Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music U2: A Love Story considers the massive appeal of the Irish super-star rock band during the last four decades. Co-authors Brian Johnston and Susan Mackey-Kallis analyze the band's songs and albums, their stage performances, and their music videos, along with U2's fans' expectations and communal practices, so to better understand how and why U2 has remained an international phenomenon since the 1980s. U2 has stayed relevant throughout the last four decades in spite of the fact that (or maybe because of the fact) the band's agenda is often at odds with traditional rock culture. In other words, throughout most of its history, U2 has been committed to human rights, spirituality, and non-violence, rather than celebrating the more typical rock star menu of drugs, sex and fast living.
At the core of Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2: A Love Story is the argument that U2's longevity and success are due to the band routinely modeling the archetypal hero's journey. It is a journey, the authors explain, that is a continuously unfolding love story.
In fact, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis organize their book by way of love. They argue that U2 propagates three kinds of love: agape, eros and amor. It is rare to see a critical analysis of popular culture in which love is the organizing principle, and for this alone Johnston and Mackey-Kallis' book is distinctive and meaningful. They take great care to explicate the ways in which agape, eros, and amor are articulated by the Irish rock band in their songs, music videos, social action and performances.
The authors explain that these three different types of love often intermingle for both U2 and the band's fans. While these sorts of love can be derailed into darkness, the band and its fans most often use the three kinds of love in positive and productive ways. U2, the authors argue, are passionate and talented enough to create the conditions for their fans to experience love in action. The band's focus on the spiritual (amor) and the communal (agape) are critical characteristics of the band's ethos, their songs, and their social and political actions which are grounded in social justice. Because U2 is a talented, intense, and passionate rock band, their erotic energy (eros) helps to turn their fans' passions into compassion for the planet and its inhabitants.
Along with its distinctive organizing principle, the book's most important characteristic is its transmodern perspective. This philosophical viewpoint argues that the interconnectedness of all things can and should be considered in the analysis of cultural phenomenon. This perspective, which reclaims the spiritual, also allows for the symbolic, the mysterious, the archetypal, and the transcendent. As transmodern critics, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis aim to interpret the songs, performances, music videos, and social action of U2 so to articulate the ways in which the band co-constructs interconnectedness with its fan communities. Their transmodern point of view helps to create a critically astute and uplifting account of a rock band and its fans.
Obviously, U2: A Love Story is a must read for fans of the band, but it is also an important text for students and scholars of popular music and popular culture. The authors' critical interpretation of the band's lyrics, music videos and their performances on stage—throughout the decades—reveal that U2's interests and passions are continuously evolving. While many popular culture studies focus on a single time period or cultural era, U2: A Love Story considers the band's creative output in all of its iterations, from the 1980s until the 2010s. This long view is important because it reminds us that popular culture and its meanings are never fixed and are always in flux.
To add to the love story, both Johnston and Mackey-Kallis declare their own fandom and describe own sustained appreciation for U2, reflecting on how the band has shaped both their personal and academic lives. They employ autoethnographic methods for making sense of their fandom, in relation to the U2 universe. Autoethnography is a form of research in which writers and researchers use their own personal experiences, self-reflection and writing to connect with wider cultural, political, and social meanings. Their own accounts are important to this study because they help us to better understand what it means to be a dedicated fan of the Irish rock band.
As both authors are enthusiasts of U2, it is entirely appropriate to include their personal reflections in this book. Because most of Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music U2: A Love Story focuses on the creative output of the band, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis' personal accounts are most welcome, and if anything, it would have been valuable to include more of their personal stories about the band and its significance to their lives.
On a formatting side note, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis' autoethnographic narratives are set off by italics and shading or in some cases the narratives are not shaded but just italicized. While such formatting aberrations have been observed in other autoethnographic texts, the purpose of it is unclear. Italics, shading and other such stylistic inflections necessarily set the autoethnographic work apart from the rest of the text. Isolating personal and meaningful accounts from the rest of the written work suggests that autoethnographic writing cannot easily be assimilated with other kinds of scholarly writing. Such an intimation is unfortunate, but editors and writers can easily remedy the perceived plight of the isolated autoethnographic text by simply avoiding such formatting choices.
Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music U2: A Love Story is a worthy love story and a thoughtful and thorough account of one of the most successful and socially conscious bands in rock history.
— Reviewed by Janna Jones, Northern Arizona University
Janna Jones is a professor in the School of Communication at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. A twentieth-century historian, Jones' scholarship focuses on the history of cinema going, architectural preservation, historic movie theaters, amateur filmmaking, public exhibition, urban and suburban history and public art. Her new book The Spirit of Detroit: The Motor City Sculptures of Marshall Fredericks is currently in press at Wayne State University Press.
