The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
U2 · produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois · Island · about 49 minutes
Mode
Anthemic rock returned to plain song; a band in a close room with Eno and Lanois, the chiming guitar held back until it is needed
Mythos
Deluge, pilgrimage and grace: the flood and the colours after it, a pilgrim shedding what can be left behind, a virtue with a woman’s name
Phase
Eleven tracks; four singles first, a public declaration of joy, four losses, a level second half, a whispered benediction at the close
Presentation
Album; eleven songs of like length, about forty-nine minutes, the four principal singles at its head; a cover photograph by Anton Corbijn of the band in an airport terminal
Register
Warm, dry and band-centred; joy, grief, prayer, tenderness and one club stomper
Scale
A middle-aged interior counting what it keeps: a dead friend, a parent and child, a Burmese prisoner, the dead of Omagh, a restless night in New York
Governing Proposition
A band returns from a decade of irony to plain songs and to the sound it had set aside, and makes the plainness its argument: in middle life what survives loss is love, faith and memory, and joy is not the opposite of grief but what grief leaves standing. The record opens on a declaration of joy in a ruined landscape, passes through four losses, and ends on a whisper, with a woman’s name that is also a virtue.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on its argument. Beautiful Day begins muted, a chugging verse over a drum loop, and the voice declares joy in a landscape it describes as ruined. Then the chorus, and then the bridge: the flood, the colours after it, the world seen from above, and with them The Edge’s ringing guitar, the sound the band had made its name with and had set aside for a decade, returned here as release. It is the one moment of full transport on the record, and it says in one gesture what the record has to say: the old sound, after ruin, as joy.
U2 made it after ten years spent turning away from that sound. Their records of the 1990s had gone into irony, electronics and spectacle, and the record before this one, with its stadium tour, had carried that frame furthest, to a commercial disappointment. This one sets the frame aside. It was produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois and released by Island in October 2000, with Interscope handling the American release: eleven tracks in about forty-nine minutes, none much shorter than three and a half minutes or longer than five and a half, all in verse and chorus. The four principal singles are the first four tracks, about a third of the running time. The record states its public face in its first seventeen minutes.
Eno and Lanois give the band a close, clear room, guitar, bass, drums and voice each legible and set in front. The Edge plays spare and rhythmic, withholding the chiming sound until it is needed, so that its arrival in the bridge of the opener and at the close of Walk On is structure, not ornament. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. play plainly and well, and the blend of loop and live drums in the opener is deftly done. The form is the claim. A record that holds that after irony one can again say simple things says them in short, conventional songs, and its plainness is its argument.
Movement II
Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of is an argument with a friend who has killed himself. It is sung not as lament but as the survivor’s exasperated tenderness: reproach, impatience, the wish that the dead had held on. That is a true and seldom-sung shape of grief, and the song finds it plainly. Bono’s falsetto lifts it into a gospel warmth against the reproach in the words, and his singing here is among the most controlled on the record.
Kite, the fifth track, holds a father letting go of his children and, by the band’s account, of his own father: the parent at both ends of a life. Its final passage rises, the voice straining upward, and the image is the soul let go on a string, the child released and the parent dying. In a Little While follows, the one song of plain bodily tenderness, with a small, worn beauty and the most intimate singing on the record. The treated sounds under Kite are where the producers’ texture survives most clearly in a record of plain songs.
From these songs the record’s disclosure can be stated, and it holds as a meaning: in middle life what survives loss is love, faith and memory, and joy is not the opposite of grief but what grief leaves standing. The opener shouted the second half of that sentence; these songs earn the first. The limit is in the statement. Much of the record asserts its meaning in general and familiar terms, love enduring and grace transfiguring, and the sound carries the plainness of the claim without uncovering much beyond it. Where the record discloses, it does so through a particular, a friend, a father, and the particulars are where it holds.
Movement III
Walk On holds a Burmese prisoner of conscience, a figure whose freedom is inward, and builds from a hush to a closing litany of what can be left behind. The record takes its title from that litany: what cannot be taken is what one carries. The pilgrim sheds and walks on, the form sheds with him, and the close is a real lift, The Edge’s withheld sound arriving again as it did in the opener.
