Word: u2
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...midst of all the '87 madness -- sold-out arena concerts, two No. 1 singles, a No. 1 album, a deluge of magazine covers -- U2 knew they were adrift. It wasn't simply that the velocity of their incredible success had cut them loose from their moorings. Superstardom beamed a sudden, harsh light: the Irish band had no strong musical foundation at all. There was a sudden shared awareness among them that their center could not hold because it had never been firmly fixed...
Bono, the band's vocalist and lyric writer, had been fretting over this problem for some time. "The music of U2 is in space somewhere," he told Bob Dylan. "There is no particular musical roots or heritage for us. In Ireland there is a tradition, but we've never plugged into it." Dylan, who has nurtured and torn up a few roots in his time, knew just what to say: "Well, you have to reach back into music. You have to reach back...
Rattle and Hum, the title of both U2's brand-new album of the 1987 tour and the energetic performance documentary film released last week, is the sound of the band making contact: with music, with tradition, with their audience, with one another. The title comes from Bullet the Blue Sky, their rabble-rousing apocalypse about American muscle flexing in Central America ("In the locust wind comes a rattle and hum . . . Outside is America"), but the substance of these various tour diaries is, in fact, an exploration. U2 did more than reach back. They immersed themselves in American musical culture...
...some grumpy reviews that fretted about a scope that went way too wide and a cohesion that remained elusive. Indeed, Rattle and Hum is careeningly ambitious, but what fixes its focus is the band's passion to rediscover and remake themselves. With crystalline production supervised by Jimmy Iovine, U2 has never sounded better or bolder. Performances are mixed together with new, studio-recorded material into a record that is part mosaic and part road map of the group's musical unconscious...
...four days is a long time away to be looking for home, and the song, fragile and heartrending, ends the record with unexpected quiet, and intimacy. It is a characteristically bold, even reckless move. Whatever was given up in 1987 remains a mystery, but it is clear, now, what U2 came away with -- the best live rock album ever made. The record, in every sense, of their lives...