Grace breaks into a sound

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With No Line on the Horizon, U2 has achieved its most consistently stimulating and theologically suggestive album since Achtung Baby (1991). From the first bar, it pulsates with intensity and conviction. In just under an hour, the listener is plunged into an extraordinary range of sound-worlds. But what of the nebulous, intangible images evoked by the album’s title and cover art? Those familiar with Dublin weather know exactly what happens when the clouds descend: all sense of distance disappears and the battleship grey of the Irish Sea blends seamlessly into gathering storm clouds. This is a central metaphor of the album and, indeed, of much of U2’s music. For ‘no line on the horizon’ evokes the ‘thin places’ of Celtic spirituality – spots around the world where the gulf between heaven and earth is narrower than at others. These function as a kind of bridge or portal, reinforcing the continuity between the sacred and secular, the eternal and temporal. Life with a lover, past regrets or even a soldier’s fears all point in their different ways beyond the immediate to the eternal.

No Line On the Horizon

The opening title track, ‘No Line On The Horizon’, tells us about a girl ‘who’s like the sea’ because ‘you can hear the universe in her sea shells’. She suggests that ‘infinity’s a great place to start’, that ‘time is irrelevant, not linear’. There is more to life than what immediately confronts our senses, so the listless and frustrated traffic cop in Paris longs to explore a larger world. Love does that: it lifts the roof off to expose something greater. This song is not just about love, nor is it just about God; it’s about both. U2 has consistently rejected the false dichotomy between the spiritual and material in favour of the (more biblical) integration of the two. This is not a pantheistic assimilation, though. Theirs is an earthy spirituality, gritty and raw, sometimes enraged, often joyful, always hopeful.

An album in three acts

Some albums are randomly strung together; others are artfully worked into what is often pretentiously termed a ‘concept album’. No Line on the Horizon falls somewhere in between. Bono has said that it has three different parts.[1] If we take the opener as a stand-alone introduction, this does seem to fit. In fact, the track somehow anticipates the moods and convictions of each of the three acts in turn.

ACT 1: Private agonies and devoted joys

 ‘Magnificent’ is nothing short of a contemporary praise psalm (‘I was born to be with you . . . I was born to sing for you . . . Justified till we die / You and I will magnify’), deliberately echoing the Magnificat, Mary’s song of ecstatic praise in Luke [2]. There are Islamic connotations too, however. For one of the 99 names of Allah is Al-ʿAẓīm, meaning ‘the Magnificent’ or ‘the Infinite’). A risky move? Certainly, but the confidence of being justified in these terms would seem resolutely Christian. The ‘love that can heal such a scar’, which ‘unites our hearts’, is that unique love of grace that makes justification possible.

‘Moment of Surrender’ is a powerful slow-burn,[3] a song profoundly haunted by guilt, for which the only solace was found when, ‘at the moment of surrender’, the singer ‘folded to my knees’. The commonplaces of the urban landscape – reflections in an ATM glass, the lines of subway trains – have become thin places (‘I was speeding on the subway through the stations of the cross’). Then, in ‘Unknown Caller’, the direction is reversed. Instead of our world pointing beyond to another, the interminable monotony of a sleepless night gets interrupted by none other than God himself issuing an insistent string of instructions, which appear to be Apple Mac metaphors for turning back to God: ‘Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak. Shush now . . . Force quit and move to trash’. ’3.33’ seems to be a subtle allusion to Jeremiah 33:3 – ‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’ Now God answers. Note that, while the lyrics stop after the chorus’s final instruction, the music doesn’t. The words are followed by almost two minutes of overwhelming, swelling sound, complete with Hammond organs and an Edge solo. The singer is literally rendered speechless by the experience.

The fascinating thing about these songs is how intensely private they are, the latter pair especially so. Even ‘Magnificent’ expresses a personal devotion to God, albeit one in which the singer’s lover is invited to join. This is nothing less than the singer in prayer and praise to God, which would be startling on a rock album if it had not come from U2. Within these three tracks (the longest on the album), we are privy to a sustained spiritual journey that embraces everything from guilt and despair, through the surprise of a divine confrontation, to hope and genuine joy. No wonder, then, in common with previous tour set lists that concluded with ‘devotionals’ (like ‘40’ and ‘Yahweh’), the European leg of the 2009 ‘360° Tour’ closed out with ‘Moment of Surrender’.

