Final Results: Rate the Song Series, 2011-2012

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FWIW, my first U2 album was 1980-1990, but I wasn't captivated by the band until I followed it up with the full albums. The first one was Achtung Baby. I love the old hits, but they weren't what truly grabbed me; it was the back catalog that did it. Axver has almost the same story.

This was also nearly three years before I joined Interference.
when i first got into them, they didn't even have any best ofs to buy. :depressed: but i'm like you, what really got me was when i started exploring their entire catalogue and bought more than just achtung baby and zooropa. and it was the deep cuts and b-sides. a couple years later when we got the internet i remember using realaudio (yes) to stream their b-sides, and even bought a couple bootleg cds of their early demos and b-sides off ebay.

when i bought achtung baby, interference didn't even exist. we didn't even have a computer at home yet. i'm not trying to one-up you, just saying that i also didn't try to align my likes and dislikes with the masses of interference or anything. i like what i like and couldn't care less if someone agrees or disagrees with me. over the years i've caught plenty of flak for liking the music i do (yes, even u2 as they were quite uncool during pop) so why would i suddenly try to fit in now when i'm way too old for that crap, when i didn't even at least pretend to do it during my formative years when everyone just wants to fit in?
 
The big point to take away from all of this is that you can't like what you haven't heard (though you can pretend to; that's something all hive members are used to doing), and folks who only know the singles are missing out. Maybe their favorites would remain the same, but there's a lot of great U2 they haven't heard and certainly should. We can all agree on that.

Well, except maybe Beav. I miss that guy.
 
digitize said:
1) Where the Streets Have No Name
2) Zooropa
3) The Fly
4) With or Without You
5) All I Want Is You
6) Bad
7) The Unforgettable Fire
8) Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
9) Until the End of the World
10) Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
11) New Year's Day
12) A Sort of Homecoming
13) Gone
14) One Tree Hill
15) Lemon
16) City of Blinding Lights
17) Love Is Blindness

18) Running to Stand Still
19) Beautiful Day
20) Moment of Surrender

21) Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
22) Pride (In the Name of Love)
23) Your Blue Room

Now, that would make some setlist. It's even beautifully arranged into openers and closers. Although not sure how wowy would fit so early.

Sorry if this has been said already, I couldn't be bothered reading all the pages...
 
FWIW, my first U2 album was 1980-1990, but I wasn't captivated by the band until I followed it up with the full albums. The first one was Achtung Baby. I love the old hits, but they weren't what truly grabbed me; it was the back catalog that did it. Axver has almost the same story.

This was also nearly three years before I joined Interference.

Yep. I had 1980-1990 and enjoyed it. ATYCLB came out, I got it, I liked some songs. 1990-2000 came out; Gone and Lady With The Spinning Head blew me away. Not One. Not Mysterious Ways. Not Nick66 Casual Fan Endorsed Choon #23. Then a friend gave me old copies of the RAH and UABRS videos. After I heard 11 O'clock Tick Tock ... well, that's the song that put me on the trajectory that got me here some six months later. Who knew I was infected by the hive mind so early? No casual fan is meant to know 11 O'clock Tick Tock, let alone fall in love with U2 because of it!

Also, are we actually arguing about whether Pop was meant to be an accessible and radio-friendly mainstream album or not? Jesus bloody Christ, the clue's in the ironic album and tour names.
 
Gone and Lady With The Spinning Head blew me away. Not One. Not Mysterious Ways. Not Nick66 Casual Fan Endorsed Choon #23.
Clearly, you're bred of some superior genetic material. Why, I bet you knew how to wipe your own ass before you were 12!
No casual fan is meant to know 11 O'clock Tick Tock, let alone fall in love with U2 because of it!
I assume you're attempting to be ironic here, or maybe funny. If not, it's unintentionally hilarious anyway, so thanks, I enjoyed that!
Also, are we actually arguing about whether Pop was meant to be an accessible and radio-friendly mainstream album or not?
Like every U2 album since the Stone Age, Pop was made with the biggest possible sales and tour-numbers in mind. The ironic title was probably intended to be humorous given that it's probably their "darkest" batch of songs, lyrically... but the record as a whole is more attuned to the mainstream than Zooropa, which was an international #1 hit on the same pop charts that the Spice Girls and Britney Spears dominated (as was Pop).

Only on a U2 forum would people be arguing, in all seriousness, that an album selling 8 million copies and followed by an overblown stadium tour was intended to be obscure.
 
Pop was attuned to the mainstream in a very deeply ironic and mocking way.

Yes, I agree it is a sardonic album. And they also wanted it to be as accessible to the mainstream as possible without compromising what they set out to achieve. I mean, they released five singles off it, and DYFL could have easily been another - so that's SIX potential singles which is half the album. If they wanted Pop to be an inaccessible curio of an record, that's a very funny way to go about it. U2's mission statement has always been to connect with the widest possible audience, and that did not change with Pop.
 
Yes, I agree it is a sardonic album. And they also wanted it to be as accessible to the mainstream as possible without compromising what they set out to achieve. I mean, they released five singles off it, and DYFL could have easily been another - so that's SIX potential singles which is half the album. If they wanted Pop to be an inaccessible curio of an record, that's a very funny way to go about it. U2's mission statement has always been to connect with the widest possible audience, and that did not change with Pop.

:up:

Stop Making Sense.
 
What I don't think you guys understand is that it is sardonic about being pop music. Did it have pop music intentions? Yes, in a way, but it also made fun of them in a way that made it look incredibly bizarre. And the variety of pop music that it chased after wasn't even close to being popular with a lot of places, such as pretty much all of the United States. I really don't think that U2 would have produced anything like the album that they did if their primary goal with it was reaching the widest possible audience. It was obviously somewhat of an intention, but not in particularly serious way. There's no way that U2 could produce that album, which, all said it done, was completely divergent from popular music and the mainstream, with a primary goal of making it tear the charts up. Whenever it flirts with "pop music" (I hate using this term, because the sort of "pop music" that Pop got involved with was so far from what many people would consider to be pop music in the late 1990s), it also mocks it to a degree where it could never really fit in.

But when it comes down to it... what is this debate about, really? Pop is a highly multifaceted album with a lot of depth from it. It's silly to say that it was just chasing after mainstream listeners, but its relationship with the mainstream is fairly complex, and that's something that I like about it. I don't think it's really possible to shrug off its mainstream ambitions; I think it's highly inadvisable to say that U2 were just trying to reach the widest possible audience with the album. There's no way they would have released a combination of quasi-sardonic dance songs and dirges if that was their goal, because that's not what was popular in 1997.
 
It's not Spiceworld, like U2 apparently wishes it had been (as read by Nick & Nipples).

It's not Metal Machine Music, like the rest of us apparently think it is (no one thinks that).

What the fuck do you people have against compromise? U2 is a band steered by human beings, not a concept or a corporation. They can release singles from an album while also having some balls and sticking to a vision. It's clearly not just one or the other, and it never has been. That's why U2 can put Pride and EPAA on the same album, or less fortunately, MOS and Crazy Tonight.

It's laughable to think that U2 went into the recording of Pop thinking LOTS OF HITS when Miami, Please, Wake Up Dead Man and Mofo are on there. It's also laughable to think that U2 didn't have their audience in mind when they stuck IGWSHA and Staring At The Sun on there. It's a little of both, as is often their way.
 
"Nick & Nipples" sounds like a great band name. they would definitely have lots of hits.
 
the only thing that Shits me is that people reckon the middle 3 of No Line ... is a sure tell sign U2 sold its soul to commercial radio
while not batting an eye over the entire If God ... - Last night ...section of POP (were all those songs singles?)

personally I reckon there's value in both
and I can recognize the band needs songs on an album to engage their audience
 
mikal said:
"Nick & Nipples" sounds like a great band name. they would definitely have lots of hits.

Maybe even a TV show.

Like I've said before, it pisses me off that the most engaging, IMO single-ready song on Pop wasn't even released as a single: Gone. Boy, they fucked up with that one. Release that one as the lead single instead of Discotheque and it's a whole different ballgame.
 
It's not Spiceworld, like U2 apparently wishes it had been (as read by Nick & Nipples).

It's not Metal Machine Music, like the rest of us apparently think it is (no one thinks that).

What the fuck do you people have against compromise? U2 is a band steered by human beings, not a concept or a corporation. They can release singles from an album while also having some balls and sticking to a vision. It's clearly not just one or the other, and it never has been. That's why U2 can put Pride and EPAA on the same album, or less fortunately, MOS and Crazy Tonight.

It's laughable to think that U2 went into the recording of Pop thinking LOTS OF HITS when Miami, Please, Wake Up Dead Man and Mofo are on there. It's also laughable to think that U2 didn't have their audience in mind when they stuck IGWSHA and Staring At The Sun on there. It's a little of both, as is often their way.

You haven't accurately characterised a single thing I've said in this thread...you're pretty much just making it up as you go along. I guess it's easy to appear nuanced when you mischaracterise others arguments as black and white. So I'll leave you to it.

As far as U2's desire that Pop be an accessible album, it's Bono you disagree with. I suggest you take your complaints up with him.
 
Nick66 said:
You haven't accurately characterised a single thing I've said in this thread...you're pretty much just making it up as you go along. I guess it's easy to appear nuanced when you mischaracterise others arguments as black and white. So I'll leave you to it.

As far as U2's desire that Pop be an accessible album, it's Bono you disagree with. I suggest you take your complaints up with him.

Holy shit, do you understand how silly you sound hen you keep quoting Bono in 2005?
 
ahem:
What constitutes a post or thread worthy of being closed, deleted, or edited by the forum moderators?
Anything that is a personal attack (by personal attack, we also include yawns, rolleyes, etc. that are directly intended to annoy, or used excessively)
the mods are only going to remind you to read the rules so many times, you know. it's already been suggested to you once that if you don't want to continue this debate, just stop posting. you don't always have to have the last word.
 
Yeah, not sure why Bono in 2005 is somehow the final word on the band's accomplishments.

Didn't he turn around just a year later and say that both ATYCLB and The Bomb failed as "albums", and that the sum of the parts were better than the whole?

And you know, they were saying No Line was possibly their best work, and then they turned their back on that album too and tried to rationalize what happened.

The only two albums they DON'T criticize are AB and JT, and BIG SURPRISE! those are their two best-selling albums.
 
Have you read U2 by U2? It's pretty abundantly clear how they feel about Pop: they rushed the album, and had a good group of songs, but they needed a little more refining. They all said that by the second leg of Popmart, they had the songs figured out and knew what they wanted them to be. They blamed the album's perceived failure on the unfinished songs and the fact that they poorly marketed it by overdoing the irony and making people inthe US think they were actually making disco music. The video for Discotheque did them in, as did a bad first night of the tour.

You have to understand the context of the album. But you already made a (frankly idiotic) post saying context doesn't matter, so I guess you'll never be qualified to talk about it because of your intense dedication to your own naivety.
 
Didn't he turn around just a year later and say that both ATYCLB and The Bomb failed as "albums", and that the sum of the parts were better than the whole?

I thought he was only talking about Atomic Bomb in that regard, saying that it really, really annoyed him. I could be wrong, but I don't think I've read him say that about ATYCLB.
 
If Bono is trying to 'massage' public opinion about U2, he's almost always spinning the truth. Whether that is regarding internal band dynamics or the creation of an album/song that hasn't been received well by the public. For instance, he is always selling the idea that the four members of U2 all agreed on (insert any album here). And then years later, we find out truths that are able to be read between the lines..

U2 didn't hire some (relatively) no-name trip-hop producer in 1996 to help them find creative ideas because they knew it could compete on the charts with post-grunge in the biggest music market on planet Earth. That's a ludicrous opinion. They took a huge gamble, hoping that it would compete and it didn't pay off like they wanted. They wanted (X) and didn't get there. Years later, U2 still wanted (X). In fact, they've always wanted (X), which is basically just an ambition to be the biggest, best and baddest band in the world. But the lengths to which U2 would go to get to (X) is what people are actually talking about.

