Shaun de Waal: International tour
What does it all mean? Besides the obvious live band footage (treated or untreated), the series of images flashing past on the giant video screen that is arguably the most essential part of U2’s PopMart concert is an almost bewildering cornucopia of pop/ art iconicity.
Perhaps it is unfair to want to analyse it, to wonder what it all adds up to, when the primary aim of PopMart is clearly to provide a great whizz-bang show – an objective met with flying colours (literally) at U2’s first South African show at Cape Town’s Green Point Stadium this week. And the fans certainly weren’t pondering the meaning of it all as they roared their approbation, punched the air e
cstatically or sang heartily along to U2’s back catalogue of tub-thumping hits.
But U2 as a band are predicated on their capacity to make meaning, to be significant in ways other than just providing a good time, though they unquestionably do that. Singer Bono’s on-stage encomium to Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Kader Asmal – who lived and worked in Ireland for decades and brought the band into the anti-apartheid fold – demonstrates this. U2 were one of the few bands during the years of oppression to donate their South African royalties to the anti-apartheid movement, and images of Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and so forth climax the show, illustrating their anthemic song One, a hymn to human interdependence – “We get to carry each other.”
So what does it mean that such images come after a plethora of art-pop signs, the band’s very faces and bodies having become part of the Warholised barrage? Shortly before he died, pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein reanimated his old comic-book paintings for p rojection at PopMart, and the late Keith Haring’s distinctive iconography has also been drafted into service. In the context of the surreal superm arket that is ostensibly PopMart, are they pointing to the overlap of commerce and culture, or are they just performing the usual postmodern gesture of voracious appropriation?
Perhaps such questions come to mind more readily because of the way U2 have adjusted their modus operandi since their blockbusting ZooTV tour of a few years back, one in which the media was multiplied and foregrounded. This concert, by comparison, despit e its grandiosity and eye-popping effects (a floating mothership-lemon, for heaven’s sake!), and the electronica-style reworking of some old songs , is straightforward rock’n’roll.
And the set list depends heavily on the surging numbers of their first decade – In the Name of Love, Where the Streets Have No Name, Sunday Bloody Sunday. After that portentous era, the band reinvented themselves (with the help of Brian Eno) and discover ed irony, which gave them a new life and a fresh significance for listeners easily tired by their earlier Christian-flavoured message-rock. They f ound a new and more interesting way to make music on their Achtung Baby and Zooropa albums, and the ZooTV tour made brilliant use of offbeat media tactics (such as phoning world leaders from the stage, or inviting Salman Rushdie on to it).
But PopMart – for all its superb entertainment value – seems a step back on to the soapbox, and one that may subvert itself. The irony up there on the world’s biggest video screen (next to the world’s biggest swizzle stick) seems no more than a jokey sid eshow to their emotive sincerity. Images such as that of a perfume named Paranoia clearly satirise consumer culture, but can U2 have their cake an d eat it too? Is the message still transmitted by all this media? Or is heartfelt meaningfulness just another sales-tool in the cultural supermarket?
U2’s PopMart will be on tour at the Johannesburg Stadium tomorrow, Saturday March 21.