U2’s Cedars of Lebanon, Breathe, Yahweh, & Grace

In the last post I made some observations about the direction that U2’s No Line on the Horizon took, especially musically, and how it was in a peculiar sense a kind of homecoming.

Lyrically, meanwhile, the songs are a continuous exploration of metaphysical – and many times, very basic – questions. In yet another post, comparing “Magnificent” and “Cedars of Lebanon” to Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy,” I mentioned how U2, in the last three albums, have been singing practically only about Love. Not about “romantic love” as Bono emphatically clarifies in “Miracle Drug,” but a love that “makes no sense of space and time.” A love that “takes strangers in,” whether strangers, who are starving to death by the thousands, or a rock star, who “needs God’s help.” In other words, the songs have been explicitly Christian.

This is not altogether news, since these Irish rockers come from Roman Catholic and Protestant stocks. The ‘homecoming,’ lyrically, happened from Pop to All That You Can’t Leave Behind. It is, indeed, a great risk that the band had taken, when, from crooning with devil’s horns in third-person, Bono (once again) started singing about Love – a risk, because we all know the contempt half of the world has for anything Christian. The cover of All That You Can’t Leave Behind alluded to Jeremiah 33:3, and the record ended with the track entitled “Grace,” which is unmistakably a testimony of Christian belief. Toward the end, the song goes,

Grace...
She carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings...
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things.

From then on, this theme has been more and more pronounced. On the one hand, the risk could have resulted to some kind of sour reception, just like when Bob Dylan started doing religious songs beginning with Slow Train Coming onto Saved (the first was a commercial success, perhaps for its novelty, and the next was just simply too much to accept). But the music from All That You Can’t Leave Behind was simply fantastic that one would be hard-pressed to dismiss it as anything less than great. What’s more, America – and the rest of the world – was momentarily humble and meditative at the time, what with the historic 9/11; back then you could sing to “Walk On” and just put your tears on auto-pilot.

But then U2 came up with How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and lyrically the band took it so much further – further than their younger days, when they sang anthems for the youth straight out of the book of Psalms. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, as in the previous, punctuated the statement once again with the last track, this time with a song entitled “Yahweh.” The imagery is even more staggering in its directness:

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don't make a fist no
Take this mouth
So quick to criticize
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn.

This is how it is to dismantle an atomic bomb, and they got a Grammy for the record, overshadowing ‘the return of mimi.’

No Line on the Horizon, no doubt, is a continuation of this lyrical trajectory. One would not miss this, just browsing on track titles alone, like ”White as Snow,” “Moment of Surrender,” and “Unknown Caller.” The ‘comedy’ referred to in the track “Stand Up Comedy” – which, along with “Get on Your Boots,” sounds like it could have come from the previous album – suggest both the classical and Christian idea of the term, that is, that the end will be happy, not to say triumphant.

Interestingly, though, what would have meant seamless lyrical continuity following the records’ last tracks was curved. If the earlier report was true that the songs in No Line on the Horizon plus more were supposed to be released as two records entitled Daylight and Darkness (in that order?), then that would give a clue to the track-succession decisions and the lyrical exploration.

Following “Grace,” which was quiet confession and celebration, and “Yahweh,” which was an humble and hopeful prayer, then “Breathe,” from No Line on the Horizon, would have been a logical continuation. The song is now more upbeat, an exhortation in a form of ‘good news,’ the good news of having found grace and not being able to keep it to yourself. But “Breathe” was second to the last track, and instead we have the whispery “Cedars of Lebanon” as punctuation, almost a comma.

Instead of the ‘comedy’ of “Breathe” or even “Magnificent,” we have an elusive song, this time not content, though fully founded on, the hope in a ‘comedic’ ending. The reference to the cedars of Lebanon is vague, thoughtful at best. There is almost no question that U2 meant it to activate several word associations, since they are wont of doing this.

As with older songs, like “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” the song seems to allude to historical events, specifically the Cedar Revolution, which was launched as a call to the ejection of Syrian military from Lebanon. If so, this would highlight the contemporary issue of American military presence in the Middle East and American foreign policy. But there are other characters in “Cedars of Lebanon,” apart from the child drinking dirty water and the soldier.

Many have already noted the biblical associations: Cedar wood was used to construct King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem so that the presence of Yahweh could come down; Moses ordered the priests to use cedar barks for the Jewish ritual of circumcision and the ritual cleansing of lepers; and Isaiah compared the Lebanon cedars to the pride of the world.

Throughout the song, what comes through are glimpses of inward-looking people, snapshots of faces doing some mundane activity, whose thoughts we could only guess, and the incoherent thoughts of someone wanting something. These images and the word associations put together suggest a sober demonstration of what it’s like to be alone, to be in deep thought at least and to be in deep shit at most, and an exhortation to “choose your enemies,” which could be an enemy in the social, physical sense or an enemy within.

*U2 Lego photo by Dunechaser @ Flickr

I read these for insight on what goes on in Bono’s mind:
Bono: Grace Over Karma
Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas