Archives for November 2017

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The ripples from the firing of Matt Lauer as the co-host of the “Today” morning news show have hit the world of New Zealand property, where officials are already scrutinizing the role of foreign buyers in an increasingly expensive market.

A New Zealand government agency said on Thursday that it was in discussions with Mr. Lauer’s representative over his purchase of a 16,000-acre farm there. Foreigners must pass a good-character test to be allowed to buy New Zealand land, and while Mr. Lauer’s purchase was approved earlier this year, the country’s Overseas Investment Office is revisiting his case in light of his firing.

Officials from that agency “are seeking further information,” said Lisa Barrett, a spokeswoman for the agency. The agency can require buyers to dispose of the property if it believes the rules have been violated.

NBC on Wednesday said it fired Mr. Lauer from “Today” following an allegation of sexual harassment, making him the latest major media figure to fall from grace amid a broad examination in the United States of inappropriate sexual behavior in the worlds of media and entertainment. Mr. Lauer, a well-known face on morning television in the United States, had been a co-host at “Today” for two decades.

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Mr. Lauer’s purchase of the lease to Hunter Valley Station, a ranch on the shore of Lake Hawea on New Zealand’s picturesque South Island, was approved in February. He bought the property with his wife, Annette Lauer, through a New Zealand-based company, according to investment office documents. The value of the property was not clear; the local news media put the price at $9.2 million. In New Zealand, government-owned land can be leased but not purchased.

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For foreign buyers, New Zealand’s definition of good character is broad. Foreign buyers can fail the test if officials found they had committed “offenses or contraventions of the law,” whether they were convicted of a crime or not. The agency can consider “other relevant matters” in making its decision, according to its website. Mr. Lauer has not been charged with wrongdoing.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/matt-lauer-new-zealand.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

There are also concerns that it will be primarily women who are expected to spend the next few months talking about sexual misconduct while men are given a pass by reporters. “If white male creators get to talk about their craft and women are expected to discuss sexual harassment, that is not acceptable,” said Dee Rees, the director and co-writer of the screenplay for “Mudbound,” a drama about racism in rural Mississippi that some see as a best picture contender.

At the same time, some studio operatives — in carefully cloaked conversations — are trying to capitalize on accusations in pursuit of awards. After the actor Anthony Rapp told Buzzfeed News that Mr. Spacey made unwanted sexual advances toward him in 1986, when Mr. Rapp was 14, and other men came forward with similar stories, there was an effort to undercut an Oscar front-runner, “Call Me By Your Name,” by connecting its depiction of a romantic relationship between a man in his 20s and one who is 17 to pedophilia. (The whisper campaign does not appear to be working: “Call Me By Your Name” won the top prize at the Gotham Awards on Monday.)

Of course, this is not the first time that sexual scandal has intersected with Hollywood’s awards season.

In 2003 Roman Polanski could not accept his Oscar for directing “The Pianist” because he fled the United States for France in 1978 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl. (Other women have since accused Mr. Polanski of sexually assaulting them when they were teenagers.) Last year, Nate Parker’s heralded slave-revolt film, “The Birth of a Nation,” collapsed as an Oscar prospect following fresh scrutiny on an old case in which Mr. Parker was accused and later acquitted of raping a fellow college student.

But the topic of sexual misconduct has now become so prevalent that some of Hollywood’s image-tending experts and awards consultants have been holding conference calls in hopes of coming to a consensus — an elusive one, so far — about how to run the media gantlet ahead.

Many longtime publicists are privately recommending avoidance. As one publicist who represents A-list stars said, the awards events are about selling tickets and winning votes, not discussing sexual harassment. She spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid drawing unwanted attention to her clients.

If put on the spot in a red carpet interview, the publicist continued, stars should give a quick answer about the behavior being abhorrent before swiftly pivoting back to their film.

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Other strategists said that awards hopefuls should adhere to one of Hollywood’s oldest saws: remember your audience. Oscars are voted on by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an organization with a membership that is 72 percent male and 87 percent white. In other words, calling out Hollywood as a cesspool of white male privilege may ensure that someone else’s name is written on the card inside that Oscar envelope.

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For another group of publicists and Oscar advisers, that kind of thinking is immoral. And trying to separate the awards process from the #MeToo movement could also result in disastrous optics. You won’t publicly demand better treatment for women, but you will openly campaign for a little gold man? Better, they say, to seize the opportunity to push for change.

