the big singalong) and (surprise!) The Edge’s iconic guitar part.
In September, during a Lower Lights show, halfway through our set, I noticed my mic was wireless. I knew I didn’t have to play guitar on the next song AND was singing a lead vocal, so I thought, “Hm, why not venture out in front of the monitors and sing?” I reasoned that it’d be a nice (that was wrong) unexpected (that much was true) moment for the audience, kinda breaking the fourth wall and doing a pseudo-rockstar thing a la Springsteen or whoever, break up the usual stage show. Of course, in my quick calculations, I failed to add in the part where, once out there, I’d need to engage with the audience, which I was unprepared and unwilling to do. A real rockstar would reach down to the audience, look them in the eye, play it up. My anxiety shouted to me that I’d reach out and nobody would reach back and I’d be the idiot up there. So I just kinda wandered out in front of the monitors, was still (yep) the idiot up there, getting almost no reaction from the audience (except my daughter who, afterward, asked, “Why did you do that?” And “why did you run back to your mic stand?” I didn’t have good answers for either question. Gotta try stuff, I guess?).
I lacked belief is what I’m saying.
A loy is an old Irish spade. Duh.
Not the most legendary, that would be CBGB’s or maybe Madison Square Garden.
Not my favorite, that would be Largo.
Not the biggest, that would be Camp Nou.
Not the most beautiful, that would be Sydney Opera House.
Not the oldest, that would be either Paradiso (an old church) in Amsterdam or Union Chapel (also an old church) in London.
Not the weirdest, that would be Brainwash, a combo laundromat/music venue I once played in San Francisco, where I was paid in Odwallas.
I couldn't help but think of bands that would interesting in The Sphere, a lot of them in the more cinematically ambitious vein. Obviously the superdupermegastar acts will do it (Beyonce, Taylor Swift, McCartney, probably Madonna, Bruno Mars, Rihanna, etc) but the ones I'd be interested to see there are:
Flaming Lips (sadly, they could probably only fill the room once, but their version of a Sphere-level experiential show would be positively nuts)
Roger Waters (seems like a no-brainer)
Daft Punk (the de-emphasis of the artist would make more sense and be more deliberate in the case of the mostly-anonymous, helmeted duo)
Bjork (similar to Flaming Lips, I don't know that she could do a residency-style thing that would justify the cost of production, but her show would be one for the books in there)
Radiohead, of course
David Byrne (or a Talking Heads reunion; the guy has a knack for the visual aspect of a show)
Peter Gabriel
Portishead (similar to Flaming Lips again, not big enough to justify a multi-date residency, but, man, this could be a haunting, spooky affair. I’m scared just thinking about it.)
Beck
I think a prog rock band could be fun? Maybe Yes or something.
Same with a jam band like Phish. If they could figure out how to have someone doing a more interactive/on-the-fly thing on the screens, it could be transcendent. (I started this post a month ago and, just today, look what was announced. The weekend of 4/20 is almost too on-brand to be true.)
The Cure