Unpleasant questions arise ahead of U2’s Las Vegas show
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The group is preparing to surprise its richest fans
Some of those who were looking for entertainment in the Las Vegas nightlife last weekend were able to witness the filming of a video for a new U2 song, as well as catch a small concert that the group gave right in front of the Plaza Hotel. In the reaction to these events there was room for both joy and grumbling.
The street action with the participation of the main rock band on the planet could not fail to impress. Bono, The Edge, Adam and Larry moved along the street on a platform attached to a truck, cheerful Irish rock sounded, and people had a lot of fun. True, everything that happened was directly imbued with a feeling of total déjà vu.
In November 2004, Bono and Co. did much the same thing on the streets of New York while filming a video for the song All Because Of You. Office clerks and random passers-by in Manhattan almost went crazy with happiness, because everything that happened was a hundred percent surprise. In the evening, the band moved to Brooklyn and played a small concert in anticipation of the release of the album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.
Nineteen years later, there is no talk of a new album. The song Atomic City is something of a tease before a series of concerts in Las Vegas. The track itself is in the spirit of those U2s that long-time fans love. A recognizable guitar, a big hello to the retro sound in the spirit of The Clash and Blondie, in general… there were fun days.
At the moment, retro is also a marketing strategy for the famous quartet. The upcoming shows will be a kind of reimagining of the album Achtung Baby (1991), a record that at one time became a real breakthrough in the band’s career. Even before the pandemic, U2 were rebooting another of their classics, Joshua Tree, and dedicating an entire tour to it. Probably, all this looks like an attempt to once again sell something that has already been sold a long time ago. However, now such formulations are recognized as boorish, and instead they are advised to say “your own style of working with archives.”
The style of working with Achtung Baby promises to be terribly technological. This is justified, because the world tour dedicated to this album at one time brought the very idea of a rock show to a completely new level. Only the advent of large screens, combined with the ability to transmit images on them in real time, as well as a television station that allowed the group to broadcast live to people from different parts of the world, gave U2 hits some incredible volume, and since then the group has been playing all the time on multimedia.
The show in Vegas will also have a screen, or rather, a pixelated dome, which is the roof in the new Sphere hall. Thus, it is expected that the music and video will reach seventeen thousand viewers, literally and figuratively. However, this super experiment has its own not very pleasant flair. In fact, the group, which is also known for its fight against everything bad, including poverty, is participating in a fat business project of a large company that, in addition to Sphere, also owns the Madison Square Garden hall in New York. Moreover, this entire attraction is not going to be transported across countries and continents, but will be shown only to those who have money for a trip to Las Vegas.
In addition, for the first time, the band will not have Larry Mullen Jr. on drums, but an understudy. Larry, who essentially formed U2 in the late seventies, is undergoing rehabilitation after surgery (he was on stage during a small performance on the streets of Vegas, but only Bono’s voice was heard live, the music was recorded) and, apparently, does not have time to regain his form for the first concerts, which will take place at the end of September. And it already looks as if the interests of big business are more important than some drummer. In a situation like this, the upcoming shows must be uncannily good. Only in this way will musicians be able to drown out the noise of discontent and console themselves with the fact that everything that happened in Vegas will remain there.
Newspaper headline:
U2 rocks it in Vegas
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