“Personally, for me, not talking about it does not feel like an option,” said Will Poulter, who played a racist police officer in “Detroit,” which will return to theaters on Friday as part of an awards push.

Mr. Poulter added: “I’ve never walked into a casting session and worried about my safety, which is something that I’ve really had to think about lately — my privilege as a man. But I have multiple actress friends who have told me that they have been objectified in really inappropriate ways. The more we talk about that, the better the chance it ends.”

Marc Malkin, who has been a red carpet reporter for outlets like E! for more than a decade, predicted that publicists would be less successful at controlling celebrity journalists than they have been in the past. Last year, for instance, gatekeepers for Casey Affleck were able to persuade some reporters not to focus on two sexual harassment suits filed against him in 2010. (He denied any wrongdoing and settled with the women for undisclosed sums.) Mr. Affleck ultimately won the Academy Award for best actor for his performance in “Manchester by the Sea.”

“Publicists always pressure us to keep our questions about the work,” Mr. Malkin said. “I don’t think that tactic will be successful this time around when it comes to sexual harassment. These are work questions.”

The difficulty in striking a balance between serious and celebratory has already been on display.

The Hollywood Film Awards, held in early November, avoided the subject; the ceremony’s host, James Corden, instead offered banter about the silliness of the night. (Mr. Corden was perhaps gun-shy after being criticized for making jokes about Mr. Weinstein at a charity event a few weeks earlier.) Presenters at the Governors Awards in late November, including Jessica Chastain and Angelina Jolie, similarly steered clear of discussion about sexual harassment. The silence from the stage generated headlines, in part because it was a departure from previous years, when stars used the platform to rail against Hollywood’s lack of racial diversity.

The Gotham Awards tried to have it both ways. The host, John Cameron Mitchell, allowed that it was a “strange time” in Hollywood, but seemed to get tangled in an effort to keep his commentary vague. “We #resist because we’re panicking, and we want to do the right thing so hard,” he said. Most of the acceptance speeches stuck to standard tropes.

That left Joana Vicente, executive director of the organization behind the Gothams, to address sexual harassment during a brief onstage appearance.

“This has been a tough year for our industry and for the world,” she said. “We would like to take a moment to recognize and to honor those women and those men who have stepped forward.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/movies/oscars-sexual-harassment-harvey-weinstein.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

It will also change the name of American Public Media’s current incarnation of the show, which Chris Thile, a songwriter and mandolinist, took over in October 2016, after Mr. Keillor stepped down.

Jon McTaggart, the president of Minnesota Public Radio, said in a statement that “all of us in the MPR community are saddened by these circumstances.”

He added: “While we appreciate the contributions Garrison has made to M.P.R., and all of public radio, we believe this decision is the right thing to do and is necessary to continue to earn the trust of our audiences, employees and supporters of our public service.”

Later on Wednesday, The Star Tribune of Minneapolis published an email from Mr. Keillor in response to a reporter’s questions, giving his version of an encounter with an unidentified woman.

“I put my hand on a woman’s bare back,” he wrote. “I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it.”

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Mr. Keillor claimed that they continued to be friends “right up until her lawyer called.”

He insisted his discomfort with physical affection was common knowledge, adding, “If I had a dollar for every woman who asked to take a selfie with me and who slipped an arm around me and let it drift down below the beltline, I’d have at least a hundred dollars.”

Mr. Keillor is one of many public figures to face consequences after allegations of sexual misconduct in recent weeks. Indeed, just a day earlier, he had come to the defense of his friend and fellow Minnesotan, Senator Al Franken, who is fighting for his political life in the face of accusations of improprieties from four women.

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In an op-ed for The Washington Post published on Tuesday evening, Mr. Keillor said calls for the senator’s resignation were “pure absurdity” and dismissed a photograph of the Democrat with his hands on a woman’s chest as something “in a spirit of low comedy.”

The fallout with the network came as Mr. Keillor was slowly receding from the public stage, though he has still been touring, with appearances around the Northeast this week. On Wednesday, he canceled a performance scheduled that night in Pittsfield, Mass.

He originally came up with the idea for his own Americana variety program in 1974 after he traveled to Nashville to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker.

