New U2 or .......Getting More Political As You Go Along........

I know U2 is a divisive band on here but that's not the point of this post:

This is the spoken part of their "America Soul" single which I can't see at an early stage of their career you could imagine lyrics this embarassingly ham-fisted to me..........which gets to question as you get bigger do you kind of forge into this territory to justify your continued existence or is it just a trap - REM and Green Day are examples of this too - and some would argue that alone made them "better" - which begs the question did anybody want this political speechifying from U2/REM/Green Day in the first place - since it was never part of what probably made you fall in love with those bands initially (it was there early on in U2 but ..........."Refu-Jesus"????)

Of course I suppose it's possible people like this song too .........and I'm just focusing too much on this I dunno:

Put your hands in the air
Hold up the sky
Could be too late, but we still gotta try
There's a moment in our life where a soul can die
And the person in a country when you believe the lie

The lie (the lie, the lie)
There's a promise in the heart of every good dream
It's a call to action, not to fantasy
The end of a dream, the start of what's real
Let it be unity, let it be community
For refugees like you and me
A country to receive us
Will you be our sanctuary
Refu-Jesus



Post Edited (12-05-17 18:02)

My problem is not with most of those lyrics, especially the first half you quote, but with Bono referring to someone as rich as himself as a refugee and the line "Refu-Jesus." Roger Waters' latest solo album is full of heavy-handed anti-Trump lyrics, but I think he actually pulls them off quite well, although he's no Killer Mike. What do you think of the Downtown Boys, who describe themselves as "beyond woke"?

I've never really cared for U2 apart from ACHTUNG BABY and stray singles like "New Year's Day." To me, they appropriated post-punk for the arena much like Led Zeppelin did with blues. But weirdly, I love ACHTUNG BABY.

I like Downtown Boys in the sense that there's so much going on - it's like a riot, they actually sound like anarchy should sound...............I don't know if I can listen to it much but I do admire it.......



Post Edited (12-03-17 15:34)

Downtown Boys (female vocalist for those unfamiliar) would be bigger than Operation Ivy if they were a 90's East Bay band -- very comparable to FIDLAR. Their Sub Pop debut belongs on any Best Of 2017 list with a slot for skate-punk.

RefuJesus!! Hahahahah!

I wrote a long piece for a prominant web site a few years ago about why people hate U2 that they ended up not running. But oh man, may have to revisit it just to add that beauty.

By the way, I find the lyrics to Neil Young's "Already Great," the opening track on his new album, pretty embarrassing, from the opening "I'm from Canada, but I think the USA's great" to the closing "Whose streets? Our streets!" chant, which white guys in their 70s really shouldn't lift. I do like the song musically. Then on the second song he speak-sings embarrassingly about removing animals from the forest, although I really like his fuzzed-out lead guitar playing.

"Refu-Jesus"? Oh, please.

I haven't heard the new U2 album yet, and haven't been keen to find out, since their last album was such a letdown for me. (I actually was grateful for the free copy that got pushed to my iTunes account. It saved me the trouble of paying to find out how bad it is.)

As for the Downtown Boys -- an exciting, powerful band musically, but I haven't added them to my show. I gave up on that tuneless, bellowing, hectoring style of vocalese around the time Black Flag split up. Sooner or later, paying to get yelled at just loses its appeal.

I've heard the Downtown Boys' THE COST OF LIVING, and they somehow managed to combine female vocals and saxophone in a punk context without sounding like clones of X-Ray Spex! And if their lyrics stray into preachiness, it helps them half of them are impossible to make out, at least on a first listen. Yes, they are exciting musically, and "A Wall" is one of the better anti-Trump rock songs I've heard, especially since it comes from a Latina woman. The vocals are no more tuneless than the majority of punk, when you venture out from the more pop-oriented areas (which got very watered down quickly post-grunge and especially post-Green Day.) Spotify then went into their cover of "Dancing in the Dark," and I liked it more than anything on THE COST OF LIVING!

Steevee, it's nice to have someone here who digs Achtung Baby as much as I do. I'm a U2 fan from way back; indeed, Reno and I probably are the only ones here who haven't written them off a long time ago. But I wasn't as bowled over by The Joshua Tree as a lot of my contemporaries. (Ira's review summed it up perfectly: "Not as good as it is popular.")

But I was enthralled by Achtung Baby from the get-go. I was driving when I first heard "The Fly" on the radio; I had to pull over to listen, rather than risk driving into a pole or something. It hasn't lost any of its potency for me.

I don't want to gratuitously attack much-beloved bands or piss people off, but ACHTUNG BABY is actually the only U2 album I can listen to all the way through and enjoy. Something clicked for them that doesn't work for me on any of their other albums, even the first three (when they had the most claim to being an authentic post-punk band - I prefer Big Country or early Simple Minds' take on the "big rock" sound of the early '80s.) I'm not sure why ACHTUNG BABY sounds so much better to me, because I can hear tons of Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode in it, incorporated much the way their earlier albums lifted from Television, PiL and Joy Division, and "One" isn't much different than their other ballads.

