Date
Author
Александр Беляев; Where Moscow
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
I don't want to go to U2
Life does not stand still. Over the past months, I’ve been asked two hundred times if I’m going to U2 and if I’m going, will it be through accreditation or something. The questioners were sure that I was not going “or what,” but that I was going with accreditation, and with some kind of crazy all-terrain badge. And in advance they envied with black envy the slacker journalist, who absolutely gets all the best things in life for free. (Except perhaps money.) In those same months, semi-acquaintances from out of town asked me a couple of times to pick up tickets purchased on the Internet from the seller’s office. Once for this “work” they offered a “fee” of a thousand rubles. I didn’t go only because I was on duty at the editorial office. (You shouldn’t laugh - the “thing” doesn’t lie on the road. Either I’m walking on the wrong roads.) And I didn’t dare tell all these people asking/begging that I wouldn’t go to U2 myself. Because I don't want to.
And no one seems to have canceled accreditations (although there were such terrible rumors). And it seems like even yesterday there were tickets at the box office (and not the most expensive ones). An insider from the promotion company leaked information to me: the stage was round, which confused people who bought expensive tickets for seats that in reality were not the best. Well, I don't know. I still can't check. Because I won't go. Because I don't see the point in this. Although I take my craft very seriously. I try to attend all the concerts, listen to all the new releases and read all the mailings from music companies - even outright nonsense about how some singer’s silicone flowed from her right breast into her left buttock. I read about bad things and listen to bad things. Because “if it weren’t for winter, we wouldn’t know summer,” as one wonderful singer sang. Or, as one sommelier convinced his wife: “You don’t understand anything about good red wine, because you haven’t tried a bad one.”
Meanwhile, I adore U2. I collected their best albums in their “native” form. I can play a couple of songs on the guitar. I've probably heard everything, and I like almost everything. I first heard U2 in 1991 in the States, where I went on a school exchange. I lived in an intelligent Italian-Irish family, and it is clear that for them U2 was like Galich, Okudzhava and Vysotsky combined for the Russians. For me, U2, against the backdrop of the then musical climate (glam rock, rap, emerging grunge), became a revelation and a taste refresher, like pure spring water. It’s an amazing thing: the music is simple, vital, but extremely original. All the songs are different, all “sit on the ears”, are memorable, but they are remembered not as some kind of pop, but as a good aphorism in which humor and wisdom are intertwined. Frank Sinatra himself admired the voice of vocalist Paul Hewson, nicknamed Bono. What other recommendations are needed here?
U2 is a pure example of pure talent and talent. Of course, they had predecessors and analogues. Waterboys, the Smiths, REM - a lot of them from the guitar rock of the 80s. We didn't know a damn thing. That is me.
None of my friends liked U2 back then; for several years I listened to them in splendid isolation. Wide public opinion also ignored them: I saw very few U2 albums in recording studios, in pirate stalls, and on the old “vinyl” Gorbushka. Although the concert version of the song Pride was published in the USSR back in 1989. Yes, that's right: I'm holding a double Greenpeace record in my hands. Breakthrough, where she goes first. “Aprelevsky Order of Lenin record plant. 1989. Zak. 51. Circulation 350,000.” Pay attention to the last number. How many people heard the song? Zero reaction.
And then some strange trend began to creep in. In the mid-90s, urban youth, more or less fashionable, mostly students, began listening to U2. I don’t remember why my interest suddenly awoke; I suspect that the culprit is the video for the song One, which was published back in 1991 (album Achtung, Baby). Then it turned out that everyone was waiting for the new U2 album. It was released under the name Pop, and VHS tapes of the Pop Mart tour soon followed. And then a shift occurred in my head. If the records of the previous tour smacked of something kitsch and propaganda, then in Pop Mart it all reached the point of absurdity. It was not pop art or postmodern, but real kitsch. But in show business it’s like this: if you’ve done something pompous/large-scale, then your next achievement must be even larger-scale, otherwise people won’t understand. Financial pyramid. Plus Bono's dealings with politicians and philanthropists. Plus the fuss with Bono from the Nobel Committee, which suddenly decided that the artist deserved to be nominated for their Peace Prize.
In general, no one noticed how the quartet, once simple guys, a group without an image, turned into glamorous politicized clowns. It is typical that new U2 fans, when talking about the group, more often use the verb “see” than “hear”, and the noun “show” rather than, say, “song”, “concert” or, at worst, “sound”. And you should definitely go to their “show”, preferably to some pleasant European capital like Berlin. At the same time, grab some Sonderangebot and drink some beer. “This is such music, such, damn it, eternal youth!” At the same time, it is customary to speak about new albums with lukewarm approval, using the meaningless adjective “not bad.” And it’s better not to mention old albums at all. Why U2 was appreciated so late in our country and what is the point of listening to them now - I don’t understand. If anyone understands, let him write on the forum on the site, I will be extremely grateful. In general, I suspect that Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, a famous doctor, figured out such mass insanity a long time ago. In his story “The Ferment of Minds,” two people looked at a flock of crows. Passers-by also stopped and looked, trying to understand what the nature lovers saw. A huge crowd had gathered. And why, no one understood.
Nevertheless, I hope that the ferment of minds tonight at the Luzhniki Grand Sports Arena will make sense. I really hope so. I'm also a fan, after all.