Yes, I know that Bono is an idiot politically (as late as May this year he was hanging out with George W Bush at his ranch in Texas – need I say more?) but “The Joshua Tree” has always been one of my favorite albums, since those days back in Lahore when my brother and I used to rock to it, so I had to go to the U2 concert in Buffalo yesterday – it didn’t hurt that Beck opened the show (what a wonderfully modest guy).
Before the band appeared on stage, powerful words from a series of poems were projected onto a screen, starting with “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes. There were poems by Whitman, Pinsky, and Sandburg, but also by Lucille Clifton and Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye and “The Border: A Double Sonnet” by Alberto Rios. The discovery for me was Jamila Woods and her “Ghazal for White Hen Pantry.”
The film projection that continued through most of the concert was gorgeous, riveting. It spoke to the vastness and beauty of American landscapes and lingered fittingly on the faces of the indigenous peoples of this land. There was some preoccupation with the American flag, which I could have done without.
In typically confused Bono fashion, there was a tribute to women (to She Moves in Mysterious Ways) which started with the pictures of Sojourner Truth, bell hooks and Angela Davis. I have to confess I was moved. The pictures continued. Begum Rokeya who was a Bengali writer, educationist, feminist born in 1880, Wangari Maathai, Rosa Parks, Saffiyah Khan, Heather Heyer. My eyes welled up. But then guess who came next – Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. Broke the spell in a rather unpleasant way.
As far as the music, the band was spot-on (The Edge still got it) but Bono’s voice is gone, so much so that they’ve had to slightly reconfigure their songs in order to accommodate the cracking. But he’s a trooper and the encore was great – Elevation got everyone jumping again when it was close to midnight. So yeah, good music, some emotional moments, a fight between two drunk guys right next to us, and the thrill of sharing music from so long ago with my 17 year old daughter 🙂