Archetype runs through the record, evoked more often than built. The opener carries a deluge and the colours after it; Walk On a pilgrim; Kite the soul on a string; Peace on Earth the nativity’s promise set against a town’s dead; and Grace, at the close, is a woman and a theological virtue at once, the one figure both particular and archetypal. A shape is there, from deluge through loss to grace, and the sequence follows it, from a public declaration of joy through four losses to a private benediction. But the listener assembles the shape from images: no figure bears it from end to end.
The first four songs restored the band to the centre of popular attention and became among the most broadcast rock of their decade. After September 2001 Walk On and Peace on Earth took on new meaning, and the record became for a time a public consolation; the band toured it through 2001 and played at the Super Bowl in 2002. Its warm, chorus-led stadium register is audible in the arena rock that followed, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Keane and The Killers among it, though much of that debt is to the band’s whole career and to The Joshua Tree. What the record showed was the renewal of a career: a veteran band returned to sincerity and was believed. It reorganised no possibility of the art.
Movement IV
Elevation, the third track, is a club stomper among elegies. It has force rather than height, whatever its title, and its dance-rock swagger and half-nonsense words answer to the band’s live purpose rather than to the record’s argument. It is the first place where the record’s law strains, and the subtractive test, which the frame passes, would take it with small loss to the record, if not to the band.
The test bites hardest after the sixth track. Wild Honey is slight, restating the opener’s lightness without the opener’s stake. When I Look at the World and New York could each be removed with small loss, and New York, an agitated song of midlife restlessness, is closer in register to the band’s 1990s than to the rest. Across these songs verse and chorus are a container, the arrangements competently turned and generic, and the polish smooths them toward sameness. The height thins with them: after the sixth track the record stays on the plain until its close. Four tracks of eleven, about a third of the running time, are not compelled.
The turn the record makes is real in the band’s career and small in the art’s. Against the 1990s it is a reversal: earnest where its predecessor was ironic, plain where that record’s tour was theatrical, songs rather than textures. Against the field of 2000 it was a minority bet, with guitar bands moving toward electronics (Kid A appeared the same month) or toward nu-metal aggression. But it was a return to the band’s own proven path, with a commercial disappointment as the pressure behind it, and the move chosen to protect a reputation was the safest one available. Eno and Lanois keep some texture, in the drum loop of the opener and under Kite; the wager is still placed on ground the band had cleared itself.
Movement V
Peace on Earth, the eighth track, is the darkest song and the record’s law in reverse. It addresses Jesus directly and sets the nativity’s promise against the dead of the Omagh bombing of August 1998, Northern Ireland’s last great atrocity of the Troubles, held in particulars, and the particulars expose the emptiness of the prayer in the title. It is a prayer the dead make hard to pray, and the record lets it stand as that. The political order enters twice, here and in Walk On, and both times it is held through people rather than positions.
Grace closes the record, the longer of the two long songs that end it, a quiet benediction that names the governing idea as a person: a woman’s name and a theological virtue at once. The opener shouted the claim and the close whispers it, and the record’s two most distant elements keep one law, grace found inside loss, sung plainly by a band in a room. Between them the range runs from stadium to bedside, and within it a family, a friend’s death, a prisoner, a bombed town and a city are held by one idea, what survives loss. Labour is absent, and history enters only in the two political songs.
The cover is a photograph by Anton Corbijn of the band in an airport terminal, in transit, under a gate sign altered to read J33-3, commonly taken as a reference to a verse of call and answer. Twenty-six years on, the record survives whole, and its fabric has aged well: the production is dry, warm and band-centred and carries little that dates it. Its presence is its singles’ more than its own. What it lacks is the turn, and the compulsion of its second half. Within those limits it says what it set out to say: that after loss simple things can be said again, and believed.
