Welcome to My Back Pages, a new collaborative staff feature that will
survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems
alike...most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The
rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this
millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we
might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone
anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have
an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this
feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.
This week, we are analyzing the lasting legacy of U2's War, which
celebrates the 30th anniversary of its 1983 release on Thursday. So
check the replies for our thoughts and a full Rdio stream of the record,
and feel free to jump in with any comments, anecdotes, or discussion
questions you may have.
Craig Manning:
Nowadays when we think of U2, a year and a half after wrapping the
biggest tour in history, and following a decade that saw them plastered
over everything from iPod commercials to TV soap operas, it’s easy to
forget where the Irish quartet got their start. Arena-scraping anthems
have been U2’s bread and butter for so long that I could probably put
on their debut album—1980’s Boy—for a room full of my college
friends, and most of them wouldn’t even recognize it as the same band.
But before Bono fucked up Spanish counting for an entire generation,
before the Edge’s bell-like guitar sound became an icon of the arena
rock movement, before the band built a legacy of towering guitar
anthems, either drenched in newfound American ideals (1987’s The Joshua Tree) or pushing the envelope of early 1990s pop music (1991’s Achtung Baby), U2 was little more than a garage band on a date with destiny.
Dubbed at their earliest meetings as the ‘Larry Mullen Band,’ Paul
‘Bono’ Hewson, David ‘the Edge’ Evans, Adam Clayon, and Larry Mullen
Jr., were a group of disenfranchised, punk-obsessed teenagers with
little to no formal musical training under their belts. That lack of
experience didn’t really matter though. These kids were hungry for
something greater than what their modest upbringings had shown them, and
as they blasted through cover songs and meandering, largely-improvised
originals, something great began to take form. Bono was an innate
showman, a performer unafraid of giving himself over to spontaneous
flights of fancy or passionate musical connection. And when the band was
signed to Island Records in 1980, their promise continued to grow,
taking the form of howling, adolescent frustration on Boy, or moody, spirituality-glazed imagery on October.
But U2’s early post-punk sound wasn’t grandiose enough to carry the world-changing ambition they harbored within themselves. War,
released on the last day of February in 1983, was the sound of a band
outgrowing their roots and establishing new frontiers for their future
security. The shift was evident from the first moments of the record,
where Mullen’s militaristic drum beat and a scream from a single violin
burst from the speakers. The song is “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” still one
of the band’s most played and most roundly recognized to date, and for
good reason. If Boy and October were built largely from punk influence and on-the-fly improv, War
was decidedly more meticulous. Bono’s lyrics, which had up to that
point been little more than cryptic ramblings, were suddenly
fully-formed, rising and falling in a protest song that had the
fist-pumping scope and guttural rage necessary to become an anthem. “I
can’t believe the news today/I can’t just close my eyes and make it go
away,” he sings at the outset. “How long, how long must we sing this
song?” It’s a question that radiates throughout the entirety of the
album.
Even alongside the two aforementioned masterpieces, War is arguably the most unique and eclectic record in the U2 catalog. Achtung Baby sent the band down a path of sonic experimentation that occupied the entirety of their 1990s output, while The Joshua Tree built the template they have spent the past 15 years trying to recreate. But War
is the most scorching, politically charged rock record U2 ever made.
In a lot of ways, it was a collision of where they came from and where
they were going. Big pieces of the band’s punk influences are still at
play here, but the singles—“Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “New Year’s Day,”
and “Two Hearts Beat As One”—hinted at U2’s ability to fill stadiums
with sound.
A big part of that was owed to the Edge, who was developing a ringing,
effects-laden guitar sound all his own. Bassist Adam Clayton described
the Edge’s contributions to War as “all those helicopter
guitars,” a heavy layer of chaotic noise that gives the record its
fierce and spontaneous energy, but the guitarist’s sound was becoming
more majestic too, and it wouldn’t be long before he could give U2 the
kick it needed to go global. At the same time, Bono was evolving, both
as a vocalist and as a lyricist. His greatest accomplishments in the
former category were still to come—I personally consider The Joshua Tree to be the most well-sung record in rock ‘n’ roll history—but in a lot of ways, War
features Bono at his most lyrically striking. The frontman ripped
international conflict from the headlines and injected it into his
songs, and the result remains the most topical, angry, and haunting
collection he has ever written. If you want to know where the activist
Bono we know today came from, look no further than War.
Chris Collum: It’s a pretty well-established fact that creating overtly
political rock music that also maintains superior quality is not an
easy task. Plenty of artists have wandered down that road and either
never returned or given us a mediocre, self-righteously preachy album
or two before quickly jumping back to wherever they left off
previously. Furthermore, records that tackle specific political issues
head-on often make for difficult—and sometimes even painful—listening.
