‘God Part II’: when U2 indulgently picked up the legacy of John Lennon
The relationship U2 have with humour is like their relationship with humility. It’s not often there, and when it is, it’s completely unintentional. Fair play to the lads; they know their brand and don’t often stray from their brand of blinding, white-knuckle sincerity. However, if you are stuck for an evening and feel like a laugh, sit down with a pizza and watch their hysterical 1988 documentary Rattle & Hum.
Give a hundred writers rooms a hundred years, and they couldn’t come up with a more needle-sharp skewering of rock star egos than Bono and the lads did without even knowing it. There are few cutaway interview bits in The Office that are funnier than Larry Mullen Jr discussing Elvis movies with the furrow-browed reverence of a Joyce scholar. In those movies, he says, “He wasn’t just a car salesman; he was a car salesman who loved to play guitar, and I really related to that”. A genuine inspiration to all.
It’s not just the Spinal Tap level of rock pompousness on show, though. There is actually some decent music to be found in amongst the yuks. The film documents the tour supporting the release of The Joshua Tree, so some of the footage of the band in full flight is genuinely breathtaking. A curtain-raising cover of The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ goes surprisingly hard, and their performance of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ complete with Bono’s infamous “fuck the revolution” speech, is just absurdly compelling no matter your thoughts on the band.
What we have here is a mix of the two. On the upside, ‘God Part II’ is a fairly agreeable bass-led groove with a typically committed Bono vocal. It comes alive around 70 seconds in, with The Edge giving his best Keith Levine impression on guitar and Bono denouncing rock traditionalism with lines like “Don’t believe in the ’60s / The golden age of pop / You glorify the past / When the future dries up.” It’s pretty good. Then you see the context it’s set in, and that line becomes, like the rest of the film, laughably without any self-awareness.
After all, Bono has the gall and the gumption to say, “Don’t believe in the ’60s”, when the whole film and, in so many ways, that entire era of the band was all about deifying the legends of the past. This is a film with an extended, toe-curling segment of the band visiting Graceland, and you’re raging against “glorifying the past”, Paul?! Even above that, the whole song, down to the title, is a John Lennon homage. A continuation of Lennon’s solo song ‘God’, where he listed things he didn’t believe in, including the titular deity.
‘God Part II’, for all its raging at folks with rose-tinted glasses welded to their noses, doesn’t just continue Lennon’s work but also contains a barefaced threat of physical violence to a biographer of Lennon who didn’t revere him the way Bono felt he should. In fairness to the lad, Albert Goldman was a muck-racking, misogynist, sensationalist hack who made disgusting allegations about Lennon because he didn’t like his music. However, you don’t get to hector people about romanticising the past while also threatening people who don’t treat your musical heroes with enough respect.
In the end, all that Rattle And Hum proved was that U2 were in desperate need to, as Bono put it on the final date of the tour promoting the album, “go away and dream it all up again”. It’s telling in the three decades since, U2 have always been at their best when they’ve had enough faith in their own legacy, without having to cling on to the coattails of their heroes the way they did here.
