After lighting up Levi’s Stadium last May and marking the 30th anniversary of their seminal album, The Joshua Tree, Irish modern rock megastars U2 return to San Jose on their Experience + Innocence Tour. The run of shows comes on the heels of their latest album, 2017’s Songs of Experience. The album features a song titled “American Soul.” Fans of Kendrick Lamar’s will recognize the track as a fleshed-out version of “XXX”—his collaboration with the Dublin rockers, which appeared on his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 full-length, Damn. The band plays two nights, Monday and Tuesday. (NV)

U2
Mon, Tue, 8pm, $41+
SAP Center, San Jose

On the way home from Levi’s Stadium last night, my mind was swimming as I mulled over exactly what I made of everything I’d just witnessed.

Irish alternative pioneers U2 had performed to a totally stoked crowd at Levi’s Stadium, running through a litany of arena-rattling anthems like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” off of their 1987 hit record The Joshua Tree.

San Jose’s paper of record, I knew, would have a review for the following day’s edition. I couldn’t see how, in the time allotted between the end of the show and the early morning deadline, that such a review would ever serve as anything more than a surface-level recap of a performance so bombastic and run through with political implications—both overt and far more subtle.

I was right.

The performance itself served, in my mind at least, to verify the sentiment of U2’s millions of fans across the globe—they do, in fact, rock—and to quash the vitriol and dismissal of Bono- and Edge-haters. At 57 and 55, respectably, the lead singer and guitarist have still got it.

THE JOSHUA TREE: Fans were into it at U2 at Levi’s Stadium. Photo by Greg Ramar.

Bono belted out all the hits on pitch and with emotive inflection. And I was reminded that in 1987, The Edge’s shimmering, effects-heavy sound was indeed a new and innovative approach to the guitar. Using the available technology, The Edge carved out a novel sound that would go on to influence a generation of players.

And speaking of technology, when you’re the “biggest band in the world,” it makes sense, perhaps, that you would splurge on what had to have been one of the world’s biggest screens. The massive display was deployed to great, and often moving, effect—as on “Where The Streets Have No Name,” which featured a steady rolling shot of some a lonesome desert highway populated only by telephone poles, scrubby brush, wind-whipped sand and the occasional lonesome drifter.

That was the good part. But there was plenty for the bad column.

Some of it was logistical. People complained of sluggish lines and poor traffic flow inside and outside of the stadium. I personally have to wonder whether any concert that large would be able to dodge complaints like these:

@LevisStadium Did you lose the memo that you were hosting #U2TheJoshuaTree2017? Unprepared for crowds for food drink swag & exiting #fail

— Tara R Wood (@taraRwood) May 18, 2017

There was also the flubbed intro to “With or Without You.” I’d say the blame for that should be aimed at the sound team, as the introductory backing track that leads off that song was played at a drastically lower volume than the band’s instruments and it was clear that The Edge and bassist Adam Clayton were having a bit of trouble picking up the drum machine beat in their monitors.

But I have to believe that some of the most cringeworthy moments from Wednesday night’s show had less to do with technical difficulties.

After finally wading through the slow-motion queue, and walking the long way around to my seat on the opposite end of the stadium—observing the punishing concession and merch lines the whole way—I arrived in my section to find a series of poems scrolling down the massive screen looming over the stage.

Two of these verses stick out in particular: “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Puerto Rican poet and playwright Pedro Pietri, and “Wingfoot Lake” by African-American poet and essayist Rita Dove. Both poems deal with what it means live as a poor and disenfranchised person of color in America.

Now, as a white cis male, privileged enough to have been helped through college by his parents—and to have used my education to land a job that grants me free access to such in-demand entertainment spectacles as this U2 concert—I try not to act like I know what it means to be a poor, disenfranchised person of color in this country. I try not to act like I know anything about that experience because, frankly, I just don’t. But also, I do my best to keep my trap shut when it comes to topics like those addressed in “Puerto Rican Obituary” and “Wingfoot Lake,” because in the struggle for civil rights, context matters—and the speaker matters.

HUH? What was up with those poems anyway? Photo by Greg Ramar.

And even while U2 were ostensibly allowing the words of Pietri and Dove to do the talking, I had to wonder: who is really speaking here? And, furthermore, if I don’t know a damn thing about what it means to grow up poor and disenfranchised and discriminated against in America, what the hell does a group of white rock stars from Ireland know about the struggle?

I’m not here to rip U2. That’s cliché. And I’m certainly not here to rip their fans—I count myself among them. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of why some find the band so offensive.

Over the course of the last 18 hours, as I’ve rolled everything around in my head, I’ve come again and again to this: Bono, The Edge, and everyone else up on that stage are all great musicians, and their heart is likely in the right place, but it may be their overall inoffensiveness that makes them so off-putting to many.

