As anyone who has read this site's reviews of The Eminem Show or Source Tags & Codes knows, Interscope bought Pitchfork editor Ryan Schreiber one of those personal, surfable wave pools like the guy from Mötley Crüe has. Otherwise, why would we review this? Pitchfork's quasi-pride is in opening reader ears to new music, and unless you're a Kaczynskian separatist, these songs have already been smuggled into your pop consciousness like drugs into Woodstock 99. Speaking of that rape-tastic festival and time-lapse history of market forces, what from the 90s will be remarkable to future armchair musicologists? The subcurrents way outperformed the mainstream, and even those subcurrents look to be outperformed by the 00s' bustling underbelly-dwellers. Please tell me that, as fads recycle, 2013 won't see the kids snorting coke off of each other's ripped-up leather as they rock out to industrio-clash.
U2 spent the 90s either in a war with Negativland, or marketing themselves as a celebration of, spoof of, critique of, and source of rampant consumption and multimedia force-feeding. No one in the 90s thought of warplanes when they heard the name U2; they thought it referred to the band's exponential unit-shiftin'. Having a remotely acronymic name put U2 in good company in the eighties (REM, XTC, PIL, INXS), while the 90s saw the proliferation of TLC, KFC and AIDS. So I can hardly blame U2 for becoming a satire of U2, then a lite-techno version of U2, only to emerge in 2000 as a U2 tribute band. As if the band internalized the poet Wallace Stevens' line, "We have been a little insane about the truth," U2 flagrantly tested the elasticity of their sound, appearance, attitude, and fanbase.
One thing the band hasn't dicked around with is how many ways they'll grub for your filthy lucre, releasing, as is well within the rights of any band this huge, a zillion different nation-specific versions of their singles, and even several different limited import versions of this comp: There's a bonus-track edition with "The Fly", a Japanese set with 31 tracks, and another two-disc version including a DVD and many of the one-disc version's curious absentees, albeit in B-side (sigh) remixed form. Best of luck to any stormchasers who want to pay shipping for all that; I'll stick to discussing the 16-track version you're most likely to find at Wal-Mart or Jaded Colonel's Aging Towny Discs and Vinyl.
If'n I was an exec at the band's label, I'd have recommended wide-releasing a two-disc lookbackamajig rather than equitably represent the lesser material. Simply repackage the gorgeous Achtung Baby as The Best of 1990-2000, and then include a bonus disc anthologizing high points from their other recent records, entitled either a) the humbling Things We Dropped Along the Way, b) the 80s-linking Still Haven't Found What We're Looking For, c) the Clinton-nodding Mistakes Were Made, or d) the spiritual When There Were Only Two Sets of Footprints, That's When the Rhythm Section Was Carrying Us.
By now you've no doubt heard the limerick (apropos for this Irish quartet) so popular with sixth graders who, preferring to blame the man who made PJ Harvey boring, overlook the work of sirs Eno, Lanois, and Orbit:
There once was a band named U2,Who ruled and then mightily blew.When asked, "Hey, what happened?"The band took a crap andFlood had someone remix their pooh.
But there's something interesting about U2's willingness to endlessly reconfigure their recent songs. Either they're admitting that the quality of their output has declined and is no longer utterly singular, or they're admitting that they're tired of operating under the weight of having their work regarded as so damn canonical. The band definitely, and consciously, shed its sacrosanctity in the 90s, and it's fitting that one of this collection's brand new songs appears in a remix version, while the "original" is relegated to a B-side of one the many versions of its remix's single, as if the band disdained it. Maybe all the tinkering is an attempt to circumvent how the populist, but diluting, dance touches of Zooropa and Pop date themselves.
