The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
U2 · produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois · Island · about 42 minutes
Mode
Arena rock turned toward atmosphere; ambient production applied to a band built for large halls
Mythos
The road toward a light, the line of martyrs, death as sleep; the American king and the fire of the title evoked
Phase
Ten tracks on two sides of almost equal length; a departure toward a light, an instrumental with no voice at the head of side two, a lullaby at the close
Presentation
Album; ten tracks, five to a side, about forty-two minutes, one of them an instrumental; recorded in a castle ballroom and finished in a Dublin studio
Register
Room sound, delay and wash; anthem, lament, sketch and hush, the words often sung for their sound
Scale
A road home through weather, Memphis in 1968, a city and its addicts, Presley’s America
Governing Proposition
A band built for large halls leaves the martial sound that made it, sets up in a castle ballroom with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, and makes the room the substance of its songs. The record opens by leaving toward a light, names a fire it never shows, brings one martyr and one addict into focus, and ends with a lullaby for a murdered man; between them it shows more mood than meaning, and holds all of it in one air.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens by leaving. A Sort of Homecoming begins on Larry Mullen’s rolling toms, with Adam Clayton’s bass moving underneath and The Edge’s guitar spread into a lattice of repeats, and it rises like a march along a road through weather toward a light. It is a homecoming with no home named in it. The song wants to arrive, and the record it opens is about distance: a light seen from the road, a fire seen from far off, a dead man sung to sleep. What it holds, it holds a little way off, and the distance is made audible as room.
The room was real. After three albums with Steve Lillywhite, Boy (1980), October (1981) and War (1983), the band chose Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, on their first work with U2, and in 1984 set up in the ballroom of Slane Castle, County Meath, before finishing the record at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin. War had made them a band of martial drums, bright guitar and declared conviction. Here the drums roll, the guitar becomes weather, and the castle’s air is in every track. Anton Corbijn’s sleeve shows the four of them standing small before the ivy-covered ruin of Moydrum Castle, County Westmeath.
The architecture is plain. Ten tracks, five to a side, run about forty-two minutes, and the two sides are of almost equal length. Music is credited to U2 and lyrics to Bono. Island released the record on 1 October 1984, and it went to number one in Britain. Its frame is built with care: a departure toward a distant light at the start, an instrumental with no voice at the head of the second side, a lullaby for a murdered man at the close. Inside the frame the songs are uneven, and the record does not hide it.
Movement II
Pride (In the Name of Love), the second track and the lead single, issued in September 1984, builds a line of men. Its verses set out figures without names: a man caught on a wire, a drowned man, a man “betrayed with a kiss”, as Christ was by Judas. The last verse resolves the line into Martin Luther King Jr., shot in Memphis on 4 April 1968. The particular death takes on the archetype of the sacrificed witness, and it is the song’s structure, the line and its resolution, that carries the archetype, not an allusion. It is the one place on the record where a myth is built rather than summoned.
What the song states is true and it holds: love chosen as a public method gets its bearers killed, and their deaths do not refute it. But it states this as homage, in an anthem of under four minutes, and it misplaces the hour. The song puts the shooting in the early morning; King was shot at about six in the evening. A wrong fact in the last verse of an elegy is a small thing and a lasting one, because the recording keeps it.
Musically Pride is the band’s old style done better. Mullen drives it, The Edge’s guitar rings, and the chorus reaches exultation in a form that could have stood on War, set now in an air War did not have. It reached the British top three, has stayed in the band’s sets for four decades, and is heard far beyond the album, on radio. It carried the record to its widest audience, and it is the one song on it that did not take the turn.
Movement III
Wire follows Pride with agitation, a riff more than a song, and then the title track slows everything. The album takes its title from “The Unforgettable Fire”, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the band saw at the Peace Museum in Chicago. The fire of the title is the fire of 1945. Strings and a slow surge carry the song to grandeur, a city at night held at a distance, remembered rather than described, and that fire is never shown close. Released as a single in 1985, it reached the British top ten.
Promenade closes the first side, short and domestic, a love by the sea, and the second side opens with no singer at all. 4th of July is two minutes of guitar and bass with no song in them, a texture that drifts and stops. It is the record’s method in its purest form: the room, the delay and the wash, with the voice removed. Placed at the hinge of the two sides, it makes literal what the rest of the record does by degrees, and it carries, by its title alone, an American festival the record never sings.
Here the record’s strength and its limit are one thing. A law of sound covers every track, the same room, the same delay, the same wash, from the anthem of Pride to the drift of 4th of July, and it holds. A looser law of theme, fire and memory, home and the road, the martyr and the addict, holds less, and Wire and Promenade barely obey it. Much of what the record brings into the open is mood. Where it discloses a meaning it does so in two songs, and the second lies on the far side of the instrumental.
Movement IV
Bad is the centre of the record and its height. The Edge’s delayed figure repeats, the bass and drums hold back, and the voice climbs for six minutes. There is no chorus to release the tension. The song ends in a litany of abstract nouns, still climbing, and the release it keeps preparing never comes. Craving is the shape of the song, and a verse and chorus with a release would lose what it knows. Of all the record’s ways of holding back, this is the one in which holding back is the meaning.
