Rock and recommodification/ why keep going/ ghosts in the machines/ when def leppard shamed U2 and other lessons learned from car stereo systems/ can we order now?

Now that U2's civil war is over, the album is complete, and the bandmembers have embraced each other with the quiver­ing chins of an old couple renewing their wedding vows, Bono feels comfortable spinning out his take on where U2 has to go and why getting up to the starting gate was so tough.

"It's hard for people," Bono says over lunch one afternoon in a restaurant where a Muzak version of "Over the Rainbow" adds a special poignance to his talk of his ambitions for U2's second public decade. "If you realize that this friction makes you smarter, quicker, and tougher, then it's surely wise to stick with it. But if you want an easy life, if you're happy with your lot, if you see success as your goal, it's over. I've had this out with various members of the band, as you know, and, I'll be honest, with All." Ali is Bono's wife, Alison Stewart Hewson. "We thought, okay, maybe it'll take ten years to get to this place, but when we got there we could stop this kind of madness. But I don't think it's mad. I think that that's the fun of it. I think there's nothing sadder than people who feel that they've arrived. I think it might have just taken a couple more minutes for some of the other people to realize the same thing.

"When you're thirty you're just starting your creative life if you're a painter or a writer. Some don't start till they're forty, or probably shouldn't. It's just that in rock & roll terms, in the way that it used to be, a lot of people were burnt out. They were shooting stars, and of course they burned bright and they burned fast, but with a lot of great artists it's the opposite; they just got better and better. That's what I

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want U2 to be. I feel like we've just had a taste of it and that the success, in a way, is a distraction. That's not false modesty, it's genuinely know­ing that this work was extraordinary because of what it hinted at more than what it was."

Bono says that after all the Rattle and Hum success (the album, reviled though it might have been, sold 7.5 million copies) and backlash, after Larry's complaint that U2 onstage was turning into a jukebox, after accepting that maybe embracing American roots music was a dead end for U2, Bono came home after that good-bye concert in Dublin at the end of 1989 feeling sapped and rotten.

"I had a terrible time at Christmas," he admits. "A very convenient end-of-decade depression. Y'know, I don't buy the idea that U2 reinvented itself in that moment, because I've always felt that all through our life was a process of re-creation and killing off the old and bringing on the new. It's just that this was a more spectacular murder.

"I looked back and said, 'Okay, it was wonderful and a lot of good work was done,' but I felt very unhappy. I said, 'If this is it, this is not enough.' I think that everyone else would have come to that conclusion, but it might have taken a few average albums and I don't think that was on. So there were a few simple tasks to be faced. Like: rhythm was now part of the language of even white rock & roll. There was no way back from it. How does a three-piece be polyrhythmic? You have to have another thing. On Unforgettable Fire Brian's contribution was to find little tape loops for us to play off. So that's how this technology thing came together. These are practical problems. So that you can focus on the personality of Adam's bass playing, rather than just the pure timekeep­ing of it. And you can have the sort of hammer aspect to Larry's kick-drum and still have the delicacy of a conga part. But it was very hard, and learning to adapt to that new technology created tension. It's a bit like trying to help somebody across the road who's saying, 'Hey, what are you doing? I like it here.!' But they wouldn't really. It's just that they're not ready to cross the road yet."

U2 has now embraced sequencers that play prerecorded instrumental parts both to fatten up their sound and to allow the musicians to play embellishments and counterpoint while a machine takes care of basics. At one time U2 would have thought of that as cheating. Now they see it as a liberation. The values that inspired Rattle and Hum—"Let's learn

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about roots and how the old songwriters did it"—have been put in deep storage.

"U2 are the world's worst wedding band." Bono shrugs. "We are. Why don't we just own up to it and stop fucking about? For instance, we were always jealous of the fact that we never knew anyone else's songs. That started a lot of В sides where we did cover versions and tried to get into the structure of songwriting vicariously and then apply it. This is a band that's one of the biggest acts in the world, and we know fuck-all in terms of what most musicians would consider to be important. 'Cause all of these bands, including this new crop, have all played in bar bands, they're all well versed in rock & roll structure— which is also why they're all so well versed in rock & roll cliches.

"Imitation and creation are opposites. The imitative spirit is very different from the creative spirit, which is not to say that we all don't beg, steal, and borrow from everybody, but if the synthesis of it all is not an original spirit, it's unimportant.

"Compare white rock to the state of African American culture. The black position is so much more modern, so much more plugged-in, so much more postmodern even. They're begging, stealing, and borrowing, but creating new things, using the technology that's available. The springboard for rock & roll was the technology of the electric guitar, the fuzz box, and printed circuits. I think it's fascinating that in Compton and in the Bronx, there are sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who are part of the next century plugging into all this technology to create new sounds, while middle-class kids from Ivy League colleges are listening to music that is Neanderthal. Not Neanderthal in that it's raw and primi­tive screaming, but that the form and fashion of it is."

When Bono gets on a roll like this there's no shutting him up. But it's worth paving attention, 'cause after Achtung Baby is released U2 is going to put all this theory into practice or flame out in the attempt. And by then he may not want to spell it all out.

"I have a theory about technology, if you can stand it," Bono says, digging in. "It's long, but it's interesting. Sitting on Sunset Strip outside the recording studio, working on the Rattle and Hum soundtrack in 1988, on Friday nights, we used to watch the parade. It was an extraordinary-sight to see these cars that were fitted out as music systems. You've seen that parade of Mexican hopping trucks, and there's a sound." Bono cups his hands over his mouth and imitates the heavy, distorted backbeat of

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