david
ONE love, blood, life
I tuned out the spider man era. So much that when I was in a supermarket and heard Rise Above being played I was trying to figure out why there was a new U2 song I never heard before being played in a super market.
Their career has been so long and so varied that they may be out of moves, other than to try to write good songs.
It did create enough of a stench to sully the U2 "brand", however. It had the most visible half of U2 (Bono & Edge) promoting it for what seemed forever. For Joe Public, it was almost impossible not to think of it as a U2-related disaster.
Said no one.
Letting Dik Evans leave the band.
Bad, BD, Vertigo, and similar
Being away for so long. Will be about 6 years since i saw them live in September.
Bono being injury prone and risking his health again and again.
Those stupid Aung San Suu Kyi masks.
It makes no sense that you can't just go to the record store and get Achtung Baby on vinyl. I'd love to know why they didn't release it in a standard format. Of all U2's decisions this is the strangest.
i'll even say that "MMMBop" is a better song than "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
That only a new album = any touring phase.
This is one of the best threads that we've had in years.
Since Irvine mentioned BFFTS, here's a major mistake: not releasing BFFTS as a full U2 song. Like a one-off single in 2010. I don't mind the Spider-Man soundtrack version, but the U2 live version is epic. I'd love to hear a clean version of that.
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I'm not sure what Joe Public thought of it.
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Thank you Digitise. I am pretty great when I have been drinking.
Since Irvine mentioned BFFTS, here's a major mistake: not releasing BFFTS as a full U2 song. Like a one-off single in 2010. I don't mind the Spider-Man soundtrack version, but the U2 live version is epic. I'd love to hear a clean version of that.
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I'm not sure what Joe Public thought of it.
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Agreed on SO many levels!
Love the live version I have, but in the end there's a chick chanting "hey, hey, hey" which annoys me to death.
Actors getting quite seriously injured, the massive production costs, scathing reviews, the public and messy falling out with Julie Taymor and a premature closure...yea it didn't make good reading. At all.
Actors getting quite seriously injured, the massive production costs, scathing reviews, the public and messy falling out with Julie Taymor and a premature closure...yea it didn't make good reading. At all.
On Broadway, it grossed as much as the "beloved" South Park guys' play, "Book of Mormon".
Considering how poorly it did, they didn't think much of it.
Artistic Decision, I'll go with butchering Mercy.
It's the prototype of their whole second guessing themselves and not trusting their own music on the last 15 years, having albums ready but not ready enough, bringing new producers and modifying their songs over and over again and then when they finally come out (if they come out) still going with wrong singles or even more modified versions.
Even worse, in the case of Mercy, that song was truly a great piece, arguably their best in the last 20 years and it was not only a matter of not including it in an album or not even not releasing it at all, but to modify it in an attempt to include it a more poppish chorus ruinining the magic it had.
Career Decision, I'll go with Boots as lead single.
That whole second guessing themselves and not trusting their own music on the last 15 years I mentioned before? well, it didn't have really bad consequences up to that point.
Not releasing Mercy didn't really affected them, Bomb was a measurable great success, just like Leave Behind was. Even Pop was not a total lost even if it wasn't as successful as they expected it to be.
But Boots -which is not a bad song per se, actually- really tarnished their image. It was the wrong song at the wrong time with the wrong eyeliner.
360 was a success, but I guess we can agree that it was closer to a greatest hits tour than to a No Line tour. Even the name of the tour didn't mentioned the album or any song at all. The tour had barely nothing to do with their new release but the image of the band as uncapable of creating good meaningful music anymore stuck.
Rattle and Hum's sin was being too serious and too arrogant, and that was "easily" fixed by adding humour and irony in themselves. But being regarded as a joke or as a punchline as bad musicians, is a lot harder to come back.
On Broadway, it grossed as much as the "beloved" South Park guys' play, "Book of Mormon". So it wasn't this "bomb" that everyone thinks. And that gross was nicely over $200M on Broadway (and that was about a year before it closed). I don't know total costs involved though, so maybe it just broke even or was a bit in the red, but hardly a bomb.
I have not read that it was a premature closure. I read that it was meant to tour (not shocking given that's in U2's nature). So I question that claim.
However, the disaster with Taymor (and I put a lot of blame on her, even though others disagree) was bad along with the injuries. I don't understand how so many were injured with that play given the rarity of injuries in the various Cirque du Soleil productions (although there was a recent death in one of them).
Overall, U2 should have just agreed to write a few songs and get out. Producing this show was a mistake, unless they were VERY silent producers, not writers or critics or anything else.
As for music decisions, for every song I would pick, there would be tons of people who adore the song (and vice versa). So I do think this Spider-man musical was probably their biggest mistake. Not doing it, per se, just having too big a role in it (and maybe choosing Taymor to be the director).
Actors getting quite seriously injured, the massive production costs, scathing reviews, the public and messy falling out with Julie Taymor and a premature closure...yea it didn't make good reading. At all.