U2, Vertigo 05 Live From Chicago (DVD ISBN # 02498 74644).

            Writer Steve Beard recalls Bono's words to his father at the band's beginning: "[God] gives us strength and a joy that does not depend on drink or drugs. This strength will, I believe, be the quality that will take us to the top of the music business. I hope our lives will be a testament to the people who follow us, and to the music business where never before have so many lost and sorrowful people gathered in one place pretending they're having a good time. It is our ambition to make more than good music." The concert footage on this DVD from two shows in Chicago on May 9–10, 2005 realize Bono's original ambition.

           The concert begins with two songs from U2's most recent CD, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb: "City of Blinding Lights" and "Vertigo." Bono has said that CBL is a song about innocence, and the spectacular lighting accompanying it provides a warm welcoming glow. Then with "Vertigo" there is an abrupt shift. The chorus of "City of Blinding Lights" ("Oh you look so beautiful tonight, in the city of blinding lights") is replaced by, "I'm at a place called Vertigo, it's everything I didn't want to know." And so beauty gives way to confusion, and blinding light to "Vertigo's" darkness: "Lights go down, it's dark, the jungle is your head." In the midst of this darkness comes a familiar voice, the voice Jesus heard when he was tempted in the wilderness: "All this, all this can be yours, just give me what I want, and no one gets hurt."

           In this world everyone gets hurt and in this concert we feel the sorrow of a son who has lost his father ("Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own"), the desperation of a heroin addict ("Running to Stand Still"), and the futility of war ("Love and Peace or Else," and "Bullet the Blue Sky"). It is particularly poignant when Bono inserts lines from "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" into "Bullet the Blue Sky" and cries out in anguish, "I want to go home."

           Heaven is the ultimate vision of home, the place described in "Where the Streets Have No Names," and will encompass all that Bono mentions in his introduction: "from the bridge at Selma of the Mississippi to the mouth of the Nile, from the swamplands of Louisiana to the high peaks of Kilimanjaro, from Dr. King's America to Nelson Mandela's Africa." In many ways the high point of the concert is not a song but the sermon and high-tech altar call that follows "Where the Streets Have No Name."

We have the technology. We have the resources. We have the know-how to end extreme poverty if we have the will. And I believe we have the will. . . .We're going to end extreme poverty. We're going to make poverty history. That's what has fallen for us to do. And I believe that that is not an impossible adventure. I believe in 50 years they will look back on this moment and say there were some people at a time who said, "It's not ok to have a child die for the lack of a twenty cent immunization. It's not ok for a child to die for lack of food in its belly in the 21st century." Now I know you know that. But I'd like you to tell President Bush that, Prime Minister Blair and any other politician you see. You can do it quite easy. You just take out your cell phone . . . Cell phones, dangerous little devices. . . .

           Bono's sermon is followed by "One" and then a first encore featuring songs from the CD Achtung Baby. U2 took the phrase "Achtung Baby" from Mel Brooks's The Producers. It is a bit surreal to go from a sermon on "extreme poverty" to "Zoo Station,""The Fly," and "Mysterious Ways." When U2 recorded Achtung Baby they were mindful of the critics who charged them with pretentiousness, and the songs on that CD became part of their answer. Perhaps then the song choice in this first encore is, in part, the band's way of attempting to head off that same charge having just challenged their audience to end extreme poverty.

           The second encore ends with two prayers, "Yahweh" and "40." The former is a petition for God to "take this heart and make it break." The latter, which draws from Psalm 40 and Psalm 6, holds out the hope that "I will sing, sing a new song."

           The carefully constructed set list building up to "One" and ending with "40" makes the show greater than the sum of its songs. At the end of the first song we hear "Blessings are not just for the ones who kneel . . . luckily," but by the end of the show we are joining U2 in prayer.