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Title: All That You Can't Leave Behind


Read this review and discuss it at CultureDose.com!

Title: All That You Can't Leave Behind
By: U2
Released by: Interscope
Released on: 2000
Rating (out of 10): 4
Date: 04/04/2002

The Hoax and Why You Believed It


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The first test: Select five friends, each of whom have a reasonable amount of familiarity with Top 40 radio, but not so much that they can name each song title, artist and chart position ten seconds in. Blindfold them. Play the first ten seconds of U2’s “In a Little While.” Stop the CD before the vocals kick in. Next, play the first ten seconds of any Sugar Ray single—one that features a guitar loop and some antiseptic record scratching. Stop the CD before the vocals kick in. Ask your friends to distinguish the Sugar Ray song from the U2 song. CultureDose.com will wager $5 that 4 out of your 5 friends will not be able to tell the difference. *

(*Offer subject to the whim of CultureDose.com management. Neither CultureDose.com nor Marty Brown holds any responsibility for injuries caused at the hands of your friends who have been forced to listen to Sugar Ray. )

The second test, play along at home: Of the following sets of lyrics, choose the one written by Bono. Is it ...
So I try to be like you/
Try to feel it like you do/
But without you it’s no use/
I can’t see what you see/
When I look at the world

or
Never found out why you left him/
But this answer begs this question/
Too blind to see tomorrow/
Too broke to beg or borrow

or
Was I not enough stimulation?/
Hit by a brick the other day/
Just when I thought that I’m O.K./
You didn’t like my conversation/
I can’t come up with something new/
It doesn’t really matter what I do

If you answered with the first set of lyrics, you win. But, I’ll tell you, I scribbled down the three examples in my notebook, forgot about them for three days, and when I came back I couldn’t tell the difference. All of them possess the same ambiguous, hackneyed approach to relationship troubles. Each of them recycles the same pseudo-wisdom we’ve come to expect from pop songs. (The first is from U2’s “When I Look at the World.” The other two were culled from the American Pie 2 Soundtrack—from Blink 182’s “Every Time I Look At You” and Angela Ammons’ “Always Getting Over You”)

Without even passing judgment on the artists I compare them to, it’s fair to say that U2 get held to a different standard than the rest of the rock bands who lazily pander to the pop market that exploded in the late '90s. All That You Can’t Leave Behind doesn’t feature anything that couldn’t have been produced by any given puppet band forced to adjust their sound to the current hot-selling trend. Yet it showed up on more than 80 year end top ten lists in 2000 (and even 8 more in 2001)—placing it toward the top of the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll. SPIN Magazine named them band of the year. They won Grammies.

The critics were only half right. U2 should get judged by a different standard than most bands. Except it should be a higher one. They should know better. The Joshua Tree (1987) and Achtung Baby have justly become part of the rock & roll canon. The former because of its sheer sonic and lyrical perfection; the latter due to the band’s Sgt. Pepper-style makeover and the twisted reinvention of their sound. Though many folks (presumably overly-eager to see the aging U2 return to its former glory) would have All That You Can’t Leave Behind join their two masterpieces in a holy triumvirate, the album actually does nothing more than turn U2 into a parody of their former selves.

Musically, All That You Can’t Leave Behind finds The Edge returning to the style of ambient, spacious guitar he practically invented in the '80s. He doesn’t riff or strum as much as he simply hits a note and lets it reverberate—somehow he manages to make his guitar work more compelling than most riff-rockers. At the same time, he doesn’t even attempt anything new. Each guitar sound on All That You Can’t Leave Behind is derivative of another U2 song that, essentially, does the same thing better. “Beautiful Day,” “Elevation,” and “Walk On” merely reinvent “Red Hill Mining Town,” “Zoo Station,” and “So Cruel,” respectively. Of course, throughout the album, they add the requisite electronica touches and record scratching, to much subtler effect than Zooropa and Pop. But it’s almost too subtle—turning them into just another radio-friendly alternative rock band birthed in the wake of Sublime and Beck.

As if U2 being derivative of itself weren’t bad enough, Bono’s insipid lyrics thoroughly kill the quality of the album. In the rare moments that he doesn’t spew senseless inarticulate self-help clichés of the keep-your-chin-up variety, he practices ridiculous anthropomorphism (at one point he’s a monkey stealing honey from a swarm of bees, at another he’s a mole digging in a hole going down) and chants why-can’t-we-all just get along mantras.

The bigger problem, of course, is not that U2 have done sloppy work, but that their fans are so eager for the band’s return that they choose to overlook it. All That You Can’t Leave Behind lacks the specificity, the urgency, the poignancy, the innovation, the courage, the experimentation that made U2 the world’s greatest band for a short time. Worse, they don’t even seem to care.

Bono, seeking a second career as a motivational speaker, has urged his fellow rock & rollers to “own up to their ambition” (or some other such nonsense) in various forums—in Rolling Stone, on the Video Music Awards, etc. He neglects to take into account that, when bands’ ambitions include nothing more than selling umpteen million records, they only end up pandering to the mass audience marketplace and spewing bile. Some bands answer to a higher power—artistic ambition. U2 once answered to that higher power. Maybe someday they’ll remember.


© Copyright CultureDose.com 04/04/2002

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