Act III · The Twelve
Eleven tracks in about forty-nine minutes, and the frame holds. Beautiful Day must open: it states the record’s argument, joy declared in a ruined landscape, before any song complicates it. Grace must close, a benediction that names the governing idea as a person. Between them Stuck in a Moment, Walk On, Kite and Peace on Earth are required, the four losses the record’s grace must pass through, and In a Little While earns its place as the one song of plain bodily tenderness. Those seven carry about two thirds of the running time. Held from the top: Wild Honey restates the opener’s lightness without its stake, When I Look at the World and New York go with small loss, and Elevation is required by the band’s purpose more than the record’s.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds as a meaning: in middle life what survives loss is love, faith and memory, and joy is not the opposite of grief but what grief leaves standing. Stuck in a Moment is the sharpest instance, an argument with a friend who has killed himself, sung as the survivor’s exasperated tenderness rather than as lament: a true and seldom-sung shape of grief. Peace on Earth sets the particular dead of the Omagh bombing against its title’s prayer, and the particulars expose the prayer’s emptiness. Kite holds a father letting go at both ends of a life. Held from the top: many statements are general and familiar, and the record asserts some of its meaning in slogans.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation comes on six of eleven tracks, all warm. Beautiful Day holds the height: a muted, chugging verse over a drum loop opens into the chorus, and the bridge, the flood and the world seen from above, releases The Edge’s ringing guitar, the old sound returned as release. Walk On builds from a hush to a litany, and its close is a real lift. Kite rises on its final passage, the voice straining upward, and Stuck in a Moment reaches a gospel warmth in its falsetto. In a Little While has a small, worn beauty, and Grace ends on a quiet height. Held from the top: the height thins after the sixth track, Elevation has force rather than height, and terror and the cold sublime are absent.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Archetype is evoked often and in places built. Beautiful Day carries the flood and the colours after it, the world seen as after a deluge. Walk On sets a pilgrim on the road, a prisoner whose freedom is inward, and gives the record its title as a litany of what the pilgrim sheds. Kite is the soul released on a string, the child let go and the parent dying. Peace on Earth sets the nativity’s promise against a town’s dead. Grace is a woman and a theological virtue at once, the one figure both particular and archetypal, and the end of a shape that runs from deluge through loss to grace. Held from the top: the listener assembles that shape from images, and no figure bears it across the sequence.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: the band’s own sound of the 1980s, chiming guitar, anthemic chorus and sacred longing, and its turn away from it in the 1990s into irony, electronics and spectacle. This record turns back, and against the 1990s the reversal is real: earnest where its predecessor was ironic. Against the field of 2000, with guitar bands moving toward electronics (Kid A came out the same month) or toward nu-metal, an unironic, hymnal rock record was a minority bet, and Eno and Lanois keep texture in the drum loop of Beautiful Day and the treated sounds under Kite. What holds it lowest is the path: the return was to the band’s own proven idiom, after a commercial disappointment, and a wager on a proven path is not a swerve.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its argument is partly its plainness. A record that claims that after irony one can again say simple things says them in short songs of conventional form, guitar, bass, drums and voice set legibly in front: the form is the reclaimed sincerity. Beautiful Day enacts it most fully, its muted verse and released chorus being the movement from ruin to joy the words name, and Walk On’s litany is form as shedding. Sequence is counted here, once: from a public declaration of joy through four losses to a private benediction. Held from the top: across the second half verse and chorus are a container, and the singles placed first serve the release as much as the argument.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence first, and twenty-six years supply it. The songs have been returned to constantly, in concert, on radio and on public occasions, and Walk On and Peace on Earth took on new meaning after September 2001, when the record became for a time a public consolation. The yield deepens in places: Kite and Stuck in a Moment open further with time and age, and Grace rewards attention to its theology. Held from the top: the surfaces are clear on first hearing and stay clear, the words state rather than withhold, the literature on the album as a whole is thin, and much of the return attaches to two or three songs, by occasion more than by yield.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is the rock album of its decade. The force is a demonstration: after a decade of irony a veteran band returned to sincerity and was believed, and refined its anthemic idiom into shorter, cleaner, more song-shaped form. Held from the top: it reorganised no possibility, and the renewal was of a career more than of the art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record restored the band to the centre of popular attention, its first four songs became among the most broadcast rock of the decade, and its warm, chorus-led stadium register is audible in the arena rock that followed, in Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Keane and The Killers, though much of that debt is to the band’s whole career.