“A Prairie Home Companion” became a radio institution, peaking at 4.1 million weekly listeners a decade before he retired, with lucrative live performances and merchandise that included recordings, books and clothes.

Mr. Keillor sang, performed in skits with recurring characters like Guy Noir and ended each show with a monologue about Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above-average.”

Famous artists who appeared on his stage included Emmylou Harris, Chet Atkins, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Keb’ Mo’ and Wilco.

He was credited with shaping the early profile of public radio.

“‘Prairie Home Companion’ came on the scene just as public radio was trying to figure out what its identity was,” Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” told The New York Times last year. “The fact that here was such a visibly weird, funny, idiosyncratic show opened up the space of other weird, idiosyncratic shows, like ‘Car Talk,’ and our show.”

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Mr. Keillor, in his statement on Wednesday, which he also published on his website, said he was “deeply grateful” for all the years appearing on the radio and touring the country.

“It’s some sort of poetic irony to be knocked off the air by a story, having told so many of them myself, but I’m 75 and don’t have any interest in arguing about this,” he said. “And I cannot in conscience bring danger to a great organization I’ve worked hard for since 1969.”

He also apologized to “all the poets whose work I won’t be reading on the radio and sorry for the people who will lose work on account of this.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/media/garrison-keillor-fired.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Not really caring about being invited anywhere can be a good thing when fielding angry phone calls from all the glittery powerful people who got scorched in (or snubbed by) his magazines, which in addition to Vogue included Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ and Glamour.

Leonard Lauder, another speaker at the memorial, described once receiving a phone call from a friend desperate to have a story in one of Mr. Newhouse’s magazines killed.

“I said, ‘I don’t think we can,’” Mr. Lauder said. “He said, ‘Please!’ So I called Si and Si said, ‘You know, I’ve had a lot of experience with this. If the story is worth keeping, you can’t kill it. If the story’s not worth keeping, I won’t do it anyway.’ That was the nicest way to say, ‘No, Leonard. Thank you.’”

Mr. Newhouse’s self-abnegation, conscious or unconscious, added to the myth around him.

So did truly loving the things his magazines covered — film, books, art, architecture, theater and restaurants — said Graydon Carter, the outgoing editor of Vanity Fair. “The thing about Si was, he loved magazines. It was the reason that Condé Nast flourished,” Mr. Carter said. “Si loved magazines the way someone like Jack Welch loved light bulbs and G.E. jet engines.”

Which is one reason it came as no surprise that many of the luminaries who appeared in his magazines came for his final send-off.

In addition to the editors of his publications, those in attendance included the designers Ralph Lauren and Diane von Furstenberg, the artist Jeff Koons, the book publisher Sonny Mehta and the architect Rem Koolhaas.

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David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, spoke after Mr. Carter and described the process of being hired there less like an arrival than an arrest.

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“I received a call from Si’s far less reticent lieutenant, the late Steve Florio, a mustachioed cigar-wielding boulevardier of the executive suite, who put matters to me in approximately these soothing terms: ‘Would you kindly direct yourself to the office in 10 minutes and please don’t make a hash of it.’” (Of course, Mr. Florio put it somewhat more coarsely than that, but Mr. Remnick is from North New Jersey. He got the gist.)

So Mr. Remnick, who was getting his hair cut at the time, jumped out of the chair, his hair shorn jagged “like an abandoned hedge,” and high-tailed it over to Madison Avenue, where Mr. Newhouse sat behind a paperless desk and spoke so plainly but so softly his new hire wasn’t sure if he was being “offered the greatest job in journalism or a glass of water.”

But in time, he came to see Mr. Newhouse not just as his boss, but as his biggest booster.

It started with the sweatshirt he wore every day.

“This was very inspiring,” Mr. Remnick said. “I never noticed Katharine Graham wearing a Washington Post sweatshirt to vouchsafe her loyalty. I’m just saying.”

But it went beyond that.

“He was also the magazine’s most ardent reader,” Mr. Remnick said. “He had bought the magazine with the same spirit he brought to works of art. He bought it because he loved it. He bought it because he aimed to rejuvenate and nourish it, to support it in the way the previous proprietor no longer could. Despite a great deal of scrutiny and criticism, he stayed focused not merely on the fiduciary success of the magazine, but on its ethos and its highest aspirations, its best possible version of itself.”