In fact, it is Bono that tries to continually sell the notion that U2 have always gone about it in the same way. And he does this by only talking about the ambition, not the manner to attain that ambition. He does this (notably in that Greg Kot piece) to alleviate criticisms about the obvious creative turn they made in the studio. He is, as main politician for the band, spinning the truth about internal band conflict over create desires, as this 'new thing'. They have made a compromise. Rather than fire Larry, or break up, U2 were forging ahead as a new 'singles band'. Again, I don't doubt that they all want to have hits and always wanted successful singles that 'rub up against' hip hop on the charts and all that kind of stuff.

But to pretend that they always went about this the same way is only to parrot Boner the Politician as an excuse-maker on behalf of U2. It is, at its essence, nothing more than historical revisionism. And the Parrots will always have the fodder, because Bono keeps giving it to them. Sort of like some elected politician running for office, spewing the 'company line' and all the minions just reciting the talking points over and over as if the more they said it, the more truth it would absorb.

U2 made POP as a tremendously ballsy move. Period. Yes, they wanted it to be as successful as The Joshua Tree. But they didn't exactly take the easiest route to do that. They'd wait another three years to do that, 'classic', inoffensive, super melodic and digestible to all of those masses. That's not a bad thing or a good thing, it's just what it is. A more safe approach towards critical and commercial risk.

Picture ATYCLB, HTDAAB or even NLOTH...six months to a year before they had a chance to 'polish' it up. That's where POP ended up. For some people, this is a bad thing, for some it is a good thing. But whatever we think of POP, anyone trying to tell you that U2 thought this was a sure-fire accessible album is only listening to Boner the Politician, spinning things after the fact. Because there is no other possible way to arrive at that conclusion by any objective examination.
 
I thought he was only talking about Atomic Bomb in that regard, saying that it really, really annoyed him. I could be wrong, but I don't think I've read him say that about ATYCLB.

I'm having trouble getting the actual full article of the source, but while he was referring directly to The Bomb, I thought he also mentioned that the previous album suffered from the same problem.
 
I haven't really followed this thread entirely, but I wanna say that U2DMfan's post is outstanding, and very welcome. If only we'd all put similar intelligent thought into our posts, rather than typing our useless opinions and hitting 'Enter'.

Anyway...
anyone trying to tell you that U2 thought this was a sure-fire accessible album is only listening to Boner the Politician, spinning things after the fact.
Speaking for myself, I'm not arguing that U2 thought it was a sure-fire accessible album (is there such a thing?). Indeed, I'm sure they realized that what they were doing (putting it out before it was ready, booking a stadium tour, etc.) was risky in the extreme. What I am arguing is that U2 always try to be big and popular. They didn't design Pop with a smaller, less accessible album in mind. You don't do that if you're taking a long break between records, spending months and years on the album at enormous costs, and pre-booking 50,000-seater stadiums.

A fair argument could be made that Achtung Baby was a bigger career risk than Pop was. Achtung Baby has much stronger songs, and ultimately won over more fans than it lost on its sheer quality, but it's only in retrospect that it seems a sure-fire classic album. At the time, it was risky, and they knew it -- indeed, I think U2 were surprised at how successful it was. Zooropa was more of a minor album (actually not even conceived as an "album" initially) made in a "safe" period where its success or failure commercially wasn't particularly important, as the game of U2's reinvention had already been won by Achtung and ZooTV (which was concurrent with Zooropa's release).

Pop was made and released after a long rest-period and with US stadiums booked in advance. Its release was accompanied by an enormous (and spectacularly unsuccessful) press conference to international media, a high-budget video/single, a TV documentary, and a large press attack in general.

Did U2 know they were gambling a bit with it? Yes. But they also took a huge gamble with Achtung Baby (and to a much lesser extent with Zooropa). And both of those gambles paid off. With Pop, their luck ran out, to some degree.

The only time, in my opinion, that U2 has intentionally released music that they didn't want a mass-audience to hear was when they decided it wasn't "U2" and called it Passengers.

So, yes, what we're all sort of arguing about is simply the nuance between the old chestnuts of (a) trying to be popular and (b) trying to be artistically valid. It is a conundrum that pre-punk, classic rock bands didn't really have to worry about, and U2 have navigated this dangerous water better than most of their 80s'/90s' peers, although it appears in recent years to have swung rather too far to (a) than (b). In any case, I personally think Pop's relation to (a) is just as strong as its relation to (b).
 
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