U2: "Get On Your Boots"

How do you not completely detest a band like U2? They’ve redefined what it means to be the Biggest Band In The World on at least three different occasions, their lead singer is an annoying douche, and last year they released their second feature film in 3D. You simply don’t and can’t get bigger or louder or more obnoxious. At this level it’s inevitable: they’re gonna earn the ire of every music fan on the planet.

And so being a U2 fan in 2009 is quite unfashionable. Which is too bad, in a way, because it’s easy to forget that this is a good band, at times a very good band, one with not just a few stodgy classics under their belt but with a broad, varied, and generally excellent discography. Yeah, so they haven’t released good music in a while, all the more reason they deserve a comeback. Every time a new single lands I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’ll be the one—a single that is simple and enjoyable, not a throwback or a reinvention or anything mindblowing but just something decent, tolerable, a Good Song. One that changes public perception of the new U2 from “I hate these douchebags” to “they’re pretty okay” and, finally, one that incites enough interest to encourage some Brooklynite hipsters to throw Boy (1980) or War (1983) onto their iPods and think “these records are awesome.” They just need one fun single to break the barrier of smug laughter and eye-rolling, one little single to kickstart a full-blown comeback. I believe they’ve got it in them.

But “Get On Your Boots” is not that single. This track tries very hard to be cool and hip and edgy but it doesn’t seem like U2 have any real idea what cool or hip or edge even mean anymore. Is it really possible that the band—or Eno and Lanois, for that matter—is so out of touch? This is “indie rock” by (and I guess for?) people who only the vaguest sense of what that genre might sound like: processed crunch, drums all over the goddamn place, background hoots and hollers. This is U2’s half-hearted attempt to sound rough and messy, like claiming to have trashed your hotel room but really just leaving the bed unmade.