There was a tough side to Mr. Newhouse, too. One doesn’t run the most storied magazine publisher in America for five decades without occasionally breaking a few eggs.

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Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman and chief executive of Condé Nast International, alluded to this in his speech when he described his cousin’s frank (and not always rosy) estimations of the work of publishers on memorandums he scrawled on legal pads with a black felt tip marker.

Those notes came to be known throughout the company as “yellow snow” and included lines such as ‘Why did the advertising rate decrease in November?,’ ‘How did this promotion perform?’ and once, ‘Do you think it’s smart to put an overweight man on the cover of British GQ two months in a row?”

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(That was in 1993, when Danny DeVito appeared in April and Robbie Coltrane appeared in May.)

Another time, Mr. Newhouse questioned Ms. Wintour about whether she really wanted to put a supermodel on the cover, swimming with a dolphin. ‘You know, Anna, I just hate fish,” he said.

She scrapped it in favor of something else.

In keeping with the Condé Nast ethos, Mr. Newhouse’s tastes were catholic to the core.

He read turn-of-the-century Russian novels but also ventured eagerly with friends to see films that ranged from blockbusters (“Lethal Weapon”) to pulp fiction (“American Psycho”).

He also became one of the most renowned art collectors of his day, scooping up works by Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock well before they came to be other collectors’ staples.

Part of his success on that front, David Geffen said, was that he approached collecting the same way he approached magazines, putting concerns of cost beneath those of quality.

“He had a better collection of post-World War II pictures than the Museum of Modern Art,” Mr. Geffen said. “If you went to that townhouse, wherever you looked there was a masterpiece.” (Mr. Newhouse later gave up his townhouse, and sold most of what was on the walls, when his dog became too old to climb the stairs.)

In 1980, Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, purchased Random House, one of the country’s most storied book publishers. That was how he met Robert Gottlieb, an editor at Knopf, who ran The New Yorker from 1987 to 1992.

In his speech, Mr. Gottlieb recalled a person whose curiosity, both personal and intellectual, was awe-inspiring.

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“He was eager, never jaded,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “He was a personification of David Riesman’s inner-directed man. Certainly open to influence and education but always secure in his own impulses. If he was proved right, he was undoubtedly gratified, but I always sensed that his true gratification came from the doing of things, not the rewards. When something didn’t work out, no doubt he was chagrined, but he would shrug and move on. There was no living in regret. In the same spirit, he never seemed to resent or even mind the negative things said about him. His friends might seethe at them, but he just brushed them off. This was not a narcissistic personality, nor a self-indulgent one.”

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In his final years, Mr. Newhouse was felled by dementia, and it broke the hearts of everyone around him to see this curious, kind and erudite man lose his memories, his ability to exercise and analyze, and then, finally, to walk and speak.

“Losing someone to a slow decline is hard on people left behind, and I was in awe of the strength with which Victoria supported Si all throughout his final years,” said Ms. Wintour, her voice breaking as she described Mr. Newhouse and his wife, Victoria Newhouse. They married in 1973.

In a video tribute, the actress and animal rights advocate Isabella Rossellini spoke of Mr. Newhouse coming to her farm for a visit toward the end of his life.

“He was in a wheelchair,” Ms. Rossellini said. “He came with his nurse and with Victoria, and we didn’t know if he was aware or not. And I lifted up a chicken and I said, ‘Look, Si,’ and he said, ‘Chicken.’ Both Victoria and I had tears in our eyes. He hadn’t spoken in many months.”

The next time he came back, words eluded him, Ms. Rossellini said. Mr. Newhouse simply sat there without much expression, petting a goat. But Ms. Rossellini knew that at that moment he was content.

She felt as though she had given him back a little of the joy he had given her.

“The end was bad, but there aren’t many good endings,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “He’s a man to be mourned, but he lived a life to be celebrated.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/fashion/si-newhouse-jr-conde-nast-remembered-eager-never-jaded.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The show became known for celebrity interviews and gimmicky stunts sprinkled in between newscasts. For several years in the 1950s, “Today” gave a starring role to J. Fred Muggs — a chimpanzee co-anchor credited with boosting the show’s popularity among families.

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Some hosts, however, who exemplified a goofy geniality on air engaged in bitter personality clashes and turf wars backstage.

