SHUT UP AND SING! U2 Concerts Would Be Better If the Band Preached Less and Sang More:

For much of the show, the band projected an earnest slideshow of Native Americans and other immigrants onto the screen. Those pictured were unsmiling, trudging down roads and living in shacks. This is U2’s version of what the immigrant experience looks like in America, and it’s all pretty bleak. But the message was muddled and totally unclear.

The album’s greatest songs—“Running to Stand Still” and “Red Hill Mining Town”—are about, respectively, heroin abuse and the death of a mining town. America is experiencing an explosive surge in opioid deaths, and the death of the steel and car industry has decimated cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit. It’s hard to understand how the relentless stream of grim portraits of immigrants connected to the songs themselves.

Last year, Bono declared Trump “potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America” and reportedly “sought favorable access to Hillary through [the] Clinton Foundation.”  In January, as Spin reported, “Obama Walked Out to U2’s ‘City of Blinding Lights’ for His Farewell Address,” and had lunch with Bono in March. So it’s rather odd for U2 to resurrect a song lamenting the death of a mining town, when Obama vowed to bankrupt the coal industry, and last year, Hillary chortled at the prospect that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

(Classical reference in headline.)