U2's Rattle and Hum is like a Real Life Spinal Tap

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

There is literally no limit to the different ways you can use me and this column. Todd in the Shadows, for example, has had me write up many of Madonna’s most spectacular cinematic disasters and now has assigned me another epic rock star folly in the notorious 1988 concert film/ego trip/parade of clumsy cultural appropriation U2: Rattle and Hum. 

With Rattle and Hum, director Phil Joanou set out to prove that U2 was the biggest, best and most important band in human history, with a frontman so charismatic and larger than life that he makes Elvis Presley look like Kevin Federline by comparison. 

Instead Joanou unwittingly illustrated that while U2 definitely was not the biggest, best or more important band alive, let alone ever, they had a solid claim to being the most pretentious.

They have fun!

Joanou is the credited director of Rattle and Hum but the real driving force behind this epic folly is Bono’s massive ego. Everything in Rattle and Hum is designed to flatter the U2 frontman’s sense of himself as a messianic figure out to save rock and roll, and also the world, with the flaming sword of righteousness that is his band’s extremely commercial brand of anthemic arena rock. 

In Rattle and Hum, Bono is Jesus, man. He’s Elvis Presley. He’s Jim Morrison at his snake-hipped sexiest. He is the soul of Ireland AND America and rock and roll. He’s everyone and everything, with an ego so massive it threatens to block out the sun and leave the whole world shivering and cold. 

I haven’t watched Rattle and Hum since it used to play in the background when I worked at a video store in the early to mid 1990s but I have lovingly referenced its most notorious moment, Bono imploring, “Okay Edge, play the blues” fairly often in my writing.

I had forgotten the context that makes this infamous moment even more exquisitely ridiculous. In his most insufferable tone of voice, Bono is lecturing the audience about South Africa and what he pronounces as “Ah-Pur-Tight”, and how his friend “Little Steven” had asked him to contribute a song to an anti-apartheid album he was putting together. 

The crowd seems insufficiently spellbound by Bono’s preaching. So he testily asks the audience at one of the band’s massive shows if he’s “bugging” them, then peevishly instructs his guitarist to play the blues as a way of both rewarding and punishing a crowd full of philistines for being more interested in U2’s music than its humorless frontman’s thoughts on South Africa.

Usually rock bands wear the “voice of a generation” tag like a crown of thorns. U2, on the other hand, is pretentious and arrogant enough to embrace it. Yet Rattle and Hum shows, to a deeply embarrassing degree, that when they’re not performing U2 have nothing to say, except perhaps that terrorism and racism are bad and consequently U2 are VERY against them.

Look at Edge and his dumb Billy Jack hat! We can tell you’re balding, dude. You’re not fooling anyone!

Rattle and Hum follows U2 as they travel to the United States to tour behind The Joshua Tree and explore their love of American roots music by visiting sacred landmarks like Graceland and Sun Studios and collaborating with black artists like B.B King and The New Voices of Freedom choir.

Despite good intentions, U2 ends up using black musicians as props and black music primarily as a way of illustrating their soulfulness and authenticity. It also does not reflect terribly well on U2 that their tribute to black American music focusses monomaniacally on the famous African-American icon Elvis Presley, whose home, studio and even film career are all explored and celebrated far more extensively than those of any black musician, including B.B King, who actually appears in the movie and the soundtrack.

The more Rattle and Hum tries to depict U2 as travelers returning to their spiritual home to explore their powerful, organic connection to black music, the more they come off like awkward tourists in a land that is not their own, with little if anything to say about our country as worshipful outsiders.

U2 similarly never seems more Irish or translucently white than when connecting with their ostensible black roots for Joanou’s impossibly adoring camera. 

U2 sets out to honor the quintessentially black music that provided the foundation for rock and roll by giving black artists an exciting opportunity to perform in the background while Bono strikes a series of rock star/Jesus poses for a camera endlessly enamored of him and his posturing. 

Look, I’m not saying that I’m not flattered by Bono’s interest in American culture and American music. We’ve done some pretty cool stuff over the years. And by “we” I of course mean black musicians. 

All I’m saying is that there are LOTS of other countries you can appropriate instead that might be a little fresher. What about Canada? They’re VERY polite and they’ve got Tim Hortons. What about Norway? I would love to see a movie where you travel there and explore your Norwegian death metal roots. 

All I’m saying is that the whole “European superstars come to America to show how down they are with black music” thing has been done to death, and with almost uniformly less embarrassing, tone-deaf results. 

A little self-deprecation would have gone a long way in Rattle and Hum but Bono and his similarly pompous bandmates don’t seem to have a sense of humor about anything, let alone their status as rock gods at the height of their extraordinary international fame. Rattle and Hum exposes U2 as a band painfully devoid of self-awareness, who have no idea how badly they’re coming off.

Rattle and Hum is a delirious exercise in self-parody that makes an all-time great band near their creative prime look like pretentious, self-absorbed jackasses. Every shot, whether filmed in arty black and white or vivid color, looks like a Rolling Stone cover. It’s rock star mythologizing at its most cliched and shameless. 

Rattle and Hum marked a turning point in U2’s career. They’d taken the “earnest rock messiahs” shtick as far as it would go. The whole world was laughing at U2’s hagiographic tribute to their own greatness, and to a much lesser extent, black American music. 

U2 wanted to be worshiped, not ridiculed. So they decided they would start experimenting with this wild new thing called “irony” and be in on the joke the next time around. This led to Achung, Baby, the Zoo TV tour and an embrace of humor that helped the group rebound from the enduring embarrassment of Rattle and Hum. 

Sometimes I will hear a U2 song I like while out and about and briefly wonder if maybe I should go back and listen to one of their albums in its entirety, something I probably haven’t done in a solid decade despite very much enjoying Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind at the time of their release. 

Watching Rattle and Hum made me feel like I was at the exact right level of U2 fandom: intensely, even obsessively mild. Live music and concert films are supposed to reaffirm and strengthen our intense emotional and spiritual connection to our favorite artists. Rattle and Hum, on the other hand, made me question why I ever liked these pretentious bozos in the first place. 

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