How Long Must We Sing This Song?
Sometimes going out to hear the old hits just makes you feel old.
If you’re a middle-aged Gen Xer with a large appetite — and budget — for nostalgia, it’s a good time to be alive. Within just three weeks of each other this fall, New Yorkers, at least, could see Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and the Cure. Earlier this summer, the Lost 80s Live tour included Wang Chung, Missing Persons, General Public, Naked Eyes, Animotion, Musical Youth, Stacey Q, Shannon, Kon Kan and Bow Wow Wow. And back in March The New York Post ran a list of the top 107 80s concerts to catch this year. I took the bait on one of these 107 offerings and went to see Duran Duran with a high school buddy at Forest Hills Stadium because I’ve lived in Queens for almost 20 years now and I’ve been a fan since age 13; wasn’t I obligated to go?
Delighted as I was that Duran were playing in my backyard, I was also sort of surprised that they would deign to visit an oft derided borough. The very venue choice seemed to be a sign of how far they’d fallen over time. Even Simon LeBon — my one-time Tiger Beat crush — seemed a bit bewildered by it all when, after opening the show with a new song I had never heard before and never need to hear again, he stepped up to the mic and said, “They tell me I’m in Queens?”
The stadium erupted — fourteen thousand mostly middle-aged Duranies all screaming their heads off. It made me wonder: What in the hell were we all doing here? Why are we still reliving our youth so hard and why has the culture seemingly bent over backward to allow us to? Which came first: the appetite for nostalgia, or the feast itself? And why did Simon Lebon’s middle-age suit fit and stage postering remind me — oddly, disturbingly — of Donald Trump?
The music Gen X came of age with has been having a moment again for a long moment now. Just ask Kate Bush. Ask The Cramps. With Gen Xers making so much of the content we watch on streamers now, it only makes sense the old songs would get dusted off and given new life on soundtracks. On top of that, we live in a world where everything old can be new again because nothing ever dies on the internet. I’m sure other generations experienced some of the flashback whiplash that the songs of your youth cause when they take you off guard — oldies radio existed before the internet — but it’s nothing like we go through now. When my 11 year old recently pointed out that her then-favorite song — “Running Up That Hill” — was playing in the pediatrician’s office, well, let’s just say I had feelings.
I mean, I love that people are still discovering great music from my adolescence, but I also feel like it puts me at risk of becoming the worst kind of fan. The kind who stops liking a band after they’ve sold out — except in this case it’s not about selling out to the masses, it’s about popping up on the radar of my own children. Can Kate Bush still be mine, when she is also my tween daughter’s? Is it wrong that I bristle when my teenager asks me whether I’ve ever heard of Pavement? And are you really allowed to wear that Nirvana shirt, dear daughter, if you can’t sing every goddamn lyric on Nevermind?
I’d barely recovered from dancing in the stands to old hits like “The Reflex,” which still makes absolutely no sense, and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which made me hungry for more overpriced concessions, when a high school friend texted me and asked if I wanted to go see U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Oh boy, did I!
I flew out to Vegas this past weekend — with Bono as my copilot reading his memoir through my airpods — and met three high school friends for the show. As teens, we’d been New Wave kids on Staten Island, New York, a place we mostly hated and defined ourselves against with our UK obsessions. We only really got wind of U2 there when they were a few records deep — Unforgettable Fire lit fires in us when “Pride (In the Name of Love)” became an alternative radio hit — but we were quick to go back to embrace War and October and, when we were seniors in high school, The Joshua Tree was one the definitive soundtracks of our time together.
For the U2 show at the Sphere, we had general admission floor tickets — no seats! Whose idea was that? — but my comfortable “old lady” shoes got vetoed by the group so I put on some heeled boots and we headed out to the gig. One of my friends had read that a space to the left of the stage was a great vantage point that too few people pushed over to, so we did that and settled in about thirty feet from the stage. We danced to DJ tunes like schoolgirls and waited for the band.