Sometimes a little bit of vagueness is better in this area than
speech-making bluntness. However, as Craig alluded to in his piece,
this record did see the beginning of Bono the activist, and yes he
pulls it off quite well. Bono’s greatest gift, both in terms of his
lyrical and vocal abilities, has always been his ability to inject an
intensely personal human element into whatever note he is singing and
whatever subject he is singing about.
U2 are not a punk band and have never been one in any sense of the term,
but come on: they’re a European band that formed in 1976, writing
songs with very simplistic guitar parts and passionate but not
technically accomplished vocals. The punk influence is undeniable.
Arguably, this album is where the band sounds the most like a “punk”
band in their existence, and that’s true for a variety of reasons. If
we ignore the album’s political messages for a moment—which are pretty
obviously inspired by punk rock doctrine—and simply look at the music,
it’s more rough around the edges than anything U2 would do until Achtung Baby.
Listen to what The Edge is doing during the trumpet solo towards the
end of “Red Light.” That kind of almost drone-like guitar work,
especially paired with Clayton’s bass lines, which often remind me of
some of the stuff Paul Simonon played on early Clash records, is
definitely reminiscent of some of the more experimental punk records
that were made in the late 70s.
Craig Manning: Not technically accomplished vocals?! Perhaps not yet, but
Bono is absolutely one of my favorite singers ever. But anyway, back
to War.
Recorded in just six weeks at Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios—and with
longtime producer Steve Lillywhite manning the boards—the songs on War
didn’t have a lot of time to breathe. Legend has it that, on the last
night of recording, the band worked until the sun came up, finishing
the final bars of the final song just as the next band arrived to take
over the studio. "We were trying to get lyrics down and mix it with
people pounding on the door," Clayton once said. The song he was
talking about, album closer “40,” is a slow-burn hymn built from the
frame of the 40th Psalm. It’s also the most pensive song on the record,
a brief and gorgeous fade-out that provides respite from the rest of War’s frantic outrage.
When U2 paid a visit to the United States on the 1983 tour, they ended
up at Colorado’s Red Rocks in the pouring rain. In any other
circumstances, the concert would probably have been canceled and
rescheduled for another day, but U2 and their manager, Paul McGuinness,
were in a tight spot: they had already booked a full-scale camera and
recording crew to come document the show for release, and to cancel
would be to lose money they didn’t have. So the band took the stage, not
knowing if any ticket-holders were even going to show up, let alone
clap, cheer, or sing along. But the most striking moment of that
recording—preserved now on the release Under a Blood Red Sky—was
the final song, “40,” where the crowd can be heard joining in one by
one as the seconds tick by. By the time the song reaches its fade-out
refrain—repeated cries of “How long to sing this song”—Bono has dropped
out entirely, letting the choir of the audience carry the melody to its
conclusion. And that one moment was a revelation. It showed how this
band could create concert moments that transcend entertainment and
become religious experience. The unique ability is still alive and well
today, in a world where U2 remains the biggest band on the planet, but
back then, it was just beginning to flourish, and War was absolutely the impetus.
Chris Collum: Definitely. The Joshua Tree often gets a lot of credit for being a hugely influential record, but War
has had an undeniable influence on the last 30 years of popular music
as well. One obvious example of the record’s legacy would be the first
Bloc Party album, Silent Alarm, which features thunderous
percussion, ringing, often aggressive guitar work—which nonetheless
maintains a clean tone, busily rhythmic bass lines, and finally,
impassioned vocal delivery with often overtly political lyrics. Sound
familiar? Kele Okerke even sounds a little like Bono at times on that
record, and hell there’s a song called “Helicopter” with guitar sounds
that are very similar to what Clayton was talking about here.
That’s merely one example of the influence War has had on popular music. Another would be Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible,
which borrows U2’s sense of grandiosity as well as Bono’s up-front and
heart-wrenching take on reality, often with political overtones. Also,
while it might seem like a stretch to some, the
much-beloved-in-these-parts, post-hardcore band Thursday definitely owe a
debt to this record as well. Musically their only output that vaguely
resembles U2 would be 2006’s A City by the Light Divided, but
Geoff Rickly certainly utilizes Bono’s lyrical method of injecting
personality and humanity into lyrics that wander around the fringes of
making a broad-stroke political statement. It’s also safe to say that
Thom Yorke and company had heard this record before they made their
late-90s alt-rock masterpieces The Bends and OK Computer. Funnily enough, however, the Radiohead record that reminds me the most of U2 came out a decade later. Thom Yorke’s vocals on In Rainbows have always seemed to have that “human element” that everyone (including myself) always says Bono captures so well.
The record’s true legacy, however, is as U2’s “great leap forward.” War is the album that truly provided the roots for the band’s enormously successful career. With War
these guys went from being the little-band-that-could from Dublin to
being the outfit would soon develop into the biggest rock band in the
world.
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