The 1990s was the decade U2 gave no fucks. Its output from that era, beginning with the unsurpassed, career-resetting Achtung Baby in 1991, saw the band indulge in its Bowie-like impulses to exhilarating effect. In ’93, Zooropa sounded like it was recorded in outer space; 1997’s Pop saw the group crashing back down onto a mirrored disco ball; in between it wrote a soundtrack to a non-existent film that featured Luciano Pavarotti on one track. The music the band produced in that period remains the nerviest, most audacious songwriting of the band’s catalog. It was a wonderful time to be a U2 fan. Even when it hopped out of a lemon in Eurotrash attire, or announced its tour ironically in the lingerie department of a Kmart, it was all art, baby!
Contained within that glorious weirdness is a lyric from “The Fly” that, as U2 enters its fifth decade, now feels prophetic: “It’s no secret that ambition bites the nail of success.” As the band stumbled into the 2000s after the relative commercial disappointment that was Pop, U2 once again rebooted its sound for All That You Can’t Leave Behind, a back-to-basics record that openly sought chart-topping validation—the word that kept popping up in interviews was “relevance”—even as its gazillionaire members could have easily written space rock operas for the rest of their days. Instead, for the last 17 years and counting, U2 has been a band idling in neutral.
Songs Of Experience, U2’s 14th studio album, revs up the ambition, to embarrassing results. It finds the group desperately searching for a radio hit while pontificating on American exceptionalism, shoehorning the Syrian refugee crisis into not one but two love songs—and on consecutive tracks, no less. It even features Bono’s first on-album use of a vocoder (surely eliciting cracks of “Bono Iver” from the cheap seats) [Correction: He used vocoder on “Elevation”]. It is the product of a band giving too many fucks.
Its title borrowed from William Blake, Songs Of Experience is a bookend to U2’s 2014 effort, Songs Of Innocence, infamous as the record that appeared, unrequested, in everyone’s iTunes. In Innocence, we find young Paul Hewson, before the “Bono” moniker stuck, penning songs in his childhood bedroom, looking for a way out of the north side of Dublin. Experience, helmed by producers Jacknife Lee and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, is Bono and Co. having found at last what they were looking for. The life lessons they learned along the way are not particularly profound.