Its subject is addiction in the city, seen from beside it: the wish for numbness, a friend’s wish to lift it, and a refrain of “wide awake” set against the drug’s sleep. It is the record’s truest disclosure, and it says less in words than its music does. The words are partial; the climb is complete. Indian Summer Sky follows, the spirit pressed by the city and the weather, pushing hard and never lifting, and the contrast shows how much of the height in Bad is form and not effort.
Bad outgrew its record. A live version was issued on the Wide Awake in America EP in 1985, and at Live Aid, at Wembley Stadium on 13 July 1985, the band lengthened it while Bono left the stage to dance with a woman from the crowd. That performance is widely taken as the moment U2 reached the largest scale. The song has been reopened in performance for four decades since, lengthened and joined to other songs, and its meaning has shifted with it. It is the clearest sign that the record still has more to give.
Movement V
The record’s costliest track comes second to last. Elvis Presley and America, over six minutes and the longest on the record, reaches for the American king and leaves him as mood. The vocal sounds found rather than written, its words half-formed over a backing that drifts, and the song aims at rapture and wanders. It is the one place where the blur is an accident kept rather than a form chosen, and the record would lose nothing it argues without it. The openness to the unfinished that gives the title track its distance is here only exposure.
Then MLK, a lullaby for a murdered man: one voice over a single sustained wash of keyboard, in under three minutes. The elegy becomes a putting to sleep, and the record ends in rest, not protest. The form is the instrument. A lament sung as a cradle song knows that the dead are past waking, and King, named by the last verse of Pride on the first side, is sung to sleep at the end of the second. The road toward a light that opened the record ends here, in sleep.
The method travelled. The Joshua Tree (1987) carried it to a world audience with the same producers, and Achtung Baby (1991) was made with them again, with Flood. Lanois took the atmosphere into Peter Gabriel’s So, Robbie Robertson’s first solo album and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. In forty-two years the record has stayed in print, and its sound has aged better than its year’s, because it chose room and decay over processed drums and bright digital synthesis. What holds it below the record that followed is not its sound. Its meanings are two and partial, its one built myth sits inside one song, and its orders stand side by side, the martyr, the addict and the fire never bearing on one another. It ends where its frame meant it to, quietly, at a distance.
Act III · The Twelve
Ten tracks in about forty-two minutes, and the subtractive test finds one cut. Elvis Presley and America, over six minutes and the longest track, is a vocal that sounds found rather than written, its words half-formed over a backing that drifts, and the record would lose nothing it argues without it. The other nine bear weight. Bad needs every bar of its six minutes, because the song is the climb. MLK needs its brevity. And 4th of July, two minutes with no voice, opens the second side by removing the singer, and so makes the record’s method literal. What holds the figure here is the size of the cut, about a seventh of the running time, and two soft spots: Wire and Indian Summer Sky are riffs more than songs, though each holds its place in the sequence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Two meanings come into the open, and the fuller is disclosed in sound. Bad sees addiction from beside it, the wish for numbness set against a refrain of “wide awake”. Its words are partial and its climb is complete: one figure rises for six minutes and is never released, and that discloses the craving as fully as a sentence could. Pride sets out a row of unnamed men, the last “betrayed with a kiss”, and resolves them into King, shot in Memphis: love chosen as a public method gets its bearers killed, and is not refuted by their deaths. What holds the figure here is that Pride states this as homage and misplaces the hour, setting in the morning a killing that came at about six in the evening, and that the rest discloses moods, many words sketches sung for their sound.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Height comes often, and once it is sustained. A Sort of Homecoming opens on Larry Mullen’s rolling toms and rises like a march toward a light. Pride reaches exultation in its chorus. The title track reaches grandeur through strings and a slow surge, a city at night held at a distance. Bad is transport in the full sense: The Edge’s delayed figure repeats, the bass and drums hold back, and the voice climbs for six minutes into a litany of abstract nouns without releasing the tension into a chorus. MLK reaches the hush of a lullaby. Five of ten tracks rise, all of them warm; Elvis Presley and America wanders, and Indian Summer Sky pushes without lifting.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth is built once, and the record carries it to its close. In Pride a man caught on a wire, a drowned man and a man betrayed as Christ was by Judas resolve into King in Memphis, and the song’s structure, not an allusion, carries the archetype of the sacrificed witness. MLK answers it at the end: the witness named on the first side is sung to sleep on the second, and the road toward a light that opens the record ends in that sleep. What holds the figure here is that the myth is built inside one song and only answered by the frame. The fire of the title, the fire of 1945 as the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki drew it, is named and never built, and Presley is left as mood.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The turn is the band’s, and it was paid for. War (1983), produced like its two predecessors by Steve Lillywhite, had made U2 a band of martial drums, bright guitar and declared conviction. At the edge of the largest scale they hired Brian Eno, a producer known for ambient music, and Daniel Lanois, set up in a castle ballroom, and made a record of washes, room sound and half-written words, its main invention The Edge’s delay, set as structure rather than ornament. The cost was momentum, and a record many heard as unfinished. The sound the band’s next record consolidated was found here. Held from the top by precedent: Eno had taken Talking Heads into his studio method, Joy Division and The Cure had worked texture over riff, and the lead single kept the old style.
