Tracks
U2/Green Day: "The Saints Are Coming"
(2006)
By Conrad Amenta | 29 January 2008
U2 and Green Day team to release an out-of-nowhere single benefiting victims of Hurricane Katrina and liberal guilt complexes everywhere, nowhere near the anniversary of that disaster. Why review it? Well, because it’s not so much a blip on the commercial rock landscape as a minor pop-cultural Event, a calculated spectacle on a stage so large the performance can’t define its own limitations and, thus, is thoroughly, mind-warpingly fascinating.
“The Saints Are Coming” develops out of a miasma of its own historical blindness and a meat-handed surgery of tricky sociopolitical issues. It reduces these unsettling, complex elements to a laser beam purity of focus that is one monumental riff, like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on mescaline. Fresh on the heels of the Democrats’ Congressional and Senatorial victory, the song is designed to be the B-side to American troops rocking out to “Fire Water Burn” as they invade Baghdad during Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, a chance for academics and ex-war supporters to jump up and down, hold up their fists in meaningless symbolism, to resist something or other while feeling good about padding their CD collections. It’s all these horrible things and still, for the briefest of moments after That Riff rises with leviathan urges, can shake you out of the doldrums of actual, immediate personal concerns and make you think that, yeah, it’s time to…um…time to… “The saints! Are cooo-ming! The saints! Are coming!”
“The Saints Are Coming” is best enjoyed with its accompanying video. Armstrong, with stone-faced seriousness, intones the opening refrain of the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” over the Edge’s (admittedly beautiful and now familiar) oversaturated guitar. When That Riff explodes under our collective ass like a bunker buster, there really couldn’t be any image other than CGI Tomahawk helicopters and stealth bombers screaming over footage of a devastated New Orleans and the banner “U.S. Iraq troops redeployed to New Orleans.” The sentiment is awesome because it’s so wrong and yet so appropriate at the same time -- the only way to counter the waste of using a billion dollar plane to fight a complicated and unpopular war is to use the same plane to drop supplies to the disembodied concept of New Orleans citizens who’d surely rather have had a school bus and a bottle of water. Maybe even that’s beside the point. Katrina is far enough behind us now that we’ve entered a time demanding analysis and introspection, not a return to raw emotion. The pure size of the gesture here is catastrophically entertaining, despite the enormity and frequency of its willful errors.
Of course, the song isn’t good. I don’t suspect anyone reading this thought it would be. But is it something that needs to be heard just for its unapologetic bombast and commercial audacity, like two icebergs of mutual disaster (not unlike the two disasters of Katrina and Iraq) spectacularly colliding on the mainstream’s horizon? Lord, yes. America’s guilty feelings yield many things, and this benefit has learned to multitask.
“The Saints Are Coming” develops out of a miasma of its own historical blindness and a meat-handed surgery of tricky sociopolitical issues. It reduces these unsettling, complex elements to a laser beam purity of focus that is one monumental riff, like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on mescaline. Fresh on the heels of the Democrats’ Congressional and Senatorial victory, the song is designed to be the B-side to American troops rocking out to “Fire Water Burn” as they invade Baghdad during Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, a chance for academics and ex-war supporters to jump up and down, hold up their fists in meaningless symbolism, to resist something or other while feeling good about padding their CD collections. It’s all these horrible things and still, for the briefest of moments after That Riff rises with leviathan urges, can shake you out of the doldrums of actual, immediate personal concerns and make you think that, yeah, it’s time to…um…time to… “The saints! Are cooo-ming! The saints! Are coming!”
“The Saints Are Coming” is best enjoyed with its accompanying video. Armstrong, with stone-faced seriousness, intones the opening refrain of the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” over the Edge’s (admittedly beautiful and now familiar) oversaturated guitar. When That Riff explodes under our collective ass like a bunker buster, there really couldn’t be any image other than CGI Tomahawk helicopters and stealth bombers screaming over footage of a devastated New Orleans and the banner “U.S. Iraq troops redeployed to New Orleans.” The sentiment is awesome because it’s so wrong and yet so appropriate at the same time -- the only way to counter the waste of using a billion dollar plane to fight a complicated and unpopular war is to use the same plane to drop supplies to the disembodied concept of New Orleans citizens who’d surely rather have had a school bus and a bottle of water. Maybe even that’s beside the point. Katrina is far enough behind us now that we’ve entered a time demanding analysis and introspection, not a return to raw emotion. The pure size of the gesture here is catastrophically entertaining, despite the enormity and frequency of its willful errors.
Of course, the song isn’t good. I don’t suspect anyone reading this thought it would be. But is it something that needs to be heard just for its unapologetic bombast and commercial audacity, like two icebergs of mutual disaster (not unlike the two disasters of Katrina and Iraq) spectacularly colliding on the mainstream’s horizon? Lord, yes. America’s guilty feelings yield many things, and this benefit has learned to multitask.