Abstract
With the release of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon,1 the world’s most successful rock band produced what they conceived to be a collection of “future hymns or future spirituals.”2 The following U2 360° tour—which, to date, is the highest grossing tour in the history of popular music3—further promoted U2’s theme of future spirituality. The centerpiece of these concerts was a 50-meter-high, stadium-dwarfing stage, which U2 had designed to look like a spaceship crossed with a cathedral.4
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Notes
Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), p. 224, p. 227.
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 1–18.
Christopher Partridge and Theodore Gabriel, Introduction to Mysticisms East and West: Studies in Mystical Experience (Studies in Religion and Culture; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003), p. xvi.
Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (20/21; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. xiii, p. 20.
Steve Stockman, Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 (Orlando: Relevant Books, 2005), p. 17.
Martin Luther, Ernst Kroker, and Johann Mathesius, Tischreden in der mathesischen Sammlung, aus einer Handschrift der Leipziger Stadtbibliothek (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903), 303; § 588 (“Ich bin der reiffe Dreck, so ist die Welt das weite Arschloch”).
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, vol. 1 (Short Circuits; Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2006), p. 87.
Michael J. Gilmour, “The Prophet Jeremiah, Aung San Suu Kyi, and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind: On Listening to Bono’s Jeremiad” in Call Me The Seeker: Listening to Religion in Popular Music, ed. Michael J. Gilmour (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 35.
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© 2014 Mike Grimshaw
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Galbraith, D. (2014). Meeting God in the Sound. In: Grimshaw, M. (eds) The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394118_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394118_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48381-5
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