Score: 8.5 / 10
In the best songs the form is the knowledge. Bad withholds a chorus and lets one figure build for six minutes, so craving is the shape of the song. MLK is a lullaby in form, so an elegy for King becomes a putting to sleep. On the title track the blur is a way of remembering: fire seen at a distance, not described. The sequence is an instrument: a departure toward a distant light opens the record, an instrumental with no voice opens the second side, and a lullaby for a dead man closes it. Pride, Wire, Promenade, Indian Summer Sky and Elvis Presley and America are containers; give them other forms and they would know much the same.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The record keeps yielding as sound more than as sense. On return it shows how much of it is room: the Slane ballroom, Eno’s treatments, the delay that turns The Edge’s lines into lattices, Adam Clayton’s bass moving under A Sort of Homecoming. Bad is the strongest evidence. It has been reopened in performance for four decades, lengthened and joined to other songs, and its meaning has shifted with it. The literature is thinner, since the record is discussed mostly as the hinge between War and The Joshua Tree. The words invite return by their ambiguity, though much of it is unfinished writing, and the return so far rests on the sound and on Bad more than on the record as a whole.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The contest is with the band’s own martial sound, and the force is the record’s own: a band built for arenas made space, decay and room sound the substance of its songs, not their decoration, and the production its successor consolidated was made here first. What holds the figure here is that it reassembled a language Eno and Lanois had already made, and that the change lay within U2’s course more than the field’s, so much of the reach travels under another record’s name. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: The Joshua Tree (1987) carried the method to a world audience with the same producers, and Achtung Baby (1991) was made with them again; Lanois took the atmosphere into Peter Gabriel’s So (1986), Robbie Robertson’s first solo album (1987) and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy (1989); and Bad at Live Aid, in July 1985, is widely taken as the moment the band reached the largest scale.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole and in print over forty-two years. The fabric has held better than most of 1984’s, the production favouring room and decay over the period’s processed drums and bright digital synthesis; Elvis Presley and America is heard as a sketch, and the misplaced hour stays in Pride. Presence is the limit. Pride and Bad have stayed in the band’s sets for four decades, and Pride is heard far beyond the album, but the album is heard whole less often than its best songs, and survives most as two songs and a sound. That holds it level with Dekalog, below Fanny and Alexander, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Eno and Lanois treat the room as an instrument and hold a band built for stadiums at a whisper without losing its weight. The Edge’s guitar sets delay as structure rather than ornament, carrying melody and space at once. Mullen’s drumming drives A Sort of Homecoming and Pride, Clayton’s bass moves under the opening, and the strings of the title track are restrained and exact. The costs are real and fall unevenly: the vocal of Elvis Presley and America, over six minutes and the longest track, is an unfinished performance kept, Wire and Indian Summer Sky are arranged as riffs more than songs, and the voice strains at the top. Command of the first rank at its best and uneven across the work is the degree at which Karnak stands.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law of sound governs all ten tracks: the same room, the same delay and wash. The two most distant elements obey it. Pride, a rock anthem of the band’s old kind, rings in an air its predecessor did not have, and 4th of July, two minutes of guitar and bass with no song in them, is that air with the song taken out. Wire and MLK, agitation and hush, share it too. A second, looser law is thematic: fire and memory, home and the road, the martyr and the addict, America seen from Ireland; Wire and Promenade barely obey it. The range runs from anthem to ambient fragment, and the record holds together by atmosphere more than by argument.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Six orders are present: public history and its violence, in Pride, MLK and the title’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki; addiction, in Bad; the sacred, in Pride’s Judas and A Sort of Homecoming; home and Ireland, in that song and Promenade; America as myth, in Elvis Presley and America and, by its title alone, 4th of July; and weather, in Indian Summer Sky. What holds the figure here is the join. Nothing lets the addict, the martyr and the fire of 1945 bear on one another; labour, the family and the state are absent; the political appears only as assassination.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.9, then The Made and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7. Height on five of ten tracks, sustained for six minutes in Bad; a production that made the room an instrument and The Edge’s delay a structure; and a method made here first that travelled through The Joshua Tree, Lanois’s productions and Live Aid. Below them, The Inevitable, The Swerve, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.5.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: six orders, one or two to a song and two of them present by a title only, with nothing to make them bear on one another. Below the rest, The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 8.2: two meanings, the fuller disclosed in sound, one myth built inside one song and answered only by the frame, and a return that rests on the sound and on Bad more than on the record as a whole.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve at 8.5 and The Imperishable at 8.5 meet it exactly, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met, since no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9.
Basis · the complete album as released by Island on 1 October 1984, ten tracks in sequence on two sides, about forty-two minutes, judged from knowledge of the recording, its making and its reception. The singles and their B-sides, the Wide Awake in America EP and the Live Aid performance of 13 July 1985 are evidence, not the work. Songs are cited by title, and no lyric is quoted beyond a fragment of four words or fewer.