Caught with My Pants Down and My Hands Up...My Hands Up

"This is My America"

As is often the case at a U2 show, the boldest moment of the night came when, towards the end of the set, the band played “Bullet the Blue Sky,” a dissonant Joshua Tree deep cut that’s become a live staple. The album version is about the United States’s involvement in military conflict in El Salvador, but on subsequent tours the band has tailored it to addressing whatever political issue has them riled up at the time: religious violence, the NRA, Nazism.

On this tour, in keeping with the whole “innocence and experience” theme, it becomes a dialogue between a 19-year-old version of Bono and the modern-day one we’re seeing onstage, who has “100, 200, 300 times” more than he needs. The criticism, though, eventually turns outward: Bono ended the song, powerfully, at the lip of the stage, shouting to the crowd, “Hands up, I’m an American. I can’t breathe, I’m an American.” And though this is the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from U2, the moment felt genuinely confrontational. They then launched into a soaring rendition of “Pride (In the Name of Love),” as the crowd blithely pumped its fists to a song that it may or may not know is about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

"This is my America," Bono exclaims.

The Birth of Bullet the Blue Sky

1987

He remembers it this way. Outside San Salvador, 30 or 40 miles up in the hills, mortars began to hit the village, and bombs cratered the hillside. Run.

That was his first thought. And this was the second: Where? It was open all around. The ground shook. The farmers looked at the traveler from Ireland and smiled and pointed. They tried to be reassuring. "That is over there," they said. "We are over here."

"I felt," says the traveler, thinking back in a safer place, "such a fool in the face of it. Those guys lived with it all their lives, and it meant nothing to them. But the fear I felt that day . . ." Just talking couldn't say it all. It would take a song.

This Boy Looked a Whole Lot Like Me . . .

Bono the Lyricist

Bono the Lyricist

November 10, 2005

U2 left little doubt who deserves the title ``greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world'' of the three contenders visiting the Bay Area this week.