Best Song Survivor v2: Rattle and Hum era

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Please select your FAVOURITE song(s)


  • Total voters
    53
  • Poll closed .
I hardly ever feel like listening to Desire or Angel of Harlem. I don't dislike them, per se, I'm just not interested.
 
Take out the live tracks, throw in the b-sides (and a couple covers), and you have a hell of a U2 record:

Van Diemen's Land
Desire
Heartland
God Part II
Hawkmoon 269
Angel of Harlem
Love Rescue Me
When Love Comes to Town
Jesus Christ
Dancing Barefoot
A Room At The Heartbreak Hotel
Hallelujah (Here She Comes)
All I Want Is You

When you consider the unreleased material from this era, you don't even need the covers really. I'm baffled U2 didn't release their own version of She's a Mystery to Me, and Wild Irish Rose is so good that it's in my top fifteen.

Though I'd still keep Dancing Barefoot because U2 owned that cover. It's their best one, a rare example of the band actually getting a cover right.
 
Though I'd still keep Dancing Barefoot because U2 owned that cover. It's their best one, a rare example of the band actually getting a cover right.

Absolutely right...that's why I included that and not Unchained Melody or Everlasting Love, which obviously have a long history before U2 touched them. But to be honest, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even know Dancing Bardfoot wasn't a U2 song for a while there, because they absolutely do own it and it just sounds so completely U2 of that era. I've since heard the original and it just doesn't hold a candle to U2's.

U2 has done other covers competently, but they haven't made anything theirs like that song.
 
Same here, U2 did a great cover of that song, and I didn't know it was Patti Smith at first. But it made me listen to Patti Smith's "Wave" album, which is amazing. My favorite of hers...now some say its not as good as "Easter" or "Horses" since its more "polished" and a bit more mainstream sounding, but I have no issue with that.
 
Patti never hid her ambition to be accepted by mainstream fans to get her message out

Patti's DB original is lovely and aching

and i've thought that ttheir covers often aren't that impressive at all....but DB
is one of the exceptions


my choices here were Desire and Heartland
 
I've just realised that one of the quirks of the seeding system is that the late eighties quarter final is going to be almost redundant.

The reason we even have to have quarter finals in the eighties is because it earns 35 semi-finalists. That's five too many for a poll on Interference. (By contrast, the nineties earn 26 and the 2000s earn 18.) So instead those 35 songs go to quarter-finals to compete for 22 semi-final spots. Under the seeding system, that means the sixteen early eighties qualifiers compete for eight semi-finals slots, and the nineteen late eighties qualifiers compete for fourteen slots. We're tossing out just five songs in the late eighties quarter final.

I guess we'll just run with that quirk. I have thought of an alternative but I'm not sure I'm that keen on it. Under the seeding, those 35 eighties finalists are ultimately competing for thirteen of the thirty grand final spots, just like the 26 nineties tracks are competing for eleven and the eighteen from the 2000s are competing for six. So I could just run the early and late eighties rounds as parts one and two of a semi-final and the top thirteen tracks across the two rounds will progress to the grand final.
 
Axver, I think I like your alternate idea better. It seems more fair to me, because otherwise, a bunch of early 80s songs that might otherwise get through will get shut out. I'm not sure how the 8/16 and 14/19 ratios were arrived at in the first place. By doing semifinal parts 1 and 2, the methodology of the 80s is kept in line with the that of the 90s and 00s, and no inherent advantage is given to either the early or late 80s other than that the late 80s had more songs go through to begin with.
 
Axver, I think I like your alternate idea better. It seems more fair to me, because otherwise, a bunch of early 80s songs that might otherwise get through will get shut out. I'm not sure how the 8/16 and 14/19 ratios were arrived at in the first place. By doing semifinal parts 1 and 2, the methodology of the 80s is kept in line with the that of the 90s and 00s, and no inherent advantage is given to either the early or late 80s other than that the late 80s had more songs go through to begin with.

Regarding the seeding, for the thirty grand finalist spots I allocated each decade one song for every album placed in the bottom tier, two songs for every album placed in the middle tier, three songs for every album placed in the top tier, and a one song bonus for any decade with at least two top tier albums. Hence the eighties have two albums in each of the three tiers and one bonus song, so the decade has a total of thirteen finalists.

I worked backwards from that for the progression from quarters to semis, simply doubling the amount that proceed (it is a nice middle ground between the 1/2/3 grand final qualification and the 5/6/7 qualification from individual albums to semis). So each quarter final sends to the semis two songs for each bottom tier album, four for each middle tier, and six for each top tier. Thus 8/16 for early eighties (two bottom tier, one middle) and 14/19 for late eighties (two top tier, one bottom).

I agree that the alternate idea is probably more fair, and promotes more even competition between early and late eighties. My big concern, however, is uneven votes between eras. If the early eighties get, say, 47 votes and the late eighties get 55, that's not ideal and makes it harder to judge what songs scrape in to the lowest qualifying places. I'd go by percentage of total votes cast rather than raw number of votes, but it's still a concern for me.
 
Due to the typically lower amount of votes over weekends, I'm not going to start the finals until Monday, so we've got some time to discuss what to do with the finals format if anybody wants to make some input.

The finalists from Rattle and Hum will be:
All I Want Is You
Heartland
Hawkmoon 269
Desire
God Part II

Stoked that Hawkmoon 269 polled better than Desire, and that God Part II beat out Angel of Harlem for the final qualifying spot.
 
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