Run the Race

I have been digging on the music of U2 over the last couple of weeks. It all started, at least in it's most recent manifestation, with hearing about a Bible study someone did using the music of the Dublin band as the lead in to talking about faith in a post-modern era. I thought, "What a cool topic," so I broke out some of my old albums and got some books on the topic from Amazon. As one thing led to another I've gotten more and more into both the music and the message.

As a guy in his early 40's I got into the band about the same time everyone else my age did in the early 80's after hearing Sunday Bloody Sunday and seeing the Live at Red Rocks video of the song on MTV (back when MTV was worth a damn and actually changed the world). Al the geezers who read this will know what I'm talking about. Like a lot of teenagers, I was really only interested in what got airplay and so I didn't listen to much of Unforgettable Fire outside of Pride (In the Name of Love). It was my first exposure to Martin Luther King Jr. because out in rural Oregon the race troubles in the South were something that might as well have happened in a foreign land. I had never thought of King's life in the terms the song presented and it changed me to some degree.

I was a sophomore in college when the Joshua Tree album came out and it was one of three great albums of the time; the other two being Paul Simon's Graceland and and Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles. The first three songs on the album, With or Without You, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and Where the Streets Have No Name, may be the best three song album set ever (and Joshua Tree may be the best rock album ever). I couldn't have told you why at the time but I Still Haven't Found... was maybe the best three minute song I had ever heard. I was hooked on the band and when the Rattle and Hum movie and album were released I was first in line. I still think it's the best album the band has ever done or maybe back in the day it would have been the second LP in a two LP set like those old 70's bands used to do. I remember that I used to sing Angel of Harlem and When Love Comes to Town in the shower. Blues was undergoing it's subculture rebirth at the time and seeing U2 perform with B. B. King, who I had recently discovered, was fantastic. The perfect song in the movie was the gospel version of Still Haven't Found. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it now but I cried in the theater when the gospel choir came in the first time on the song in the movie because it was so perfect. It has taken me 20 years to figure out why but the song is so true.

In grad school came Achtung Baby and that was not exactly what I expected. It was a lot harder and edgier than I was wanting, though that was mostly because I was still thinking that bands should do the same thing they had done before. Still there were a couple of the best songs U2 had ever done: Mysterious Ways and One. The first has a groove that rivals just about anything and the second just reveals such a deep hurt. I wish I had remembered the second tune later in my life when I felt like the Catholic church rejected my marriage because it hadn't been performed by a priest. The words of the song perfectly express how I felt and wish I could have given it to my wife to explain what I was feeling inside when I couldn't say the words.

After Achtung Baby U2 took it's foray into electronic music and parted ways then. I sort of got the parody of rock star culture the band was doing on Zooropa and PopMart and I thought it was cool and all but I just didn't dig this kind of music. So for about 8 years I didn't listen to the band much unless I was pulling out "the good old stuff". Then All That You Can't Leave Behind came out and it was like the old U2 was back but with cooler lyrics. It was as if something had come unfettered in the band and they were expressing themselves as truly as they knew how. The song Elevation is a great example of this with a funky tune and elliptical lines that could be taken more than one way but that somehow led to something so much deeper than just the stuff of typical rock tunes.

The truth is that the lyrics weren't cooler but I had grown up a lot. More importantly I had decided to really follow and investigate my Christian faith and all of the sudden I found this well-spring of Christian thought and expression that was a thousand times more authentic than the stuff Word and Sparrow and Integrity and all the rest were spoon-feeding the contemporary Christian subculture. I found this band that was Christian but that sang about sadness and anger and lament and joy and love and all of the rest of the human conditions that connected it all to a holy God who loved His broken creation. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb has just continued this and made it all the more obvious.

Now when I listen to Still Haven't Found I don't just hear a modified 12 bar blues but a Biblical lament worthy of King David and Psalms. When the New Voices of Freedom sing "I Still Haven't Found..." I just connect with the old black spiritual sense of searching for God and finding Him but not finding Him; of loss and hope, of triumph and tribulation. To me it's the best piece of Christian rock ever recorded and maybe the most authentic. Listen to the lyrics and tell me you haven't been there; that you haven't searched and serched for the answered and not been satisfied. Tell me you haven't looked in passionate relationships and emotionally based religion and come up feeling empty. And then you find that something more and you know the Truth and that "All the colors are leading to water". You believe it but like the man with the demon possessed boy at the foot of Mt. Tabor you find yourself at the foot of the One saying, "Lord, I believe...but please, God, help me with my lack of faith."

"But I still haven't found what I'm looking for."

Grace and Peace.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

The Physicist Link Me |

Thursday, September 25, 2008

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The Physicist Link Me |