When I first heard the CD "No Line On The Horizon" I thought something was wrong... it seemed just a pack of poor pop songs without conceptual unity, some tracks located in similar sounding places of previous records... it seemed something done in a hurry for commercial purposes only. Something was definitely wrong!
Then I saw the U2 movie "Linear" and another dimension opened in front of my eyes... I instantly understood that it was not just a complement for the CD or a bonus for fans... it was the REAL album! The movie(and its plot) and the songs(with their lyrics) merge in such a way it looks like U2 changed rock'n'roll indeed, as announced in the Rolling Stone magazine that followed the release of the record. I always thought U2 couldn't beat themselves after Achtung Baby and the ZooTV. That was their ideal as a band...
But with Linear they surprisingly break new artistic ground by going beyond their rock band art - as Pink Floyd did with The Wall or The Who with Tommy. The new art is bigger than the artist's media. And better, without just copying the formula of the past examples... but making it fresh, modern, new cinema like.
That per se would be enough... but the movie transcends and includes the band's career symbols, "eating" them semantically... we got here Bono's Discotheque character on an identity crisis between the Supermarket Erotique world of the ZOOTV era and the religious ground of desert loneliness and biblical numbers of Joshua Tree and All That You Cant Leave Behind (the movie starts in France, by the way).
The traffic cop of the Rue du Marais then become Bono's new alter ego getting out of the American blues ground of the 80s and the Europe of the 90s and 2000s... takes its new motorcycle soul and heads his imagination to Africa - the third U2 aesthetic ground, an out of time origin and home, a point of view of eternity Bono always looked for on his lyrics. The White as Snow scene here then merges One with I Still Haven't Found What Im Looking For.
By the end of the movie we understand the cover of the CD... and more: we understand what is to come. The next U2 album, called by Bono "Songs of Ascent", will end the hero's journey - something the movie and the songs do not show us. The movie ends exactly on the line of the horizon...
The Edge said the band didn't want to "complicate". So, they altered the tracks order and released that commercial CD version without soul. In Linear, there is another track order that amazingly change the whole way you listen to the album... and there is a song I cant accept it was not released in the crap CD version: Winter. The song is one of the best of the work and its essential for the whole art conception.
One last comment: the Get On Your Boots scene... a Fassbinder-like epic mood that makes you wonder... why didn't U2 just release this DVD alone?
(please, visit my Orkut community "U2 Linear" to share more analysis)
