One of the soundtracks for the period was Poe’s Haunted, which came out in tandem on 10/31/00. Not only did it provide the "boy meets girl" audio gate crash of the present proposal in her mind with “Hey Pretty” (-though it’s “soul architect”, not “sole architect”), it did so in terms of a virtual building under the sea in the belly of a whale (in terms of conflating Biblical analogy with her symbolism of the universal unconscious sea, there simply wasn’t a better marriage than that one), it was complemented by “Wild” and “Haunted”. Not to mention (given her promiscuity overseas) “Not a Virgin”.
It spoke of the act of supplanting that had taken place in terms of her father with “Control”, which reacted, it so happened, not just in terms of how she’d assumed control in that context by crossing the ocean, but as an aside also inferred the advent she made in terms of taking over the contest itself. It did so in terms of supplanting a king. It also did so in the context of a lover’s conquest (the song’s subject has discovered love; it’s whispered in her ear, -on the sandy shore, no less). She also possessed a garden, which was about come into play with Bono’s same allusion in a context that was much more specific when All That You Can’t Leave Behind came out simultaneously. That track would be “Wild Honey” (that song that would happen to be the one to target her most specifically out of the entire album). So the song inadvertently, in its confluence of allusions, performed as a bridge of sorts between the king’s supplanting depicted in Smashing Pumpkins’ SIYL video, and what Bono had done next, -after he met her, in terms of the very analogy Bono employed about meeting her on the sandy shore with “Never Let Me Go” from the Million Dollar Hotel Soundtrack. And it timed this to the summer, when they’d not only met for real, but in terms of specific and binding nature of “Summer Rain”.
The album also put a humorous spin on the sour aftertaste of having been abandoned inside someone’s art (which was now happening times two) by singing about turning lemons into lemon meringue (perfectly within reference to Bono’s initiation of the devolved Femina –“Lemon” which had just been transmuted into a universal symbol with the advent of Radiohead’s “Everything in its Right Place” embedded as it were in Kid A).
Then “Amazed” (4:06) managed to insert the context of “Johnny” (that one juxtaposed as both John the Baptist and Elijah thanks to “Jezebel” from Poe’s debut album Hello) into what was supposed to simply be a concept album about her father’s death (in terms of the artistic feedback beheading she was witnessing, no big leap there), and shifted it into the spiritual symbolism by conflating it with the existent hallway analogy. (This was further reinforced by “5 ½ Minute Hallway” –which transferred and continued the hallway analogy employed by both Bono and Martin Gore, in “Rush”, and so on, where the connection still wasn’t being made (with a hallway that kept stretching instead of compressing), -this right when she was actually trying to make the connection tangibly in the real world, and felt it had failed.)
It also conflated “Johnny” as possibly being the terrifying father figure. This effectively shifted the whole song into another context entirely, not to mention the concept of the concept album, and conflated it with the concepts in Hello as well. She was leaving, getting away from “Johnny”; the decision to leave was based on all the ink that had bled from her hands which created a picture that she understood (her journal for the period had been over 300,000 words, -her first). What was very interesting was the allusion of a suitcase was not something she packed, what was described (although she was alluded as having packed her things), -affirmation was when Johnny’s suitcase was received. This is an incredibly interesting nuance, because while she was the one who went packing, -the allusion is to a delivered suitcase, and it being Johhny’s. Quite interesting in terms of her opening introduction to Bono where she’d declared how her father believed himself to be a prophet who was the reincarnation of Elijah and John the Baptist, -who’d created a Biblically based doctrine based on pre-conception existence, -in the context that when Poe had created the “Johnny” character, she’d happen to conflate the name of John the Baptist with the story of Elijah (already explained). Not only did U2 significantly convey the transmission of love in a suitcase through the airport in the “Beautiful Day” video –but the only signal that existed to Rahab that Bono may have absorbed her missives and found them to have significant import was that he named his firstborn son Elijah right after that introduction, -the moment they met. (The “love” suitcase is scanned at 1:50 -Bono’s also depicted grabbing a suitcase in passing at 1:14, maybe signifying he’s arrived at the airport looking for it. It may be he finds what he’s looking for when he bites the woman’s apple, bliss from a complete stranger in the airport at 2:29. (Think on that for a second.)) In other words, the transmission of “Johnny” could not have been more literal in terms of being received and being the signal, -and being what mattered.
