Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2: A Love Story

by Brian Johnston, Susan Mackey-Kallis Villanova University

Overview

U2’s ongoing popular appeal is constructed in the spaces between band and fan, commercialism and community, spirituality and nihilism; finding meaning in a surface-oriented popular culture and contradiction in the depths of political and faith-based institutions. The band’s long-term success and continued relevance is a result of their ability to hold these energies in tension without one subsuming the other—to live in the liminal space that such contradictions invite. U2’s mythic trajectory was born from a bygone electronic era, realized in our current digital era but with an eye on the forthcoming virtual era; it is a new myth for the whole world, found in the most unlikely of places, popular culture. This book approaches the band’s mythic trajectory through a combination of rhetorical analysis and autoethnographic explorations that unveil the more personal experiences most of us have with media. Drawing heavily upon the works of Marshal McLuhan, Joseph Campbell, Thomas S. Frentz, and Janice Hocker Rushing, Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2 unpacks U2’s popular appeal through the lenses of Agape (spiritual, communal love), Amor (romantic love), and Eros (erotic love).

Check out the book's official website for additional information: https//:www.u2mythos.com

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498553056
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	11/08/2018
Series:	Communication Perspectives in Popular Culture
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.24(w) x 9.36(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Brian Johnston is visiting assistant professor in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University.

Susan Mackey-Kallis is associate professor in the Department of Communication at Villanova University.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Love and Liminality
Part One: Agape
Chapter Three: Archetypal Foundations of the “Holy” Community
Chapter Four: Call to Action
Part Two: Amor
Chapter Five: Into the Labyrinth
Chapter Six: Mythic Trajectory and the Overdeveloped Shadow
Part Three: Eros
Chapter Seven: Into the “Heart”
Chapter Eight: Integration and the Return: “Songs of Innocence + Experience” Tour
Chapter Nine: Love, Liminality, and the Transmodern Rock Star

Bibliography
About the Authors

Editorial Reviews

Reading Brian Johnston and Susan Mackey-Kallis’s Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2: A Love Story is an uplifting experience. Building on work in fan culture studies, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis offer a compelling account of U2’s musical biography while intertwining autoethnographic insights drawn from their experiences as long-time fans of the band. The result is a powerful love story, both of fans’ love for the artists who move them and of a band whose entire musical career has illustrated the inseparable and liminal nature of three types of love (eros, agape, and amor). Together, the authors vividly illustrate how U2 and its fans travel together on a quest for “unity and social justice in the world.

Roger C. Aden

It is rare to see a critical analysis of popular culture in which love is the organizing principle, and for this alone Johnston and Mackey-Kallis' book is distinctive and meaningful. They take great care to explicate the ways in which agape, eros, and amor are articulated by the Irish rock band in their songs, music videos, social action and performances. .. Along with its distinctive organizing principle, the book's most important characteristic is its transmodern perspective. This philosophical viewpoint argues that the interconnectedness of all things can and should be considered in the analysis of cultural phenomenon. This perspective, which reclaims the spiritual, also allows for the symbolic, the mysterious, the archetypal, and the transcendent. As transmodern critics, Johnston and Mackey-Kallis aim to interpret the songs, performances, music videos, and social action of U2 so to articulate the ways in which the band co-constructs interconnectedness with its fan communities.

Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies

Johnston and Mackey-Kallis’ Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2: A Love Story is much more than an academic study of the super-band U2 and its fan community. It is a deeply moving meditation on the complex character of love – one that deftly draws critical inspiration from psychoanalysis, medium theory, and media erotics to illuminate the ways that the music, at its best, stirs the soul, creates community, and calls on all of us to realize our better natures. Full of passion, pleasure, and insight, U2: A Love Story invites readers to fall in love with a band that has left an indelible mark on both rock music and its fans.

Brian L. Ott

Johnston and Mackey-Kallis deliver an original, compelling, and intimate analysis of U2 across the last four decades. An essential book for scholars of music, mythology, politics, and popular culture.

Tony Adams