In 1989, Mr. Gumbel wrote a confidential memo complaining that the show’s weather presenter, Willard Scott, was holding “the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.” After the memo leaked, the two men performed a staged reconciliation on air, with Mr. Scott planting a kiss on Mr. Gumbel’s cheek.

“Today” dominated the morning TV ratings from the end of 1995 to 2012, when it started losing out to its ABC rival, “Good Morning America.”

As ratings sagged in 2012, Ann Curry was ousted as an anchor because she and her co-host Matt Lauer were deemed to lack chemistry. But her removal was deeply damaging for the show. After Ms. Curry said her teary goodbye, the show lost advertising revenue and viewers.

Ms. Curry had felt that the atmosphere behind the scenes at the show had undermined her and she told friends that her final months were a form of professional torture. Mr. Lauer’s indifference to her situation also hurt, she said.

The “Today” show eventually moved past that, however, and viewers returned. Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, joined this year as a host.

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Now, with the firing of Mr. Lauer, NBC News faces a different sort of crisis, one that will likely impact the network for some time.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/media/today-show-history.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

MARGARET LYONS I can’t either.

Morning TV lives and dies by its perceived intimacy. Of course, I don’t know Matt Lauer … but I don’t not know him either. He’s a celebrity — and much of celebrity culture is that one-way bond.

I wonder if this will shift one aspect of the conversation that sometimes exists around abuse and assault. Even when professing solidarity with survivors, many people still balk, still recoil and insist, “I don’t know anyone who would ever do that or has ever done that.” You do now, kind of.

PONIEWOZIK This is one thing I think is so valuable about a reaction like Savannah Guthrie’s. She says Mr. Lauer is her “dear, dear friend” but that this doesn’t excuse him. Likewise, Ms. King acknowledged being broken up, but repeated that Mr. Rose “does not get a pass.”

The reckoning is necessary, they’re saying, but that doesn’t make it easy. Maybe that gives the audience permission to process facts in their own lives that are not easy to handle. As Ms. Guthrie put it, “How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?”

You might have been a fan of Mr. Lauer and Mr. Rose, or not. You may be surprised, or not. But as more and more of these bills come due — as I type, I just saw the news that Garrison Keillor says he was fired over accusations of inappropriate behavior — it’s not going to happen to only people you never liked.

LYONS I guess the hopeful part of me (a measly sliver at best) wonders if “Today” or “CBS This Morning” might grapple with this as a process, like when Katie Couric taught us about cancer screenings. “Welcome back to the third hour of ‘Today.’ Later, we’ll talk about restorative justice. But first, here’s how the patriarchy is bad for everyone …”

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Clearing house is an important step, but it’s not the only step. Matt Lauer getting fired is new, but suggestions that “Today” is a sexist workplace … those are not new. And I’m curious how the show will address that, if at all.

PONIEWOZIK The flip side of the “morning shows are like a family” dynamic is that it has had some weird gender assumptions built in. The preconception, for instance, that you need a man and a woman hosting — like a mom and dad — and that, often, the man is cast as the one who lends gravitas and authority. (Those being relative terms in a genre that has room for “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?”)

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A side effect of these scandals has been that suddenly two of the big network morning shows were hosted by women. (The last example I recall was when Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts co-hosted “Good Morning America” — because Charles Gibson was given “World News Tonight” over Ms. Sawyer.) The designated male was gone — but the cameras stayed on! The news got told! The world kept spinning!

LYONS Yeah, I think the answer to “what would happen if two women hosted?” is just, “Then two women would be hosting.” I could live just fine in that world!

PONIEWOZIK There’s a pattern in these harassment scandals lately where after the revelation comes the forensic phase: People comb through the internet for old video-clip evidence that says, look, we should have seen the guy was bad news all along.

I saw plenty of examples right after Mr. Lauer was fired: a letch-y interview with Anne Hathaway; a tasteless 2012 “Today” sketch with Mr. Lauer as a victim of “sexual harassment”; the whole ugly, gender-charged ejection of Ann Curry. There was the atrocious “commander-in-chief forum” in the 2016 campaign, where, as I wrote at the time, Mr. Lauer interrupted Hillary Clinton constantly while pitching softballs to Donald J. Trump.

