For some groups a singles collection makes sense: As opposed to a greatest hits or a best of, a singles set should reflect a band that doesn't always think in album-length terms, and sometimes favors the succinct one-shot. U2 are not one of these bands. According to the liner notes in 18 Singles-- a compilation timed for the holiday season which overlaps heavily with two previous best-ofs-- only half of these songs actually saw commercial release as singles in the United States. All others hit the charts in either the UK or Europe, and then there are two new songs, "Window in the Skies" and a cover of the Skids' "The Saints Are Coming", recorded with Green Day.
Revisiting familiar songs like "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", "New Year's Day", "One", and "Desire" provides little in the way of new revelations. These songs have never gone away long enough to allow for a fresh listen, and they work now pretty much the way they always did. More than anything, they're likely to reinforce strong opinions that have had decades to harden. U2 have fans as passionate as any other upper-tier rock act, but they also have more haters than any of the other entities currently competing for "Best Band in the World" status-- not least because they're the only ones over 25 years old crass enough to make such a goal explicit. One link to a photo of Bono yanking up his flag-lined jacket at the Super Bowl is all that's needed to win an online argument about U2's obnoxiousness.
Still, I can swallow every argument against U2 whole without offering a rebuttal and acknowledge that their best songs up through Zooropa still move me. There's been a shift in the past year or two towards rock that strives to be big and audacious and ambitious and U2, love them or hate them, are one of rock's enduring Big and Important Band archetypes. And for a while, they also wrote great melodies, had a very clever and original guitar player, and had producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois working at the top of their games.
But only for a while, and U2's singles from the past 10 years are several steps down from the band's acknowledged classics. "Vertigo" wanted to be raw but came over as bland alternarock; "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of" was Bono rolling downhill with his feet off the pedals. "Beautiful Day", on the other hand, was a bald-faced try at recapturing past glories, and against all odds it succeeded, in part because of that "Touch Me" melodic fragment nicked from A-Ha.
The late-period drop-off is more apparent on the two new tracks. "The Saints Are Coming", which debuted in the Louisiana Superdome during a Monday Night Football halftime, finds U2 and Green Day trying to keep its New Orleans association alive by opening the song with Billie Joe Armstrong crooning a painfully thin verse from "The House of the Rising Sun". The sleepy and flat vibe he imparts with his intro continues through the rest of the song. "Window in the Skies" is a little better; it's got a decent chorus with Bono on falsetto, and it's one of his songs where he's singing about love but could be thinking about something else. I'd say it's no "Sweetest Thing", but I never liked the rerecorded version included here nearly as much as the original B-side.
At this point U2 is so omnipresent-- and Bono has so thoroughly ingratiated himself to the baby boomer power players in every field-- that it's hard to imagine them losing cultural relevance again, as they did in the late 1990s. They're always nearby in times of strife, ready to help broken cities and stunned nations heal with a dose of epic rock'n'roll. As long as there is calamity, U2 will remain relevant. Maybe that's why they fell off during Clinton's second term-- the West had forgotten what real trouble was all about, and there was nothing for U2 to push against. As for 18 Singles, you might check out those earlier comps instead.
