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"What I like about pop music, and why I'm still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music." -- Bono, 2004 |
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"What I like about pop music, and why I'm still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music." -- Bono, 2004 |
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My Fan Year - #1
@U2,
January 08, 2005
Here's my New Year's resolution: I'll use this space every week to talk about life as a U2 fan. I won't do what Matt does in "Off the Record." I won't talk about the most recent developments in the U2niverse. Instead I'll talk about stuff like hearing Achtung Baby for the first time, or about what it's been like to write for this site for all these years, or what strange circumstances fandom has put me in. I'd like to do this now, in 2005, every week of 2005 in fact, for a couple of different reasons. For one -- as you may have read by now --this is the big blowout fireworks-and-iPods @U2 @10 Anniversary Year. If there was ever a time to go all nostalgic and sentimental, this is it. But the other reason is that after this year, I'm turning in my badge as a Professional U2 Fan. In this set of columns I'll try to write everything about U2 I still want to say, and then that'll be the end of it. Why now? I don't know; the time just seems right. There's other stuff I gotta go do. * * * One thing I'd like to do with every column is talk about one song in depth. Since this is the first column, I'll start with the first song I fell for: "The Fly." As many times as I've listened to it, I've never noticed until today the paradox in the lyric. Almost every line starts "It's no secret" -- which generally means "It's obvious" or "Everyone knows." But take a look at that first line -- are the stars falling from the sky? And does everyone know this? How about that idea that a secret is something you tell one other person? Some secrets are never told to anyone at all. If you like, you can pick fights with the whole first verse. In the second verse, things get a bit more personal, and tougher to argue with. Ambition bites the nails of success, does it? There aren't a lot of us in the position to know that. Again, though, it's no secret. This time I believe him -- if only because it isn't a secret anymore. A secret is something told to one other person, and here the Fly is telling on himself to ten million and counting. So that's why it's no secret at all. It's odd to listen to "The Fly" on Achtung Baby after hearing it live on the Elevation Tour. It sounds so slow and clumsy. It's a sprawling mess -- not necessarily a bad thing in the world of rock'n'roll; the chaos of the arrangement seems appropriate for the subject matter. But how is it that it could take a band ten years to learn to perform one of their own songs well? © @U2/Pancella, 2005.
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