U2 and the Las Vegas Sphere: You can admire the band without loving the spectacle

The business theory known as the innovator’s dilemma proposes that market leaders are doomed to fail when disrupted by nimble new entrants. The only way to survive is by destroying the very thing that made you successful in the first place. “Everything must change for everything to remain the same,” as Tancredi says in The Leopard.

It has happened a few times in music. Think of Bob Dylan bringing his electric guitar to Newport Folk Festival. Or David Bowie killing Ziggy Stardust.

In the early 1990s U2 executed a similarly dramatic handbrake turn, successfully swerving to avoid imminent career obsolescence. Lampooned by the (camp, ironic, danceable) Pet Shop Boys, outflanked by the (edgier, chemically enhanced, danceable) Madchester bands, trapped in a classic-rock sarcophagus of their own making at a moment when all the energy was coming out of club culture, the band – still in their early 30s – looked set for an inevitable slide into heritage status.

[ U2 live in Las Vegas: An unforgettable gig unlike any other ]

Just in time for U2, Achtung Baby changed the narrative. The pivot from earnest authenticity to playful postmodern ambiguity and from straight-up rock to twisted beats provided them with a remarkable new lease of life that gifted them another decade and a half of chart success and twice that of stadium-filling tours. Without it they might now be doing two-for-the-price-of-one shows in mid-sized arenas alongside the likes of Billy Idol or Simple Minds. Instead here they are opening the most hyped new venue of the 21st century with a redo of Achtung Baby.

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You can appreciate the international success of Baileys Irish Cream without having to actually drink the stuff. And you can admire U2′s astuteness, longevity, work ethic and group solidarity without having much time for their particular brand of overblown spectacle, built for enormodomes and juiced with a ragbag of visual concepts appropriated from the scrapbooks of the digital avant-garde.

[ ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it’: U2 fans on the band’s Las Vegas Sphere debut ]

Reviewers were impressed by U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere (as we are supposed to call it). “Utterly astonishing,” said the Guardian. “Spectacular,” said Variety. Some reviewers expressed reservations about whether the sensory overload of the whole dwarfed the actual performance. YouTube footage shows Bono’s not-entirely-steady voice failing to compete with the Sturm und Drang of the visuals. Others found the whole experience made them a bit queasy. But the overall reaction was overwhelmingly positive. In a thoughtful piece in the New York Times, Jon Caramanica, paraphrasing track two from Achtung Baby, noted the way Las Vegas’s unique synthesis of banality and hyperreality renders it a place where the “simulacrum of glamour available to everyone ensures no one gets the real thing”.

“Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, no band played with the aesthetic of grandiosity more than U2, and no band made a philosophy of futurist communication so central to its visual presentation,” wrote Caramanica. “So the choice of U2 to show off what Sphere was capable of made sense – a messianic band for a messianic venue.”

Observing all this from several thousand kilometres away, that seems about right. Achtung Baby was the starting point for their Zoo TV tour and a reinvention by U2 of the art of stadium performance. Improving technology during the 1990s and 2000s allowed for sophisticated use of video on increasingly large screens. U2 led the way, turning traditional backdrops into high-tech son-et-lumiere shows that dazzled the audience with graphics, animations and high-res filmed images. Fighter jets swooped across the stage, mushroom clouds billowed, flowers bloomed, advertising slogans flashed alongside gnomic utterances. Millions of people loved it.

It hardly seems worth it at this point to pick at the glaring contradictions (some might use a stronger word) that attend a show in which, during With or Without You, the audience is treated to a “virtual fresco” depicting endangered animal species. This in a $2.3 billion, 35-storey, all-electronic folly in the middle of a desert at the end of the world’s hottest summer since records began. One is reminded of an ancient joke: Bono is onstage with his hands in the air. “Every time I clap my hands a child in Africa dies,” he shouts. A voice comes from the crowd: “Stop clapping your f**king hands, then.”

Sphere does seem the inevitable end point of three decades of this jiggery-pokery. More amusement ride than venue, it will be mildly interesting to see what it becomes in time. Its first non-U2 programming will be screenings of Postcard from Earth, a “special Sphere-targeted film” by Darren Aronofsky, director of the not-queasy-at-all The Whale, Black Swan and Mother! Go easy on the complimentary mai tais before that one.