Condescending to women is bad in and of itself. And sexual harassment is bad in and of itself. And maybe they’re correlated — I’m not a psychologist, I just watch “Mindhunter.” But I’m skeptical that creeps will always leave an obvious trail of bread crumbs, especially people who are literally paid to give a performance, even if it’s for the news division.

LYONS Agreed. There is not a one-to-one correlation between “is sexist in public” and “assaults people in private.” Abusers get good at hiding their most abusive selves from the rest of the world. Why else would threats — “who would believe you?” — take such hold?

What I hope, though, is that more people start recognizing that behavior doesn’t have to rise to some insane level of horror to be considered unacceptable. You cannot imagine how tired I am of hearing that someone “was just joking around,” or that “I should lighten up,” or that “come on, I know he’s not a bad guy.” I am very tired of hearing that. Low-key degradation is also a bad way to be.

To recap, keep your hands to yourself; keep your genitals covered in any work environment; and embrace the radical notion that women are people. And … I don’t know, maybe hire Ann Curry back?

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/arts/television/matt-lauer-charlie-rose.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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People who can’t stand U2’s earnest, heal-the-world side may want to turn elsewhere right now. The word “love,” unironic and high-minded, recurs all over “Songs of Experience,” the band’s long-gestating sequel to its 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence.”

Where “Songs of Innocence” was full of youthful biographical specifics, both euphoric and grim, from the group’s lead singer and main lyricist, Bono, “Songs of Experience” has an adult’s broader, more general perspective. It favors lessons and archetypes, not stories. Like “Songs of Innocence,” the new album employed multiple producers, and U2 has clearly pondered every nanosecond of sound, whether polishing its reverberations or administering calibrated amounts of distortion. It’s not an album that courts new fans by radically changing U2’s style; instead, it reaffirms the sound that has been filling arenas and stadiums for decades.

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The album is also a return to the standard commercial market. Apple made “Songs of Innocence” a giveaway that suddenly appeared in the iTunes libraries of both fans and non-fans worldwide. Many greeted it as a corporate intrusion rather than a gift, generating a backlash that threatened to eclipse the album’s worthy songs. “Songs of Experience,” U2’s 14th studio album, is having a more conventional release.

Bono has described “Songs of Experience” as a collection of letters to family, fans and America: messages and advisories from a globally minded public figure. And for most of the album, U2 sets out to counter the anger, despair and cynicism of 2017 with insistent optimism.

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That’s a temptation to preach, and some songs are unabashed homilies. Bookending the album (before a bonus track) are songs titled “Love Is All We Have Left” and “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way.” The opener is a celestial benediction over tremulous strings, declaring, “Nothing to stop this being the best day ever,” while the finale is a grand crescendo of a march, an arena anthem declaring, “When you think you’re done, you’ve just begun.”

But in between, there’s more ambivalence, humor, self-questioning and openly political intent. “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” with an exultant leap in its melody and the Edge’s quick-strummed guitar at its core, is a love song that shades into a warning: “The best things are easy to destroy.” The cheerful 1950s-style beat of “The Showman (Little More Better)” gives Bono a springboard to mock the artifice of his role as a pop singer: “Making a spectacle of falling apart is/Just the start of the show.”

Meanwhile, U2 has been thinking hard about migrants. “Red Flag Day” — with the nimble syncopations of the Edge’s rhythm-guitar chords, Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums meshing like the Police — starts as a romp at a Mediterranean beach paradise but ends up thinking about migrants drowned in those same waters. The fuzz-toned stomp of “American Soul” begins as an Irish band’s tribute to American rock ’n’ roll but goes on to praise the idea of America welcoming outsiders from all over: “For refugees like you and me/a country to receive us/Will you be my sanctuary/Refu-Jesus!”

Yet even U2’s faith and hope face their limits in the era of “Brexit” and President Trump. “The Blackout” has a strutting four-on-the-floor beat and a guitar effect distantly echoing “Mysterious Ways,” but it’s not party music. The lyrics wonder if democracy is facing an “extinction event”: “A big mouth says the people they don’t want to be free.” The chorus goes on to insist, “When the lights go out, don’t you ever doubt/The light that we can really be.” It doesn’t sound like love — it sounds like resistance.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/arts/music/u2-songs-of-experience-review.html?partner=rss&emc=rss