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-six years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: eleven tracks as issued, nothing lost. Presence is continuous and wide for the songs and narrower for the album: Beautiful Day remains among the most widely heard rock songs of its era in public and broadcast use, but the record is heard whole far less often than its singles. The fabric has aged well. The production is dry, warm and band-centred, and the surface fixed to its moment, the millennial turn and the hearing after September 2001, is heard now as period, not dated. Under thirty years, with its presence chiefly the singles’, it stands level with Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, of the same age, whose presence is likewise charged, and a tenth below Kid A, of the same month, and The Unforgettable Fire, both at 8.5.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high, economical and load-bearing where the record turns. Eno and Lanois give the band a close, clear room in which each instrument is legible. The Edge’s playing is the craft signature: spare and rhythmic, withholding the chiming sound until it is needed, so that its arrival in Beautiful Day’s bridge and Walk On’s close is structure, not ornament. Bono’s singing is at its most controlled, in Stuck in a Moment above all. The faults: the second half is generic in arrangement, Wild Honey is light, and the polish smooths several tracks toward sameness. That sets it a tenth below The Unforgettable Fire at 8.7, bolder in its room and less even in its finish.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the record: grace found inside loss, sung plainly by a band in a room. The two most distant elements obey it. Beautiful Day, a public declaration of joy, and Grace, a private benediction, make the same claim, first shouted and then whispered. Peace on Earth, the darkest song, obeys it in reverse, a prayer the dead make hard to pray, and Stuck in a Moment and Kite carry it through a friend’s death and a parent’s. The range runs from stadium to bedside. Held from the top: Elevation’s dance-rock swagger answers to the band’s live purpose rather than to the law, New York’s agitated restlessness belongs closer to the band’s 1990s, and Wild Honey sits at the law’s edge. Nothing contradicts it, but two tracks strain it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Consciousness, a middle-aged interior counting what it keeps, is held throughout. The family is held in Kite, parent and child at both ends of a life; friendship and death in Stuck in a Moment. The political order enters twice in particulars: a Burmese prisoner of conscience in Walk On, and in Peace on Earth the Omagh bombing, by its dead. The sacred is the frame, from the opener’s flood to Grace. The city appears in New York. One idea, what survives loss, makes the joins, and they are real. What holds the figure: labour, history beyond the two political songs and the body beyond love are absent or glimpsed, and several orders appear in one song each.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.6, then The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Unconcealment and The Sublime at 8.3. A making economical and load-bearing where the record turns, the withheld guitar arriving as structure; a recording whole after twenty-six years, its fabric aged well; a disclosure that holds, that joy is what grief leaves standing, found most truly in a survivor’s argument with the dead; and a warm height on six of eleven tracks, fullest in the bridge of the opener and the close of Walk On. Below them, The Inner Law at 8.1.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 7.0: a reversal real in the band’s career and small in the art’s, a return to its own proven path chosen as the safest move after a commercial disappointment. Below the rest, The Bottomless Well at 7.7, then The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 7.8: clear surfaces and a return that attaches to a few songs by occasion; four of eleven tracks not compelled; and orders held in one song each, with labour absent.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 and The Swerve at 7.0 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.0, half a point below 7.5; every other axis it governs clears it, the next lowest being The Bottomless Well at 7.7, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.0, at the line where Tier IV begins, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as first released by Island in October 2000, with Interscope in the United States, eleven tracks in their original order, about forty-nine minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording, its lyrics and its reception, with no recording or lyric sheet in hand. Running times are approximate. The bonus track carried on some editions outside the United States, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, to words by Salman Rushdie, is not part of the work; the singles, the tour of 2001, the Super Bowl performance of 2002 and later live use are evidence, not the object. Songs are cited by title; no lyric is quoted, and the images described are paraphrased. Exact release dates by market, track-by-track production credits, studio locations, chart positions, awards and sales figures are not given, being unverified here.