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Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Third Ways and Triple Albums: on U2 taking cues from The Violets and David Crowder

There are always two ways..
            and often the best way is the third way
 (even though as dc talk suggested, that way is the hard way).

Apparently, one of the plans for what  was to became U2's first masterwork--The Joshua Tree--was a double album on the theme of "The Two Americas."  Another possible schema followed William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience.'

Maybe the decision to keep it to a single album was to present the contradiction/paradox in  a cohesive --though of course, still contradictory--collage, as opposed to  they too-easy dualism of a dual-disc.

Most dualisms must be dueled; even dialect can be dualed.

"Songs of Innocent Experience."
"The Two Americas in One."

As Brendan Kelly once wrote (in a review of U2's "Pop"):


More Songs of Innocence and Experience:

..We live in an age when sexuality and spirituality are usually treated as completely separate realities despite the fact that down through the ages some of the greatest poets and song-writers identified the presence of the one in the other. Think of Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience', D. H. Lawrence's poems, stories and novels, and some of W. B. Yeats's greatest poems. (Yeats, in fact, is a strong and perfectly absorbed influence on Bono)... link

But trialectic?  Tertium quid?  The third way isn't always Yahweh; but it often is the creative solution.
It might lead to trifurcation...or a holy trinity.

U2 could've released the Joshua Tree as three discs; they had that much material.
(the same is true with their current project, but...arggg... that's another topic.  take a cue from TVB, boys. Or at least read my blog).

 Or maybe it's best to see several trilogies in their catalog .
Do you see thesis/anithesis/synthesis in any perceived trology?
Or other patterns?

U3?

--
Note:
Many felt blindsided by the "sudden"   death of The David Crowder Band; but DC had long said  (and even given clues in album titles..
let the reader understand) they had long planned their discography as a series of seven CDs; even to the degree where the first three were mirrored (sequeled?  as "reannunciations") by the next three...and the seventh  (itself a double album, which includes seven sequences) was a...synthesis?  prequel? requiem with hints of new birth?

Many see the three U2  albums of this decade as a trilogy.
So why not go out with a triple bang with this next triple album..


Related:

U2  and their three eras: id, ego and supergo? what's next?


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Hey, thanks for engaging the conversation!