ANALYSIS : Greatness Is More Than Grand Gestures

Don’t mean to bug ya--as U2 singer Bono Hewson puts it in one of the many strident moments of his band’s new album and concert film, “Rattle and Hum,” but if you are among the legions who love U2 and believe that the Irish band deserves to be ranked among the all-time greats of rock ‘n’ roll--well, this probably will bug ya quite a bit.

Actually, it almost bugs me that I haven’t been able to detect in U2 the greatness that seems so apparent to so many knowledgeable and passionate rock fans. Not wanting to be contrary, I listened to the new album and went to the movie, faintly hoping for some new illumination about the band that I hadn’t gleaned from its past work and live shows. In fact, I liked a good deal of what I saw and heard.

But greatness? Where U2 is concerned, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

To be fair, U2 has some impressive qualities. It is a band determined to make music on a big scale and use it to make big statements about social and spiritual concerns. At a time when heroes are hard to find in politics or pop culture, U2 is trying hard to be heroic. The band’s surging, martial rhythms and drive-and-chime guitars are undeniably powerful, and Bono’s considerable charisma has obvious appeal. But grand gestures and big abstractions make me nervous. Give me the particulars of life--from them, perhaps, we can begin to understand some broader truths. U2’s sweeping abstractions may be moving because of the power with which they are delivered, but they tell us almost nothing about life as it is lived.

To listen to Bono and the boys, though, they have arrived at some momentous answers.

“All I’ve got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth,” Bono sings as he improvises his own words in U2’s version of the Bob Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower.” Not a red guitar, three chords and a song that might be an attempt to say something truthful. Three chords and The Truth.

In “Watchtower,” Dylan himself went no further than to say, “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” That’s a far more circumspect, far less pretentious vision than Bono has of how strongly one can lay claim to speaking truth. The joker and the thief who populate Dylan’s song await a revelation, hoping that the truth and justice missing from their world will be revealed by a higher power; Bono is all too eager to play the hero, to cast himself as some kind of titanic, truth-bearing rock messiah.

I’m not suggesting here that Hewson the private person is casting himself as a titan or saint. He has denied that in interviews, and we should take him at his word. It’s Bono the songwriter-performer who is being pretentious.

U2 might do well to consider a line from “My Back Pages,” another Dylan song:

Good and Bad , I spoke these words, just like a wedding vow .

But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

In other words, watch out for big words and big abstractions.

So what should a rock band do? It should do what great artists have always tried to do, from Homer to James Joyce (a Dubliner whose sense of humor and devotion to the specific stand in stark contrast to dour U2). A great artist tells stories. A great artist describes people and places, and makes us privy to his or her words and thoughts. If U2 has ever fleshed out a character or told a yarn in a song, I must have missed it.

Instead, lyricist Bono gives us geography and meteorology--oceans and deserts and thunderclouds--and songs that are nearly unpopulated, aside from the occasional ode to a nonfictional hero such as Martin Luther King.

It’s telling that the landscape footage of U2’s Dublin and the American heartland in “Rattle and Hum” depicts vistas without people. That, apparently, is how U2 sees the world: a landscape of ideas and ideals, and vaguely conceived spiritual and political struggle--but not of individual lives lived in the grit and bustle of everyday life.

Great rock music lives in that grit and bustle, and it thrives on the specific. Rock greatness is Van Morrison singing about a day at a swimming hole (“And It Stoned Me”) and from the details of his story weaving a vision of the broader qualities of fellowship and generosity of spirit.

It’s the Rolling Stones introducing you to a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis (“Honky Tonk Women”) or Neil Young walking you through a violent rite of passage in “Powderfinger,” molding setting, plot and character into a whole that takes on tragic, mythic proportions.

Along with the passion and power that U2 certainly possesses, great rock ‘n’ roll must encompass laughter and fun and whimsy and imagination--qualities that U2 simply has not shown. These are crippling deficiencies.

“Rattle and Hum” does hint at some progress. It finds U2 delving into R & B, country, folk music and the blues, belatedly tapping the root sources that nourish rock. That opens new expressive possibilities that crop up in songs like “Van Diemen’s Land,” a humble folk ballad written and sung by guitarist Dave (the Edge) Evans. In fact, the song even conjures up a character and sketches a story. It’s not greatness, but perhaps it’s a start.

“U2: Rattle and Hum” is playing at the Edwards Westbrook Twin Cinema, 10141 Westminster Ave. in Garden Grove, and the Century City Center, 3901 Metropolitan Drive in Orange.