The Sphere wasn’t expressly built for U2 but it’s hard to imagine a better act to christen the venue with their months-long residency. This show is Zoo TV on steroids; it’s everything they were trying to do with the technology available in the 90s, only it’s like nothing they or any of us probably would have even imagined being possible at the time. The whole experience is absolutely awe-inspiring, and it’s hard not to want to take your phone out at every second to capture what’s happening around you even if you are a Gen X parent who tells you kids all the time to put the goddamn phone away and live in the moment. Honestly, I cried a few times — like during “One” when Bono — and everyone else — sang “Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead?” Because yes. Weren’t we all here to raise the dead in the form of our younger selves?
When Bono started teasing that they were at the portion of the show where they changed up the setlist a bit each night, I said to my friend, “I think I’m going to lose my mind” because my god, what were they going to play next? I knew going in that the show was Achtung Baby, beginning to end, so I had dared not expect too much from this “Turntable” break between side a and b but in that moment I was a giddy teenage fangirl resurrected. We ended up being gifted with “All I Want is You” from Rattle and Hum, and a mini-set from War, including “Two Hearts Beat as One,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and “Seconds,” the later of which Bono pointed out they hadn’t played live in almost forty years.
ALMOST FORTY YEARS.
Hang on. How long? How looooong?
And how old did that make us?
It was hard, when confronted with a number like that when standing next to three women you’ve known exactly that long, not to marvel at how far we’ve all come in life, how much we’ve all seen. In the forty years that U2 was out there living their lives and not playing “Seconds,” we were all growing up and falling in love and going to college and getting jobs and getting our hearts broken and breaking hearts and living abroad and getting married and earning law degrees or publishing novels and buying homes and getting dogs and fighting cancer and establishing careers and giving birth and donating kidneys and burying parents and friends and sending kids off to college and building lives for ourselves. We’ve all been through so much. But on the flipside, a number like that inevitably makes you think, too, about how many years we have left. Because odds are — sorry, ladies! — it won’t be another 40.
After the show, when everyone agreed I was justified in complaining that my feet hurt, we all kept saying it was the concert of a lifetime. We meant it like that was a good thing, I think, but I also was sort of thinking of it all more morbidly. Was that the last time in my life I’d ever see U2? Was this the last time I’d even have the chance? I’d seen them for the first time when I was only sixteen…then again in Dublin when I was twenty-two, then one more time in my late 20s. Was this a last hurrah only I hadn’t known it would be?
My friends and I had been close enough to the stage that we could see the band’s wrinkled faces. Adam Clayton, let’s be honest, looks a little bit like your Floridian grandmother. One friend insisted Bono was wearing a hairpiece and the rest of us didn’t have evidence to argue. Larry Mullen Jr wasn’t even there since he’s recovering from back surgery. These are the rock idols of our youth? And almost 20,000 of us still showed up for them on one night forty years later?
U2’s The Joshua Tree dominated airwaves the summer my mother died in 1987 so their music always been a soundtrack linked to death in my life; it only makes sense I’d be thinking of my own mortality while also thinking of the band’s. But I wondered, when they look out at the crowds each night of their Vegas residency, are they also wondering how many nights like these they have left in them before they die?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a great night out is still a great night out even if it’s tinged with sadness for the passing of time and the loss of youth. Maybe we all know that every great night out might be our last so we might as well have as many of them as we can. Maybe that’s why the old bands still tour; why we still show up.
There’s surely a point at which reliving your youth gets old. But at 53, I’m guess I’m not quite there yet and I guess neither is U2. Bono is still Bono — a dramatic slow-mo walker, a singer a little bit at odds with the mic or maybe himself; and I’m still me, busting the same moves I did when I was sixteen but now with more scars and lower bone density. I didn’t get to choose sharing time on this earth with U2 and they didn’t get to choose me. But I’m glad I’ve shared many many journeys around the sun with them. We’ve been through a lot together, whether they know it or not. And best of all, as a lifelong artists and lifelong fan, “we get to carry each other,” as the lyric goes.
We get to carry each other through this life.
What a privilege. What a night. I should have worn the old lady shoes.