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I prefer Big Country or early Simple Minds' take on the "big rock" sound of the early '80s.)

Haha, I prefer Big Country and Simple Minds PERIOD.

Back to the topic of the original post from mats84, the review of U2's latest on Pitchfork is good read. I really don't care anything about the album itself because I'm long past being a fan of the band's work, but I the reviewer's take on what drives the band is quite interesting...that more than anything, U2 strives to be relevant. This, he asserts, has long been their driving force.

Achtung Baby and War are my two all-time favorite U2 records. I know those are not universal picks, but when I got together with the Chunky Glasses folks to discuss the thirtieth anniversary of Joshua Tree (I saw the tour, too, which was a complete surprise), I was surprised that two others shared that sentiment. I actually like the second half of Joshua Tree more than the first.

Re: the new U2, which I have, I find the lyrics are increasingly banal and I wince at the Hallmark card sentimentality. The record still sounds good; it is definitely better than Songs of Innocence, I would say. They do something that can come across as glib but sometimes still effective, those "iPod commercials" that actually seem to succeed for what they are. After seeing the show at FedEx Field, I called them "stadium bangers" — like "Elevation," a flat-out ridiculous song that somehow works when presented at a massive scale. "Blackout" kinda works, and "You're the Best Thing About Me" is really good despite its hokey video. "Lights of Home" and a few other tracks are genuinely bad. They have been writing over-sincere songs about the United States as their spiritual home since Unforgettable Fire so the America-mongering doesn't necessarily bother me.

October is my favorite, and I like the first three albums (and the live at Red Rock), then it is diminishing returns, but I still have most of their albums in one form or another, except for Rattle and Hum.

I was pleasantly surprised by No Line on the Horizon, which was good and relatively low-key except for the awful lead single, but hardly listened to Songs of Innocence. I still bought Songs of Experience but with very low expectations. It won't get into my listening rotation for a few weeks, but I still hope that they'll catch lightning once again. I try not to listen to the lyrics, though, as most of the awfulness comes from that direction, so I never picked up that Innocence was about Bono growing up in Dublin.

If they would just give up on this idea that they have to be the biggest band in the world beloved by one and all, they would sill be able to put out interesting music. But then, that would mean Bono getting a personality transplant.

Every time I clap my hands a child in Africa dies...

Stop clapping your hands, then!

I liked U2 right up to around the time they must've felt that they could no longer get away with dressing like Amish cowboys and walking across frozen lakes.



Wasn't that right about the time "Rattle & Hum" came out? Didn't they go all sorts of Las Vegas after that?

Bah!

The only ones I dig are October and the 1st EP. Though I like October a lot.

Both times I saw them I thought - ah well, maybe it's an off night. Both times the concerts were filmed. Both films became the staple concert videos of their catalog.

Yes, I've made this post before. But then all of you have said the exact same thing about their last five albums.

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If they would just give up on this idea that they have to be the biggest band in the world beloved by one and all, they would sill be able to put out interesting music. But then, that would mean Bono getting a personality transplant.

Good point. Both points, actually.

Back in 1989, the Mekons referred to Bono as "the Dublin messiah." He often seems to confuse being a Christian with wanting to be Jesus.

By coincidence I was thumbing through my copy of The Rock Yearbook Volume 8 (a good series of books during the 80's) and I came across this quote of Sounds's review of Eugene Chadbourne's "Corpses of Foreign Wars":

"A witty, silly barbed album which realizes the historical supremacy of satire over the soapbox as a tool which which to bludgeon away at the Establishment".

Sounds like words that U2 (and so many other hearts-in-right-place bands/artists) need to take to heart.

Songs of Innocence was the first U2 album that I found to be just plain worthless -- mainly because its songs and its sound were so goddamn generic. A song paying tribute to Joey Ramone whose lyrics never mention him by name? A ballad called "A Song for Someone"? Please.

I blamed the band for taking thoroughly shitty advice from Jimmy Iovine, who was prez of Interscope when U2 presented its first-draft of the album. He claimed to have told them, "I don't hear anything here that would appeal to anyone who isn't already a U2 fan," and sent them back to the drawing board. Jeez, it made me angry to read that. What a shallow, sorry asshole, telling a band that's already got millions of fans around the world, in effect, "Get back to the studio and don't come out till you figure out how to win over a lot more."

Still, U2 certainly is big enough to tell even a guy like Iovine where he gets off. If they'd recognized his advice for the nonsense it was, and told him so, they might've released a better album. I haven't listened to Songs of Experience yet, but since they worked with most of the same producers who were involved in its predecessor, I'm definitely going in with reduced expectations.

Both. I want U2 to run for Big Brother.