U2 - THE SAINTS ARE COMING - song for a healthy soul

U2 choose their cover versions carefully and it would seem that Edge was the instigator of this old Skids single when he looked around for a song to use for his campaign to help those made homeless, city-less, stateless after Hurricane Katrina. Hardly even a hit when released in the late seventies U2 with help from Green Day made it a number 1 across the world.

 

The Edge’s choosing of the song may have had a few threads. The New Orleans Saints is a Football team and the two collaborating bands would re-open their stadium with a live version of the song. At the time of it being recorded in Abbey Road studios there was already heavy publicity for the 200^th Anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery. The grouping of clergy and lay people who sparked the social reform of the eighteenth century were known as the Saints. They were the kind of political, religious and spiritual leaders that New Orleans needed after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city.

The Saints Are Coming was written by Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson about a friend of Jobson’s who went off to with the British Army to N. Ireland. While there his father died and the song in its original intention was a son trying to reach his father without any hope of succeeding. There was a cathartic message at the heart of the song.

It takes on another hue with the U2/Green Day version. U2 have used the phone illustration before as a metaphor for prayer. They have also made a lot of music in the tension of prayer prayed and being frustrated with the seeming silence coming back. The Psalmist knew this frustration as of course did Job.

With the video another theme kicks in. Between live shots of the band both in Abbey Road and in the New Orleans Dome there are news clips of the US army coming as saints to rescue the people of the flooded city. It is a heroic image, powerfully missional of mercy. The troops in Iraq are re-employed to save their own people rather than being distracted overseas. It reminds the discerning listener of an old Larry Norman song American Novel, from as far back as 1973 but sadly still relevant:

“You’re far across the ocean in a war that’s not your own

And while you’re winning there you’re going to lose the one at home”

 

The video demands a re-imagining. This is how the world could be like if people make different choices of re-imagining. As the video ends with the sign NOT AS SEEN ON TV. It is the dream of imaginative alternative. Powerful in the force of music and image, there is an adrenaline rush of inspiration to get out there and change the world.

Comments

[David]

Great track... The problem with the video is that there are some, including my relatively clued-in son, who think that the US airlift actually DID happen...

[Beth]

I'm interested in the 2 different versions of this video -- same basic visuals, same basic theme, but the less-circulated version is more aggressively political (esp at the end with a couple of very pointed anti-Iraq war references).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO5ETcbGw6U