Worst Songs Ever: U2’s “Angel of Harlem”

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

U2’s “Angel of Harlem”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #14 in February 1989

What [rock critics] basically want is for it to be like 1969 again. It’s this thing where British – or in U2’s case, Irish – groups discover the roots of American music. U2 have discovered this and they’re just doing pastiches [his voice rises] and it’s reviewed as a serious thing because DYLAN PLAYS ORGAN on some song and B.B. King plays on some throwaway pop song “When Love Comes to Town” that could have been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It could be in ‘Starlight Express’ if you ask me. — Neil Tennant, 1989.

For a decade, half measures held no interest for U2. If Bono discovered “irony” after flipping through a pocket Webster in search of “ignis fatuus,” then they would spend a record exploring “irony.” If they thought Kmart and wearing T-shirts with muscle prints made a statement about American love for garish capitalism, then, by gum, they’d stage press conferences in them and wear them, respectively. The sincerity porn started with Rattle and Hum, a necrophiliac gesture that was supposed to demonstrate U2’s affection for the American musics that they suddenly discovered during the The Joshua Tree tour. Making an initial splash as Joy Division and Public Image Ltd aficionados who as an innovation inserted positivist Christian theology into the choppy underwritten arrangements, U2 had not a trace of roots music in them, to their credit. Even when they recorded The Unforgettable Fire and dropped MLK’s name and recorded a mumbled electronic embarrassment called “Elvis Presley and America” they wore their received notions of How This Stuff Worked maladroitly, but, to quote Lou Reed, in that they weren’t charmless. And like their idol Bowie they understood that poseurism took risks.

So far so good. Then Rattle and Hum. The first single “Desire” gets a drubbing, but The Edge’s riff and the rhythm section’s take on the sainted Bo Diddley rhythm works. Because I live in Miami, I didn’t hear the original mix — Y-100 played the Hollywood remix; its siren, police blotter, and Reagan samples adduced “America” better than blather about red guitars and B.B. King samples.

Things go to pot with “Angel of Harlem.” With a determined nod to “Like a Rolling Stone,” Bono and the lads tip their hats to Lady Day, then enjoying a deserved rediscovery as the CD revolution exposed thousands of new fans to Billie Holiday as well as Miles Davis and A Love Supreme. But the allusions are as significant as references on a resume, with the added effrontery of knowing that only Miles might’ve returned the call (he wouldn’t have, but he did Don Johnson’s in 1985, which should tell you something about the burden of significance). The horn section these days reminds me of Feargal Sharkey’s “You Little Thief,” an admittance of loss and isolation coated in a million-buck David Stewart production that required trumpetists to blow as if through a coke fog. On “Angel of Harlem,” Bono sings to match the horns, and with the risk of wrecking his adenoids a constant threat all he could do was write,”Lady Day’s got diamond eyes/she sees the truth behind the lies”; if he’d substituted “Bette Midler” it would’ve been as meaningless.

Let us circle back to Neil Tennant’s quote above. U2 fans are an ornery lot. What I’ve written means nothing to them. They won’t hear the disjunction between the band’s ambitions and its self-importance and the way in which it produces a track intended as sincere but resulting in condescending doggerel by amateurs. In a year when a majority of the American body politic voted for a serial liar and the least persuasive spokesman for proletarian values (for George H.W. Bush, “pork rinds” were his “Lady Day”), Bono’s bellowing “salvation in the blues” made sense.

Achtung Baby, wraparound shades, and Kmart beckoned — what else could U2 do? Had they made more albums comprised of leftovers and DYLAN PLAYS ORGAN, they would have turned into Big Country. Bono sang softer, the band played slower, Eno stuffed the tunes with synth strings, and the band played as if recording the soundtrack to, well, bad Wim Wenders films. But these moves suited a quartet whose symphonic pretensions outstripped their physical abilities and like their boomer drinking buddies possessed dismal instincts for sensing public sentiment.fh