“After The Sphere” in terms of when I write this note—the day after experiencing U2, Achtung, etc., in Las Vegas. Also, though: in terms of the question their residency seems to pose: what might the next integrated experiential mega-thing look like, after this? Setting that prognostication aside and focusing instead on why the show begs the “what could be next?” question: it feels self-consciously like the end of the line, a kind of capstone experience or final project. Post-stardom, post-concert, post-album, post-nostalgia, post-internet, post-point-of-no-environmental/political-return. Iceberg having breached the hull, you might scramble for the exits. Alternately, you could make something nice in what little time you have left.
Achtung in Vegas says it is doing the latter, is sometimes accused of doing the former, but in my view actually obeys a kind of psychedelic logic that is neither. My sense is that it privileges seeing something over doing something. Though it feels intensely “creative” in many ways, “never before seen” as a kind of base-case, the experience of being there was, for me, largely an experience of colliding with an always-already, a recognition of the situation of contemporary life, a laying bare.
For all of the framing around novelty, around the extent to which this show is a singular achievement in multimodal saturation, my experiential sense was that of looking, all together, into a mirror. Not a series of interlocking prisms a la Wink World, which we walked through earlier that day, nor a surround of floor-to-ceiling slimming reflective surfaces in the hotel lobby that become a retroactive justification for furikake fries and a soft scramble at midnight. Mirrors of that sort manipulate, persuade, even to some extent coerce us; they offer us something that is almost actually there, that is close enough to actual reality to make a persuasive argument. In Wink World it is that infinitude is impossible to really wrap our heads around until we pay to watch fluorescent streamers spin in a hall of mirrors when the bass drops, especially if we’d upgraded to the 3-D glasses. (We had.) In the hotel lobby, it is that the delta between our conventional self-regard and the one arising from a subtle vertical plastic-man stretch has been precisely determined, in dollars, in order to be sold back to us at the Ultra Dining Experience at the end of the funnel.
This feels like coincidence but it is curated, calculated, strategized. It is so familiar to me and so thoroughly baked in to my experience of leaving the house that I take its automaticity for granted. That particular type of familiarity is qualitatively different, though, than the bare awareness of being alive in 2024 on offer—texts from Biden’s team punctuating the slow walk through security asking me to buy in, literally. Even if most of the crowd seemed to be mining the set for share-worthy video clips, flattening a massive sphere into a rectangular pocket computer, you got the sense that everyone was, in fact, actually there, and actually attuned to what was unfolding.
Vegas vacuums money out of you by design. We sense it. It’s a tithe, the amount you are willing to lose, the terms of the transaction and the quip we might write on the memo line to justify the trip in advance or remember it afterwards. That is most certainly one version of crystal-clarity around modern living. We justify it or it pisses us off, we embrace it as fun or spectacle or irony, or we roll our eyes. Regardless, it affirms our sense of who we are and what we value. This crazy desert city is over there with its cash-sucker and we are over here with our self-righteousness or moral indignation or circumscribed terms of engagement—what happens in Vegas, amirite?—or even unabashed delight. In that way we see ourselves as individuals in dynamic relationship with the world out there. Difference. Separation. Deep, abiding.
But in the case of U2 at the sphere it was as though my whole history with their songs, their sound, the culture that lionized it (for a while, and then delighted in claiming and hot-taking their latter-day aesthetic missteps) went fractally recursive. They were U2, the actual band, actual Bono and the actual Edge and actual Adam Clayton and, well, not the actual drummer but still. The fact of their physical presence on a giant turntable that Brian Eno designed, their aura, their whatever-you-want-to-call-it that makes live music, especially at that level of celebrity and cultural embeddedness, feel like going to real church, like transubstantiation. But they were also U2 cast in a spectacle about U2, starring U2, as themselves, with occasional cameos by the members of U2. This is how this world works, they openly say. And in that awareness to play it and play with it my uncanny, unmistakable, and totally counterintuitive sense what that they were dissolving, giving it back, giving it away. U2 is bigger than U2, based on tautological logic, in a sense the yin to MAGA yang. Alive and sentient, bigger than its figurehead. But in the U2 case, and I know this sounds insane, the project is to disintegrate the ego instead of to concentrate it. How could it have felt like they were stepping back?
That’s what I have been trying to tease out, and it occurred to me multiple times, midstream, on the return flight home, how nice it is to have a place to make and share an attempt. So thank you, all 237 of you. (Not bad!)
The way to think about the show, in fact, might be as a really, really convincing essay. Intro paragraph: here is a spherical concrete enclosure, here is a rock band. Thesis: the wall was never concrete, never solid. It was a projection all along but given your buy-in, let’s reveal that by pretend-cracking through the pretend surface, by using your illusion. Behind the concrete? The band. In front of the concrete? The band. Got it, all understood, please proceed with spectacle. Until the second song, the moment of surfacing the methodology: slogans unfolding at frame-rate. Words flash by faster than we can knowingly parse but that we actually can, it turns out, read, on some deep level. It is easier to read them than not to, even at speed.
And that is what we will do for the next two hours: take it all in without knowing exactly how. In that sense the word salad that jitters through song 2 is a cheat code, a weird sequence of buttons that both unlocks some aptitude we didn’t know we had as well as reveals the program’s architecture and its interfacing with our own. It lights the perceptual path.
Calibration complete. Enjoy the show, til the last song, performed in bright light, congratulatory and maybe on-the-nose. I resisted ending with some permutation of the chorus. “It’s a Beautiful Day” does not seem to fully capture the sendoff, but I can’t seem to get away from it as a kind of inevitable appeal. For all of the ways that “it’s dangerous out there” that the show articulates, there is in fact something beautiful about being willing to call it. Not how one sees it, but how it actually is.
Andrea, thank you for this. Vegas and U2 are sucking me into their spheres in two weeks time, despite all sensible time and money constraints. I will be reflecting on your words before, during and after the gig. Cheers.
I saw it this weekend, too. I’ll admit, I didn’t think that hard about it but appreciate that you did.