ACT 2: Itchy feet, bombast and wry smiles

We get to let our hair down and tap toes now. ‘Get On Your Boots’, the first single from the album, is brash, abrasive and teasing, but also faintly ridiculous, its tongue firmly rooted in its cheek. Rolling Stone observes that it comes right in the middle of album, ‘as if the band thought it needed some kind of zany halftime.’[4] With a knowing wink, this song looks the critics of U2’s pontifications in the eye. It promises to give the future ‘a big kiss’, and ‘not to talk about wars between nations’, but of course, Bono can’t resist slipping in ‘not right now’. The song seems more interested in ‘love’, ‘joy’, ‘laughter’ and his girl ‘getting on her sexy boots’. But even here U2 includes a few serious jabs. There is more than meets the ear to the mantra-like repetitions of ‘you don’t know how beautiful you are’ and ‘let me in the sound’ (to which we will return).

This playful exuberance is sustained in the other two songs in the section. ‘Crazy’ is the more earnest perhaps, but still claims, ‘the right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear’. That justifies ‘Get On Your Boots’, perhaps, but could also allude to the incongruities of Bono’s public face. ‘Every generation gets a chance to change the world’, apparently, but this can create the most bizarre situations for those who try. Bono has himself referred to the absurd ‘currency’ of his celebrity, which results in a super-rich rock star pleading the case for the world’s poor in the Oval Office. In ‘Stand Up Comedy’, he goes even further: ‘Stand up to rock stars / Napoleon is in high heels / Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas’. In all this, it’s as if he is pleading, ‘I know you don’t take me seriously,[5] but for heaven’s sake, take the ideas seriously – they’re big ideas!’ Even in this second act, the songs are driven by the activism for which U2 is known. But they are disarmingly playful and fun; it’s an optimistic activism that makes its exuberant joy part of the appeal to join in. Their ‘hope, faith, love’ characterise such activism, but actually also enable it.

Then, suddenly the mood radically changes yet again. Without any warning, we’re immersed into the sound world of a road trip from Europe’s autobahns into North Africa and the Middle East.

ACT 3: Doubts and grace in the Middle East

Brian Eno’s stamp is clear throughout the album, especially in this final act. But his is not the only influence. Much of the work on this album was done in Fez, Morocco, as the result of Bono’s attendance at a Sufi religious music festival. So ‘FEZ – Being Born’ immediately assaults us with the bustle and tradesmen’s cries of a north African souk, as well as the faintest vestiges of a muezzin’s call to prayer. Musically, the song has what seems like a couple of false starts before launching into something more insistent and yet plaintive. For all its Islamic and north African atmosphere, however, U2’s convictions have not been left behind, hence the repeated echoes of the ‘let me in the sound’ refrain near the start of the song. ‘FEZ – Being Born’ is an elusive song, evoking the crossing from Europe into Africa at the Gibraltar straights and, as such, is transitional in more ways than one.

‘White as Snow’ is the most incongruous track on the album. The rather abstract introduction gives nothing away; it is only when the lyrics’ melody begins that the tune’s familiarity suddenly dawns: the Advent carol, ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’. The melody perfectly expresses the lyrics’ longing, driven by an old biblical image: ‘dry ground’ that ‘bears no fruit at all’. This is Old Testament language for spiritual barrenness. And this song yearns for spiritual life, which again means, above all, forgiveness. Bono has suggested the song refers to a dying soldier in Afghanistan. Without his youthful assurance, he can only hope that ‘his heart could be as white as snow’, through ‘the lamb as white as snow’. It hauntingly seems to reflect back to the experience of ‘Moment of Surrender’.

One might first think that ‘Breathe’ would fit best thematically, musically and culturally with Act 1 rather than Act 3. Much has been written about the opening date: 16 June. Is it the Bloomsday of James Joyce’s Ulysses, South Africa’s Youth Day, memorialising the Soweto student uprisings of 1976, or simply some ordinary day on which Bono simply heard the news? This misses the point, for this is about being ‘out there’ in the real world. Bono has claimed to be a ‘travelling salesman of ideas’,[6] a point he alludes to here when saying that he comes ‘from a long line of travelling sales people on my mother’s side’. It requires being out there in new contexts and situations. It is the message of grace that makes him breathe and gives confidence ‘to go out there into the street and sing your heart out’.

The final surprise of the album is its unexpected consolidation of the Act 3 mood in ‘Cedars of Lebanon’. We’re in the world of minarets, poverty (‘the child drinking dirty water from the river bank’) and urban conflict (‘soldier brings oranges he got out from a tank’) from the perspective of that arch-outsider, the foreign correspondent. Crumpled and confused, this is not so much a song as a semi-spoken monologue marked by vulnerability, regret and doubt. Yet there are also wry aphorisms about life: ‘this shitty world sometimes produces a rose’; ‘the worst of us are a long drawn out confession / the best of us are geniuses of compression’; ‘choose your enemies carefully ‘cos they will define you’. These are, presumably, the thoughts that lie behind the simple headlines into which he has spent the night squeezing complicated lives (perhaps even the radio headlines behind Breathe?).

