360 Degrees of Love: Reflections On The First North American Leg of U2′s World Tour

The mathematical idea of 360 degrees descends from ancient Babylon and has contemporary correlation in everything from video game systems to snowboarding. Increasingly in common usage, the “360 degree” concept represents a comprehensive and enlightened take on whatever is at hand, as in “360 degrees of knowledge.”

Few bands have had the volumes of cash or cache of vision to attempt something as ambitious as a massive stadium rock show, and in the months that U2’s 360 tour has been jetting and trucking its way around Europe and North America, critics and fans have attempted to analyze every aspect of the endeavor: musically and morally, environmentally and economically.

Having seen the tour in Chicago twice, Raleigh, and Atlanta, I feel compelled to make my final review a reflection on the band’s specific projection of pop star practice in the early 21^st century, on the entirely pretentious project of the stadium rock spectacle in 2009.

Having missed the Pop tour due to poverty, grad school, and being a new parent at the time, this is my first proper U2 stadium tour, and I look back at its first North American shows with gratitude because it did not succumb to 360 degrees of chaos, catastrophe, or cliché. That said, I can leave the 360 degrees of deafening critique to other critics and offer instead my 360 degrees of fan devotion.

With this tour, we got 360 degrees of culmination. While not a single inside source has uttered a single word about this being the last waltz, who could help themselves to speculate, to ask the band’s collective ego: How do you top this?

With the careful assistance of a vast and dedicated international cast of staff and crew, this tour represents not only a creative victory against a chorus of vicious cynics, it appears to be three chords strummed on the guitar of history as strokes of engineering genius, triumphs of industry professionalism, and treaties with the marketplace of media consumption.

The endless labors required to manifest the tour’s light and magic extend directly from 360 degrees of chemistry coalescing between the fierce four. Watch these eternally youthful yet middle-aged men from any angle in the coliseum and the same camaraderie congeals. Refusing to conceal their collaborative grace, U2 is as ever a sturdy four-legged altar to the enduring spirit of rock and roll. As Judas spars Jesus inside Achtung Baby’s “Until The End of The World,” Bono and Edge trade laps around the perimeters of possibility, vocal passion spilling over the brim into the waves of jarring joy wrought by Edge’s guitar.

The always charming rhythm section of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen ceaselessly cool the hot engine of Bono’s impetuousness and thrust a throbbing anchor into the deep sea of sonic groove, giving a ground to the starry skies of Edge’s sparkle and soar. Special stadium prescience gets pumped into our ears and souls from Adam’s and Larry’s presence on the new tracks like “Breathe” and “Magnificient” as well as on the always funky favorites like “Mysterious Ways” and “Elevation.” Watching them work their parts of the spectacle, I imagine that they have always been the well-watered roots beneath Bono’s boastfully blooming flowers.

So much spurious speculation and premature condemnation in the fan community has focused on one fatefully and forever controversial aspect of any show: the setlist. On this tour as on previous ones, the concert’s composition and choreography require 360 degrees of coherence. Established on technological and spiritual scaffolding no less precarious than the rigging Bono scaled with his white flag back in the day, the mere setting draws cues from an epic back catalog of live shows, combining the raw intimacy of tours like Unforgettable Fire or Elevation with the grand pomp of Popmart and Zoo TV.

With or without our online commentary on every aspect of every gig, the band clearly invests significant time arranging an inspired itinerary for something to which the fans will give their full mental, monetary, & emotional commitment. The initial idea to open the shows with a long string from No Line On The Horizon was ultimately retooled down to three tracks before dropping hits from the crowd-pleasing core.

While on Vertigo tour (supporting an album with a longer-winded title that some critics affectionately called Man), the obscure scouring of the back catalog had them dipping into ditties like “The Ocean” or “The Electric Co.” from Boy. This time out, tracks from the band’s first record have been conspicuously absent, but older fans welcomed a revival of The Unforgettable Fire’s title track along with the hymnlike lullaby of “MLK” serving as an intro to “Walk On.”

For folks in the U2 fan community, a far-flung global network that meets up primarily online at fansites and forums like this one, the occasion of a U2 tour provides a space for planned and spontaneous outbursts of our camaraderie, forever reminding us that U2 fandom offers 360 degrees of community.

Of many experiential highlights this tour: I was thrilled to meet people with whom I had corresponded previously, including the always friendly Cathal McCarron who was touring with his book Me & U2 and the fellow Interferencers I found simply because they were the only people in my section that recognized “Your Blye Room”; I enjoyed seeing the second Chicago show with my parents—who were with me at my first U2 concert in 1984 and who will both turn 70 in 2010; most definitely, the entire weekend in North Carolina acted as a watershed because the U2 Academic Conference provided all I had hope for and more.

Because of (and in spite of) their ever tenacious and gregarious frontman, U2 have come to model 360 degrees of courage. In the case of Bono, the thin line between a hopeful hastening of moral imperatives and the self-aggrandizing hubris of a hasty megalomaniac is forever shifting and sometimes shifty. Between my study of the band and my longtime allegiance to the low-fi, DIY ethos of grassroots musical and political movements, I could find lots wrong with how U2 run their business and promote their causes in the context of superstardom.

But looking past the legitimate and illegitimate slagging this band receives, they still “stand up” to the rockstars within themselves and devote so much energy to spirituality and social justice and speaking out for human rights and testifying to the importance of “love and community” throughout it all. I’m not sure that men of lesser fortitude would ever have the huevos to do what these guys have done on such a grand scale.

When I was in middle school, I constructed a fantasy band in my mind that embodied the best that the arc of rock history had to offer up until that time. Like the cosmic comedy found in the film Walk Hard, such imaginings have inherent elements of the silly. For the three decades that followed my air-band antics and rockstar role-playing, U2 turned out to be the band of my dreams, becoming the best (and only sometimes the worst) that rock and roll can be. With all that could have gone wrong with the Irish foursome’s most recent globe-trotting jaunt, the first two legs of the tour have been an undisputed triumph for 360 degrees of love.

–Andrew William Smith, Editor

Photos from the Atlanta show by Patty Arriagada for Interference.com