No Saints Here

So: have you seen the video for U2 & Green Day's "The Saints Are Coming" yet? I have. And it's another resounding toll in the death knell of U2's artistic credibility.

(Let's get the song out of the way first: It's good, not great, another example of U2 trying desperately to come across as a band that can really Rock, rather than just being the purveyors of uplifting church / grocery-store "rock." It's not embarassing, however, and Bono's voice sounds good with Billy Joe's, so there's no real reason to complain from a musical perspective.)

If you were too lazy to click that big old YouTube link and give up three minutes of your life, here's the premise: Footage of New Orleans, flooded after Hurricane Katrina, is altered to add U.S. Army planes and vehicles swarming the city en masse to rescue survivors, distribute food, etc., while a news ticker scrolls "TROOPS REROUTED FROM IRAQ TO NEW ORLEANS." The last shot of the video is of a hand-painted sign on a telephone pole: "NOT AS SEEN ON TV."

Now, as a concept, this is kind of cute: throw a backhanded slap at the failure of the Bush administration to bail out New Orleans by reminding them of one of the real costs of deploying our soldiers in a worthless war. But there are a couple of problems, and they're interwoven. One problem is that this footage is the video's entire schtick: it's a short song, so screen time is limited, but there's no development of this theme, no narrative arc, just shot after limp shot (often with somewhat embarassing visual effects) of the same kind of rescue operation, over and over. In fact, many of the shots aren't even of Army troops being used to do anything productive; they're just jet fighters flying over the Superdome, the Mississippi, etc., doing nothing except appearing triumphant. Those images strike a disturbing tone, sending a mixed message that seems almost celebratory as opposed to elegaic; they're shots that have always been shorthand for "The American military is bad-ass!" and their context here isn't strong enough to override that message. It's meant to play critically, but it just winds up looking like disaster porn: Weepy images of destruction, juxtaposed with images of American might that play on the desire of Americans to see their military do some good. It's President Bush in a cowboy hat at Ground Zero, and the final shot comes too late after those images to override their mixed significance.

It's that mixed tone that results in a lack of strength and focus that damns the whole video. The simple fact is that the destruction of New Orleans is one of the biggest open wounds on the American psyche of the last fifty years, and if you're going to make a statement about it, you need to do the immensity of the event justice: a watered-down, backhanded, catty swipe isn't going to do anybody any good. Why do the images of the people responsible for this tragedy -- and make no mistake, it's the fault of people, not nature -- ever appear in the video? The question of why we didn't help on a logistical level is addressed -- our resources were committed to Iraq -- but the question of why we failed on the social, moral, and emotional level is skimmed over entirely. Again, there's not much screen time to play with -- just a little over three minutes -- but a full minute at the start is wasted on an egregious, self-important, black-and-white The Artists In The Studio Record This Touching Music sequence, in which Billy Joe sings with eyes squinted shut in Artistic Intensity and Bono transparently betrays his need to have his vocals mixed much higher than anyone else's on the track. Why do U2 and Green Day even have to appear in this video? What artistic statement is made through their presence, other than a self-congratulatory impulse to connect themselves to this daring and visionary political statement? The military-rescues-the-survivors footage could've been shown during this minute, freeing up another two-thirds of the video to engage in more imaginative, more focused attacks on the apathy and toxic culture that caused this disaster. And don't even get me started on including the live-performance footage recorded at the opening game of the NFL season: Aesthetically, it doesn't even begin to fit, looking for all the world like a car commercial cut into the news reportage.

It's not like they'd be taking any kind of commercial risk by making a powerful statement of blame. Green Day are the most popular American rock band in the world right now, and they have goodwill and political capital to burn: hitching to their wagon was a smart move on U2's part, but why squander the opportunity? The answer is obvious, and it's the number-one reason why I honestly believe that U2 will never record anything truly surprising or important for as long as they are still together: Because Bono refuses to offend any senators. Bono is a political lobbyist now: he is in every way a part of a political machine, forced to play by its rules, rather than exerting his own rules from a position of power outside the system. Bono needs every vote he can get for his AIDS relief agenda in the U.S. Senate, and he's not willing to step on any Republican toes to do it, even if most of the bastards responsible for New Orleans are Republican flunkies (and the culture of entitlement and disregard for the lower-class that made it possible in the first place is largely a Republican invention). Back when he first started working for Jubilee 2000 in the late 90s, he made a lot of noise about using the power of U2 to further his goals: He said he'd take the band into any district where the Congressman wouldn't support debt relief and play a show, urging the audience to vote against the representative. That never happened, and it's never going to happen: with this video he was given the opportunity to make a sharp and directed attack on a fundamental force of badness in this world, and he walked away from it in order to avoid offending the powerful and influential people in his e-mail address book, even though politically and culturally they're at their lowest ebb of power and influence.

I'm tired of being the petulant fan who bitches that their favorite band won't do things their way, and what I'm about to say is obviously a cliche that those fans always spout, whether they're angry about ticket prices being high or synthesizers replacing guitars or artwork decisions they don't like. But I truly believe that U2 are betraying the ideals they've sold to their audience for years, and are asking their fans to follow them into territory where they cozy up to, and make life easier for, the kinds of people their music and politics have always rejected. Musically, they're as compelling as they've ever been -- I do sincerely love their last album -- but culturally and socially, it's not going too far to say that they're becoming almost poisonously apathetic. I know that they think about these things, and that Bono believes that the problem of Africa is bigger than the United States culture war. But it weakens his moral authority to merely pretend to engage with that issue when he prioritizes something else above it: It would have been better for him to not talk about Hurricane Katrina at all then to engage with it in such an insultingly simple-minded, pussy-footing and ineffective way. He's making me respect him less every time he opens his mouth, when I want nothing more than to be able to back him up on his goals. It really has become a classic case of the process crushing the message, and something has to change.