It all seems so low-stakes for Bono to make his generalized appeals for world peace while wearing intentionally distressed designer clothing. It not only rings hollow coming from the mouth of a man of such privilege, it can even feel a bit like a commercial calculation—especially when considering how Bono hedges his political proclamations.

Sure, the band played a humorous clip from the 1950s TV show Trackdown, which featured a snake-oil salesman named “Trump” promising to ward of the end times by building a wall around an entire town. But again, context matters, and the speaker matters as well.

Bono wasn’t directly denouncing Donald Trump. He was allowing a clip from a campy Western TV show to do the talking—effectively putting at least a bit of distance between the implication of the snippet of video and the way he actually feels.

And how exactly does Bono feel about Trump? It’s hard to say. When the singer did pipe up on politics, he made an appeal for “the party of Lincoln” and the “party of Kennedy” to come together—saying that if we could just make our way to “higher ground” we might find “common ground.”

Sigh.

Say what you will about the anti-Trump rant Father John Misty made at WXPN’s XPoNential Music Fest last year. To be sure, both singers might be classified as suffering from varying degrees of White-Savior-itis, but for Josh Tillman (a.k.a., Father John), the stakes were a bit higher. He actually stopped his set, sat down and attempted to process his feelings on Trump in real time.

He called our current Commander in Chief an “entertaining tyrant,” drawing cheers as well as jeers from the audience, who had paid good money to see him and others perform. He put himself out there. And then he doubled down.

“Do we think that our hilarious tyrant is going to be met with a hilarious revolution that is won by hilarious revolutionaries?” Tillman asked the crowd.

But I’m not here to tout Tillman for asking a rhetorical question incredulously. It’s just that it leads me to what I think may be the central question:

What do we want of our entertainers? Do we want them to be thoughtful individuals, critical of groupthink—willing to challenge us to be thoughtful ourselves? Or do we want them to pacify us with pithy, meaningless aphorisms and wordless choruses, which seem scientifically designed to accommodate inoffensive stadium chant-alongs?

BEAUTIFUL DAY: Ah… we’re just salty music critics. The fans loved it! Photo by Greg Ramar.

Check out photos from the show here.

It is only appropriate that U2 kicked off the first U.S. date of its latest North American tour with a sold-out crowd of devotees at SAP Center on Monday, including members of the San Francisco Giants, the Rev. Cecil Williams from Glide Church and big names in tech.

No other band is more closely aligned with Silicon Valley tech giants and U2’s inspirational songs from over three decades are undoubtedly good enough to make the unofficial reverend outfielder Hunter Pence jump in praise (that, he did, with Giants manager Bruce Bochy and teammate Ryan Vogelsong standing nearby). Count on a few new Bono-inspired startup slogans jotted on after party napkins, too.

But even with that social cachet, U2 continues to push the limits of arena-sized performances, this time doing its best to make the 17,000-capacity SAP Center feel like an intimate music venue. On Monday, it felt like a club gig compared to the band’s last Bay Area outing, the massive, record-breaking U2 360° Tour at Oakland Coliseum back in 2011.

PHOTO GALLERY: U2 At SAP Center

In San Jose, the band utilized an innovative setup for more than two hours with a large stage at the north end of the arena floor that was linked with a runway to a smaller stage at the south end. Above the mid-section, giant LED boards projected massive video and animation visuals.

Alternating from each stage throughout the night, fans on opposing ends of the stadium were offered a unique perspective, although it seems somewhere near half court is probably best for this show. The sequences with the LED screen were stunning, especially when Bono and the Edge climbed a platform behind the images, allowing Bono to interact with an animated streetscape and later hold the Edge in his giant hand.

The Edge. Photo by Brian Kirksey.

Musically, it was a night of nostalgia on multiple levels, first with an emphasis on songs from the band’s 2014 album Songs of Innocence, which was inspired by the band’s formative years. They started with the first single from that album, “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone),” and then an unexpected pick, U2’s first single ever “Out of Control,” before Bono introduced bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen and the Edge by their Dublin neighborhoods.

Bono set the tone in the first break, riffing on the tour’s iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE theme and asking the crowd: “Can you still experience innocence after all of these years?”

That’s not always an easy question with U2. At this point, multiple generations can claim U2 origin stories; the musical bookmarks from their past that brought them out on a Monday night to sing along in near-religious fervor to the group’s biggest hits.

At the same time, the band had the audience questioning: Where is our innocence after Ferguson and during the AIDS crisis? What have we learned from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the conflict in Ireland? Can we become global citizens? What is magic and what is a trick?

Perhaps, that’s what U2 does best. In the wake of thousands of glowing cell phones and selfie attempts, it’s a band that can still insert a little humanity, charity and mystery into the rock ’n’ roll juggernaut. On Monday, it was nostalgic and refreshing—and it felt a little innocent—all at once.

U2 performs again on May 19 at SAP Center before continuing its North American tour.