That new song, "Electrical Storm", is a fine one for this version of U2, which means that it plays like a funkier, happier, more colossally passionate Coldplay/Radiohead hybrid. "Electrical Storm" also brings up the quandary of why two songs from 2002 are on a collection that's supposed to be an honest-to-goodness decade-spanner. Please tell me these tunes weren't tossed together unscrupulously in order to spice this November release up for that clusterfucked "holiday" that blends druids and messiahs and credit limits and gorging on mall foodcourt slurry. The other brand new tune on 1990-2000 is the theme from Gangs of New York, Scorsese's ambitious film about a magician's rivalry with a younger version of the cowardly lion of Oz for the heart of a transvestite, set against the backdrop of the riots that almost destroyed the Muppet Christmas Carol soundstage. Instead of living up to the film's gleeful taste for swindle and skullduggery, the song, "The Hands That Built America", is a woozy wedge of that empty grandeur that plagued the band's return to seriousness on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind. See that album's pre-9-11 "New York", or the band's 9-11 tribute during the tragedy's subsequent Super Bowl. The band's heart is in the right place, but in that heart/place lie stupid songs. With the heavy-handed "Hands", U2 have finally penned their answer to "This Used to Be My Greyhound", or whatever that Madonna song was a commercial for.
Another way "Hands" sucks is that it pillages the cool operatic moment from "Miss Sarajevo", a song otherwise a pillage of a Velvet Underground chorus and a pillage of The Byrds' pillage of Ecclesiastes, from U2's clever Passengers project, a record of songs for fictional movies that worked as a tongue-in-cheek statement about how good the movies have been to U2, a band whose image and tours have always seemed larger than life. Even the videotaped footage of the indignant Bono goose-stepping through "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was somehow cinematic in scope, and made their later film Rattle and Hum a no-brainer. One prays that an Imax feature isn't looming if U2 devolves into the Stones. In addition to the Gangs theme, and the Pavarotti-sampling film-fake "Sarajevo", this disc features soundtrack work from Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World and Batman Forever (U2's song is, of course, their orchestral-rock action-franchise counterpart to McCartney's Bond-anthem "Live and Let Die"). Curiously absent are U2's songs from the bad Wim Wenders remake City of Angels and the bad Wim Wenders original Million Dollar Hotel. And hey, where's Adam Clayton's solo version of the Mission: Impossible theme? J'accuse!
Okay, so Achtung is criminally under- and misrepresented. You do get "One", which Johnny Cash did better on his Solitary Man. (Where's the Cash-sung Zooropa oddity "The Wanderer"? I'd prefer that to the questionable half-rap of-- a new mix of!-- "Numb".) The problem with U2's "One" is that the pimpy music never sounds as despondent as the lyrics, like how critics charged Billy Bob Thornton's character in The Man Who Wasn't There with looking too suave to be believably pathetic. To U2's version I picture white people in their apartments clutching wine glasses, unbuttoning the top button of Gap shirts and giving each other come-hither looks. Cash's cover invokes an image of an epic judgment day for a planet festering with failed lovers.
I can't get past how the verse part of "Gone" (new mix!) recalls The Beatles' "Taxman". And the redundantly titled "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" is one of those positive advice songs that flow from Bono when he's in his Christian altar-ego. "Beautiful Day" is the best of these, and its Edge bombast can transform quarter-beer night at the bowling alley into a precipice of gladiatorial triumph, the way the melodrama of "Pride (In the Name of Love)" can leave patrons of a diner that used to be a Shoney's agog. While "Discotheque" (new mix!) is still unforgivable, "Stay (Faraway So Close)" is still a great pop song, even as it sounds like U2 doing Sebadoh doing the Smiths. The sassy "Staring at the Sun" (new mix!) even kind of kicks ass.
But oh well. This CD is for the fairweather fans who can afford the good seats at U2 shows; it's a coarse chronicle of a band inarguably masterful at creating four-minute forty-second atmospheres in which Bono pants and prolongs his falsetto triple-threat of "heeeee," "hooooo," and "hiiiiii." Are the buffalo adorning the packaging an activist reference to whitey's waste of these animals that the Native Americans handled more efficiently and reverently, or is the band joking about being bloated and on the edge of extinction? These songs were designed to keep us warm in our cubicles, to prevent us from leaping from dorm windows or attempting to mate with vending machines. Like too much of the entertainment from 1990-2000, this disc contains beautifully recorded, and expertly executed, piffle.
