Picking the Stairway to Heaven
[I discovered through a comment that I’d inadvertently copped the title for yesterday’s post from a book on this topic: Tim Stevens’ Pop Goes the Church: Should the Church Engage Pop Culture? I’ve not had a chance to look at it myself, but if you’re interested in going deeper on this topic, you might check it out.]
I can’t shake the feeling that somewhere, in some U2 performance or other that I’ve seen in person or on DVD, Bono instructs The Edge to “take us to church” as he heads into his solo. I can’t now find it, though I’ll admit I haven’t tried as hard as I might: it’s one of those useful illusions I’d prefer not to have shattered. For whether Bono has said it or not, the sound of Edge’s ringing guitar is used time and again in U2 songs to shift the register from the mundane to the transcendent. When The Edge is playing we’re always, in Robert Palmer’s resonant phrase, in “the church of the sonic guitar.”
Much as the stepwise soaring vocal lines of Bach’s and Handel’s sacred music were meant to lead our hearts and spirits heavenward, so the repeated ascending arpeggios issuing from The Edge’s Gibson Explorer are the musical corollary of climbing the stairway to heaven. (Indeed, the word “arpeggio” derives from the Italian word for harp, that most stereotypical instrument in the heavenly orchestra.) As The Edge described it in a 1982 interview, “I like a nice ringing sound on guitar, and most of my chords I find two strings and make them ring the same note, so it’s almost like a 12-string sound.” One might argue that the sound of R.E.M.’s guitarist, Peter Buck, could be described in very similar terms: chiming, shimmering, ringing. Coming of age after the brush-clearing of punk, both men are arguably more rhythm than traditional lead players, more colorists than typical guitar heroes, ensemble players first and foremost. But to me at least, the feel of the two players is quite different.
To begin, Buck’s runs tend not to soar in the way The Edge’s do; The Edge once suggested that the lousy bass end of his first guitar forced him up the fretboard, but whatever the reason, Buck doesn’t typically dwell in the high frequencies where The Edge has pitched his tent. Then too, there’s a joyous exuberance about The Edge’s playing, reflected in his bodily presence on stage. Whereas according to Bono, “When Peter [Buck] plays guitar, there’s a strong sense of fuck off that comes from his side of the stage. And you feel that he wants to be in a band because he likes what they do… but that’s all.” Bono means this as praise, not damnation. And finally, even though R.E.M.’s first Athens, Georgia, rehearsal and performance space was St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, there’s no religious text or subtext to Buck’s playing. Even the band’s highest-charting U.S. hit, “Losing My Religion,” isn’t really a spiritual song—singer Michael Stipe has called it “a classic obsession pop song.”
The Edge’s sound crept into American churches not just because he’s such a prevalent influence on younger players: he’s there because his sound is both implicitly and explicitly spiritual. As fcrp reader Tim commented after yesterday’s post, “The praise band at my friend’s youth church has three lead guitarists, all of whom play single-note lines drenched in delay”—The Edge’s signature style. “There is probably no more epic or inspiring of a guitar style,” Tim writes. Just as important, I think, U2′s The Joshua Tree represented an important crossover between secular and sacred pop music, and the sound that The Edge patented on that album became, by association, the sound of a kind of soft-sell, secularized Christian praise music. For better or worse, U2′s Christianity is so low-key as to be practically invisible most of the time, and certainly “overlook-able”: easily assimilable into a broadly humanist spirituality that would offend almost no one.
In fact, not to get essentialist—but in the interest of time and space—one track from The Joshua Tree is almost singly responsible: the album’s second #1 single, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The song strikes a perfect balance between the sacred and the profane; Bono, who writes most of the band’s lyrics, describes it not as a song of faith, but a song of doubt. (For his part The Edge, rather hilariously, has called it “‘Eye of the Tiger’ played by a reggae band.”) “Song of doubt” maybe, but doubt that a person of faith can certainly understand. The song closes with an explicitly Christian image, though one the singer isn’t entirely prepared to accept:
I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colours will bleed into one
Bleed into one.
But yes, I’m still running.
You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame
Oh my shame, you know I believe it.
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for….
Doubt notwithstanding, the song symbolically replaced “Kumbaya” in many churches and youth groups in the late 1980s, and with it, the sound of The Edge’s guitar snuck into church sanctuaries.
That’s the guitar timbre and style around which contemporary Christian praise music has been organized: The Edge’s guitar and, as my friend Kevin Holm-Hudson smartly added, the chord progressions from “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Purple Rain.” From those bare bones, a considerable body of work has grown up, and arguably, in the process, the U2 influence, apart from the Edge’s timbre, has largely been left behind. But rock-inflected contemporary Christian praise music is founded on an interesting paradox: U2 tried through their music to bring the church to pop audiences; the Church, in return, has tried to woo pop audiences in via the heavenly peals of The Edge’s guitar.
Whoa, Thanks for the shout-out! I agree with your point about “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” “sneaking” The Edge into contemporary Christian music, but for me an even tighter parallel comes from “With or Without You.” The “chiming” guitar entry The Edge makes after the second verse is hugely influential, plus the steady-eighths bass line (with the “Don’t Stop Believin’” chord progression, I might add!). Even the Bono-bridge-buildup has been nicked:
Bono: “And you give yourself away… And you give yourself away…”
Matt and Beth Redman (from the song “Blessed Be Your Name”): “You give and take away… You give and take away…”
I have even heard church bands meld the two: “You give and take away… You give and take away… And You give… And You give… And You give and take away…”
Excellent stuff–Looking forward to seeing where you go with this. Have you been following the similar thread unfolding right now on the SMT pop-analysis listserv?
Thanks, Kevin, but I got nowhere to go from here: I’m no musicologist, and you know much more about this than I do!
At the concert in East Lansing two nights ago, I also heard Bono say, “Take us to church,” before Edge’s solo in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Interesting to see the allusion again.
P.S. What an amazing band live. It was my first U2 concert, and I look forward to many more!