33 rebellions per minute
"Into the arms of America"
1980
U2, BOY
As a clear, albeit indirect, result of the facts that 1) the University of Massachusetts at Boston has a poorly designed web page and 2) I intend to buy an album by the Nields sometime pretty soon, I spent much of my free time this week reading Haruki Murakami's novel Wild Sheep Chase (no, I won't explain the chain of events, this was merely a brief reflection on causality). It's a fascinating, odd novel. Part of its charm is that it simultaneously evokes for me Albert Camus's existentialist classic The Stranger, Dianna Wynne Jones's young-adult fantasy Archer's Goon, and Douglas Coupland's romance novel (lovingly disguised as trendy zeitgeist philosophizing) Microserfs, a wonderful assortment. Camus is evoked for me by the nameless narrator's firm sense of honor, firmer sense of passivity, and despite-all-this prime-mover status in the story; Jones by the way that strange mysteries continuously resolve into ridiculous, surreal answers without anyone thinking to object; Coupland by the frequent world-examining digressions that appear at first to have nothing to do with the plot or characters but which, in egregious defiance of fiction conventions,turn out to be exactly as irrelevant as they seem.
Yet as nifty as all this is, Wild Sheep Chase had one virtue that was for me absolutely singular: the most fascinating bits were often the physical descriptions of places. Now, I'm long past the point where reading a devoted explanation of a natural setting puts me to sleep. I don't read through the descriptions saying to myself "Jeezus, this is boring". Indeed, three weeks after finishing Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (the first Pulitzer winner I've liked, to my knowledge), I can still call a clear mental map of the farms and homes to mind, so I must have been interested, on some unconscious level. But absorbing the physical settings on purpose? With knowing pleasure? That's new, and I'm very, very impressed.
U2's debut album BOY--- an album that begins, according to the most advanced hearers of cosmic vibrations on Terry Pratchett's Discworld, almost exactly like the universe itself: with a muffed chord and a barely audible "one, two, three, four!"--- is another artwork that invents its own unique virtue in my mind, and a far more remarkable one. I've already digressed somewhere on the notion of a "perfect" album, which I usually define as one in which every moment of play seems to contribute to a whole artistic vision. BOY goes beyond this. Every moment on this album is one I can call to mind on demand, one which indeed will call me if it feels neglected, but that's not it either. Every single element of every second is in place. It's not that I listen to other albums squinting my ears and muttering "those hi-hat quarter-notes don't accomplish anything, and why do they need a synth squiggle there? Harrumph!"; it is merely that with BOY, I feel a deep, unprecedented sensation of _not being able_ to think like that about it. Everything counts, everything fits. "I Will Follow" follows the opening countoff with a shiny guitar riff, some rifle-shot snare drum, a driving eighth-note bass line, some high glockenspiel notes, and Bono's earnest voice. And those are what the album consists of.
Not in the sense of repetition: every song invents its own variation on the Edge's guitar sound, on the bass line, on the drumming (especially), and mood. "Twilight" has the heaviest, darkest, echoiest bass line and fades out with a percussive monotone on bass shadowed by the guitar's best imitation of a door hinge. "Into The Heart" is the slowest and most deliberately pretty song, timing its softly suspended 2-note soprano guitar to emerge into the front by its end, then fade into a gloomier minor-key in which the anthemically terrified "Out Of Control" emerges. The reflective, tremolo-heavy "the Ocean", pushed along by tribal drums but more a finely-crafted sketch than a landscape painting, is similarly merged into the charged "A Day Without Me" by an emphatic bass line pulsed like the waves of a Slinky, plus an eighth-note guitar part that evolves into melody. "Another Time, Another Place" follows and--- with an oddly-shaped chorus melody and the seeming background sound of hedge-clippers, and led by exploratory guitars that nearly violate time signature--- is the closest thing to spacey; but the quarter-note kick-drums are always there, and reappear in deeper-pitched form right after the racing guitar rhythms opening the frantic "Electric Co", from which a single ringing guitar chord at the end absorbs the tom-toms that drive "Shadows And Tall Trees" (title taken, as long as I'm doing Booknotes, from Lord Of The Flies), which, like "Electric Co" and "Stories For Boys" and "Twilight" and "...Follow" before it, shares some thematically central lyrical phrases about boyhood and manhood.
Never do the band say "hey, a piano could go here", or "let's try an unexpectedly lilting melody for a sweetly personal final song that all the other have to be re-read in light of", or "how bout some poetically oblique lyrics in list form?". So there's nothing like the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays" or Jane Siberry's "the Taxi Ride" or Veda Hille's "Instructions", all of which are wonderful outliers that I treasure in other people's albums and careers; so what? BOY is what it is, and if you've heard the hit-in-retrospect "I Will Follow" and dislike it, I doubt hearing a thorough, exemplary 11-song exploration of its sonic possibilities will appeal to you. But me, I regard U2's bizarrely digressive career, from frightened schoolboys to bellowing preachers to comic-book superheroes to coolly staring DJ's, as understandable. Because once you've gotten your orginal vision just right and still have decades of life left, what _can_ you do?
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