Fluxblog
December 16th, 2005 9:29pm


Real Unprofessional, Like Them Eskimos

If you were wondering, I was in Missouri. If you’re now wondering why I was in Missouri, here’s at least 75% of the reason:

Kanye West @ Savvis Center, St. Louis, MO 12/14/2005
Diamonds of Sierra Leone / The New Workout Plan / Touch The Sky / Heard ‘Em Say / Get ‘Em High / All Falls Down / Slow Jamz / Through The Wire / Jesus Walks / Gold Digger

Kanye West “Late” – As you can see, this song was not in the setlist, but I can’t imagine that any of you haven’t heard the songs that were, even if you never bought the albums or listened to them intentionally.

A proper Kanye West/U2 bill surely would have drawn an interesting mix of fans, but this was a regular support slot for Kanye, announced long after tickets were sold out and as such, the audience was entirely comprised of U2 fans. Lucky for him, the people close to the stage in the ellipse area went wild for him, but the reception around the arena ran hot and cold, with many rockist jackasses booing him while he was onstage and later on, when Bono expressed how happy he was to share a stage with the guy.

The performance itself was an awkward mix of expert showmanship and good ideas not quite gelling as they should. He was backed by a DJ and a full string section, but the mix was horrible throughout the set, mainly resulting in the bass drowning out West’s vocals and the more nuanced parts of the string arrangements. With only a few exceptions, the songs were played in abrupt bits and pieces, rarely with any sort of graceful ending. However, many of the songs did come off well – the string interpolation of the musical hook in “Heard ‘Em Say” was gorgeous, “All Falls Down” seemed particularly well rehearsed, and “Jesus Walks” came across as the sort of arena anthem it ought to be.

The most exciting and memorable thing about this set was Kanye himself, and the sheer magnitude of his charisma. Unlike other U2 opening acts, West took full advantage of their ellipse stage design, jogging along the runway and working it just as well, if not better than Bono himself. The guy is a total natural, and definitely needs to tour more often. If he starts headlining stadiums himself, he really ought to consider stealing that ellipse concept. Really, anyone playing a room that size should. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

U2 @ Savvis Center, St. Louis, MO 12/14/2005
City of Blinding Lights / Vertigo / Elevation / Gloria / I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For – In A Little While / Beautiful Day / Original of the Species / Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own / Love and Peace Or Else / Sunday Bloody Sunday / Bullet the Blue Sky / Miss Sarajevo / Pride (In the Name of Love) / Where The Streets Have No Name / One // Until the End of the World / Mysterious Ways / With Or Without You /// Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of / Instant Karma / Yahweh / 40

U2 “Love and Peace Or Else (Live in Chicago 5/9/2005)” – Oh yeah, U2 played as well. This was my seventh U2 show (though two of them were not full concerts – Tibetan Freedom Concert 1997, and that show in Brooklyn from last year), and I’m pretty sure that in terms of performance, this was the best that I’ve seen them. Bono’s voice was very on, and he took full advantage of this by going for every vocal flourish that might not be within his reach on a regular night. I was pleased to see a show with a somewhat different running order from the one I caught at Madison Square Garden back in October. I was particularly pleased to see them play “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (which I haven’t witnessed since Popmart) and “Mysterious Ways,” which I’ve seen four times before, but this was easily the best of the five.

“Love and Peace Or Else” was far better in St. Louis than in the 10/8/2005 MSG set, as was the rest of the so-called ‘heart of darkness’ mini-set that also includes “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Bullet The Blue Sky.” Though I quite enjoy “Love and Peace,” this is by far the weakest part of the Vertigo tour – for one thing, these three songs in a row feels more than a little redundant on a musical level, but more than that, there are very troubling political implications in the repurposing of the latter two songs that Chris Conroy discussed in his incomplete review of the tour:

But every night, when “Sunday Bloody Sunday” begins, I check out of the concert completely…It all comes down to a lack of meaning. I feel very strongly that any and all political and social impact that the righteous idealism of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” represents has been leeched out of the song by decades of overexposure. It’s been cast and recast to stand in for so many conflicts that it’s just not saying anything specific about anything that matters…Shouting “This is your song now!” is even more of an insult; it’s giving the audience free rein to wear the cloak of righteousness for five minutes, to pretend that they Really Care and that Violence Is Wrong, before they return to the world where it’s OK to say things like “I think we should just bomb the hell out of all of ’em” and be greeted by serious nods and murmured assent. When R.E.M. say “This is your song now!” before singing “Losing My Religion,” it’s a different scenario; both songs are overplayed popular hits, but one is, at heart, a pop song about personal emotions, and the other is much more outward-looking and focused on something that is obviously not universal: disgust at armed conflict.

“Bullet The Blue Sky” suffers from pretty much the exact same identity crisis. It’s been played on every tour since it was written, largely because the band don’t have any other songs in their catalogue that will allow them to show off bruising hard-rock chops. It, too, is a profoundly anti-violent song — it was written in disgust at how the American military was used to subjugate dissent in Central America — but every time it gets trotted out, Bono desperately tries to make it new and relevant by pointing it at some other conflict. On the Elevation tour, he came the closest he’s come to successfully making it matter again, turning it into a sharp attack on gun violence with a hammy-but-haunting riff on the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman. Seeing that song shoved down America’s throat when it was played on the first leg of Elevation was remarkable: here was a band that actually did have the balls to say something that large segments of the audience might not like; here was a band who wrote songs that represented their ideals, and performed them with conviction. But after September 11th, the band dropped that level of interpretation from the song, and hearing it played in New York City became a disturbing experience: inside the arena, it felt like the audience was taking the song up as a battle cry, as a “we want revenge” violence fantasy, losing themselves in the brutality of the music and not in its lyrics of
condemnation for the exercise of force.

On the Vertigo tour, “Bullet The Blue Sky” has become spectacularly muddled. It’s obviously impossible to sing a song about the American military abroad in this climate without having that song be about the Iraq war, and Bono knows it; he’s been incorporating “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” into the lyric, and suddenly the song becomes bizarrely, schizophrenically, pro-soldier — at last night’s show, Bono quite literally dedicated the song to “the brave men and women of the United States Military.” How are we supposed to take that? Obviously conflicts like the Iraq war can produce a difficult line to straddle — it’s virtually impossible to respect what the soldiers are being required to do, but it’s impossible not to respect the impulse to serve one’s country in the name of idealism. A song about hating the sin but loving the sinner could definitely be a rich gold mine for the band to explore, but “Bullet The Blue Sky” is not that song. “Bullet The Blue Sky” is a song of condemnation, of outrage. How the hell are we to take this confused, empty version?

I definitely agree with Chris on this score, and came into the show on Wednesday night with some strong bias against this segment, but at least this time around it didn’t feel as though the band was sleepwalking through “Bullet the Blue Sky” – it actually did have some power to it. This doesn’t change the fact that I’d very much like to never see the song played live again in my life. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

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