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U2, Globalization, and the Identity Trade

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U2, Globalization, and the Identity Trade

 

U2's Identity Trade: In Their Own Words...

 

An investigation into the band’s self-evaluations exposes bothersome inconsistencies, unconscious confessions, and imaginary authentications that could more accurately be interpreted as calculated selling points for pop culture.  For instance, in talking about the aptly named Pop album, The Edge offers an inadvertently deep confession, claiming, “It’s very difficult to pin this record down.  It’s not got any identity because it’s got so many” (all lyrics, album reviews, and interviews are taken from U2's official website).  In talking about the same album, Bono sums up the second, global period of the band’s existence in which “we’ve had to get the brightly colored wrapping paper right, because what’s underneath is not so pretty.”  

 

By purposefully suggesting that, beneath the “brightly colored wrapping paper,” Pop contains a complex mixture of identity and some sort of unsettlingly authentic music, Bono and The Edge consciously attempt to market their album to the global, authentic pop community, but the duality of the performers’ statements immediately discredits them.  The Edge’s confession suggests that, with Pop, the band consciously obscured or traded in their former identity for one of musical and cultural plurality, and in doing so, they actually prevented themselves from attaining any noticeable identity.

Why, then, would a very successful band trade their former national identity for a host of other global pop identities?   Likewise, Bono’s statement leads one to wonder, if they are capable of producing real, unadulterated political rock, for what reason would they decide to wrap it in brightly colored packaging?  This scrutiny of The Edge and Bono’s self-critiques supports the belief that one should not ignore everything that composers say about their own music, but rather it is important that those statements are never taken at face value.  Because U2 admitted that they no longer represented a specific (Irish) identity and consciously masked their music in commercial pop aesthetics, they lost authenticity as rock artists and as an Irish band.  As U2’s first publicly-acknowledged experiment with global commercialization, the unambiguously-named album Pop–in contrast to their vague stage and band names— received mediocre reviews and failed to gain acceptance on the global market.