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"Maybe that is the step forward on this record, to be able to have the freedom to have humour sitting alongside songs that are deadly earnest, and the two actually balance out each other." -- Edge, on All That You Can't Leave Behind |
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"Maybe that is the step forward on this record, to be able to have the freedom to have humour sitting alongside songs that are deadly earnest, and the two actually balance out each other." -- Edge, on All That You Can't Leave Behind |
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Like a Song: Where The Streets Have No Name
@U2,
March 19, 2008
[Ed. note: This is the seventeenth in a series of personal essays by the @U2 staff about songs and/or albums that have had great meaning or impact in our lives.]
 On Feb. 1st, 2006, I moved from my hometown of St. Louis, Mo., to Cincinnati, Ohio. I moved to join an "intentional Christian community" -- well, that's one way to refer to it, anyhow. I found that even when I used neutral words to describe the place, my friends would look at me funny. "So...it's a bunch of people living together and sharing meals and praying a lot?" they said. "Whatever you do, Angela, don't drink the Kool-Aid." Since it didn't matter what I called it, I gave up on trying to make it sound safe and took to calling my new residence the Artsy-Fartsy Jesus Freak Crazy Commune Cult House. (The "Artsy-Fartsy" is in loving tribute to the large number of painters, photographers, musicians and puppeteers involved in the community the house is part of.) The AFJFCCC House used to be a Roman Catholic rectory. The community that owns it now bought a whole set of Catholic real estate -- a convent, a church, and the aforementioned priest's house -- from the archdiocese; these places had been vacant since a parish had been closed. The rectory is old and spacious, designed to house a passel of priests; I lived there with as many as eight other people, families and singles. I had a room and a bathroom to myself, but I ate breakfasts and dinners in common with my housemates. Of an evening there'd be spontaneous gatherings for movies or favorite TV shows; in good weather we'd hang out on the back deck with music shuffling out of an iPod. Many of our neighbors were folks who had lived in the AFJFCCC House or the convent building before buying or renting close by (something I've done myself; I now live half a block away). So if, say, we had a party out on the back deck, friends would amble over, lured by the tunes wafting out to the street or the smell of bratwurst on the barbecue. The weekend after I moved in there was a Super Bowl party. Among the people who showed up was a guy named Chad. I overheard him talking excitedly about seeing U2 in concert. I was looking forward to getting to know him because, hey, it's always great to find fellow fans you can gush about U2 with. Not long afterward -- just a few weeks -- I heard Chad was in the hospital. And days after that, in mid-March, this husband and father of two little boys had died, and the whole community was in shock. Friends and family gathered from across the state and across the country for his memorial service. It was held in the beautiful old church next door to the AFJFCCC House. The call went out beforehand for help cleaning up and setting up the church building for the memorial. A group of people were going to gather in the morning of the day of the service to get the place looking beautiful. Not having known Chad, but feeling like I would have liked to, I wandered in. The light streamed through vividly colored stained glass. Plaster angels, some broken, some whole, were perched atop pillars and resting in corners. As I walked up the aisle to where small gatherings of friends were sweeping and dusting and unstacking chairs, I heard the deep tones of an organ. Before I could glance instinctively up to the choir loft (where an honest-to-goodness pipe organ sat unused and magnificent) there came the cascade of guitar tones that I will never call familiar, no matter how many times I hear them. And then the kick-start insistence of the drums, and the racing-pulse heartbeat of the bass, and the ache of the voice trying desperately to say what only music, out of all our gifts, can: I want to run I want to hide I want to tear down the walls That hold me inside I just stood there and listened. I don't think I'd ever heard a U2 song in a church building before -- certainly not cranked up, and certainly not in the morning before a service saying goodbye. I love old church buildings, but they are so often solemn places; I wasn't exactly expecting to hear a beloved U2 song reverberating in the Gothic stillness. But it worked, somehow. The sunlight was broken into colors by the stained glass as the chords were broken into arpeggios by Edge; the vast space, like a concert hall, was filled with the sound, yet nearly empty of people; the ache of loss pushed up right against the wonder of hope. I had never before experienced how a song could be so suited to a space and time and circumstance -- except I say that every time I hear "Streets." I want to reach out And touch the flame Where the streets have no name For days the AFJCCC House was packed with people talking, praying, tapping out blog entries on laptops, listening to U2 songs on constant shuffle on Chad's U2 iPod. "Grace" seemed to come on a lot. There was grace here -- mixed in, mixed up with the sadness. I felt in "Streets," with its background in Bono and Ali's time spent in Ethiopia during the famine, a response to a tragic situation that resonated with me. I was so new to town, I didn't really know this community, yet there we all were together in mourning. You want to respond any way you can. I want to feel Sunlight on my face See the dust cloud disappear Wthout a trace How can such an incredible song come out of tragedy? Grace makes beauty out of ugly things. There's an exchange going on here, death for life. You can take raw emotional material and shape it into something useful and good. And true. Art, or creativity, is transformative, and the deeper and sadder the source it's drawing from, the higher and nobler the result can be. I want to take shelter from the poison rain Where the streets have no name... We're still building, then burning down love... And when I go there I go there with you It's all I can do Compassion is key, I think. The Latin is "com-passio" -- it means "suffering with," a coming together to be with each other, even in -- especially in -- sad times. You can learn a lot about a community by the way it mourns. I saw the folks in and around the AFJFCCC House stand up to death, face it square. I saw them hold on when anyone needed to cry, and heard them play U2 songs loud in their church. Knowing they could do all this helped reinforce my decision to move there. These were the sort of people I could picture myself wanting to be around for a long time. The city's a flood And our love turns to rust We're beaten and blown by the wind Trampled in dust I'll show you a place High on a desert plain Where the streets have no name "There is a crack in everything," Leonard Cohen sings. "That's how the light gets in." I've never been one to think that the world of ATMs and billboards and breakfast cereal is the only one to be had, but when a death occurs, the cracks in the ordinary grow a little wider, and more light comes spilling in. What seemed important before grows faded and pale; what seemed hardly worth noticing before leaves a shadow like a scar in the brightness. I've got lots of memories of "Streets" -- roadtrips where it started playing as a remarkable landscape came into view, concerts where joy shone out of every face as the lights blazed on, the simple delight of listening to it with friends. The song has acquired new levels of meaning over the years -- it was a rallying cry on the Vertigo tour, it was an offering when Bono recited Psalm 116 before it ("What can I give back to God...?") on the Elevation tour. But in the church before Chad's memorial service and now always and everywhere, it felt like, feels like, an invitation to that place the light is coming from. © @U2/Pancella, 2008.
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