It seems a strange way to finish, but it is not accidental. ‘Cedars of Lebanon’ is a common Old Testament image, but to what end is it used here? Could it be that, in an era dominated by headlines about Middle Eastern conflict, this is advice to those with their hands on national triggers? The Edge’s falsetto chorus urges ‘return the call to home’, but being the album’s conclusion, one suspects more is going on than simply an anti-war protest. Could the call come from the ‘Unknown Caller himself’, which would make ‘home’ something far greater?

Stirrings and provocations

There are a number of challenges that need to be heard, here. First, surprisingly for someone who inhabits an image-obsessed world, Bono insists several times on this album that he’s not concerned about image. Whether that is credible, there is no doubting the importance of the point. ‘The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear’ (‘I’ll Go Crazy if I don’t go Crazy Tonight’) is echoed by the haunting refrain in ‘Moment of Surrender’: ‘I did not notice the passers-by and they did not notice me’. The point is that if something is important to you, it transcends what other people might think of you. That presumably is what enables one to ‘walk out into the street and sing your heart out’ (‘Breathe’).

Second, although God doesn’t get named explicitly, he is ever-present here. Mentioned in three songs, he is clearly the chorus and subject of ‘Unknown Caller’. Bono suggested as much in interviews with Michka Assayas before 2005 - the song has clearly been brewing for years:

‘Be silent and know that I am God’ That’s a favourite line from the Scriptures. [Psalm 46:10] ‘Shut up and Let Me Love You’ would be the pop song. It’s really what it means. If ever I needed to hear a comment, it might be that.[7]

But the most suggestive God-talk comes in ‘Stand Up Comedy’: ‘But while I’m getting over certainty, stop helping God across the road like a little old lady’. No disrespect to little old ladies, but this is certainly laying a gauntlet to those who think they can manipulate or second-guess God. Compared to God, who are we? As it goes on: ‘I gotta stand up to ego, but my ego’s not really the enemy / It’s like a small child crossing an eight lane highway on a voyage of discovery.’ He’s the one who needs help on the road, not God. The point seems to be, ‘Your God is too small!’ So the album as a whole seems to offer vital correctives. First, don’t assume ours is a closed, mechanistic universe. Eternity is closer than you imagine. Second, don’t assume you know God better than you do. He is far, far greater (magnificent, even), than you can possibly imagine.

Let Me In The Sound

What is this sound that ‘Get On Your Boots’ wants a part of? The answer is not hard to find, especially when we come to ‘Breathe’: ‘I’ve found grace inside a sound / I found grace, it’s all that I found / and I can breathe / breathe now.’ It is a clear reference to John Newton’s iconic hymn:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.

It is no accident then, that during the recent 360° tour, this verse got slipped in (for example, on the Chicago and Boston legs) between ‘One’ and ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’. In his endorsement for Steve Turner’s history of the hymn, Bono wrote:

Steve Turner is a tough-minded poet with an ear for the psalms, an eye for the miracles in the mundane, and an understanding of how despair can break the ground for joy to take root. The story of ‘Amazing Grace’ is just that: a gospel song without any of the big-grinning cheesiness often found in that genre. As a musician, I am often struck by the phrase ‘sweet the sound’ as in ‘Amazing grace! (How sweet the sound).’ I love to think music can be an instrument of grace . . . that there might be mercy in melody and that at the very least a great song can fill the silence of indifference we sometimes find in our hearts.[8]

In many ways, Bono could have been describing the whole of No Line On the Horizon. Whereas the album All That You Can’t Leave Behind ended with a song called ‘Grace’, this album seems utterly saturated in it. Grace changes everything; grace is what overcomes the past; grace is what brings about the joy and hope that is not blind to the realities of the world. Grace is what enables the fresh start/reboot that the ‘Unknown Caller’ commands; it brings the relief of the ‘Moment of Surrender’, swells the joy of ‘Magnificent’, satisfies the yearning of ‘White as Snow’, drives the sense of purpose of ‘Stand Up Comedy’ and fills the lungs with the invigorating fresh air of ‘Breathe’. In his interviews with Bono, Assayas asked him about what overwhelms him.

Assayas: What leaves you speechless?
Bono: Does singing count?
Assayas: I’m afraid not. Songs have words.
Bono: But not when I start. Usually, it’s just a melody and nonsense words. Hmm. Songs are about as succinct as I get. I’m just sparing you.
[laughs then ponders for a moment]
‘Forgiveness’ is my answer.
Assayas: You mean ‘being forgiven’?
Bono: Yeah.[9]

 

Mark's further theological reflections on No Line on the Horizon can be found on TheologyNetwork.org.

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