The Sad Punk
Blue Crack Addict
One word...
Bad.
Bad.
Their most important song
- Thread starter Spinning_head
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If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
I would can not pin down one song as more important than the other, some very important:
-NYD and SBS- established them as a radio and live force respectively.
-With or Without you, Still Haven't Found-smash hits from Joshua Tree, both #1 in US.
-One- without a doubt, this has to be mentioned, the band seriously was considering breaking up and had no idea what direction they wanted to go in. It saved their career, but more importantly, insured their place in history. If they quit after JT, U2 would have been considered a good band who were once on top in the mid-late 80s. Now they are considered possibly the greatest band ever with the longest amount of time putting out best selling albums and record breaking world tours. Without One, none of that would be possible.(half of their grammys as well)
Streets and Bad, while certainly 2 of my top 5, are, as others said, not even in the top tier of famous U2 songs known by casual fans and non fans. Streets is a song that people recognize when they hear, but they dont necessarily think of it as the signature U2 song, even though I and many others do. As for Bad, it is almost obscure among the general public and gets much less radio play than any of their other songs. Classic rock 100.7 in Boston plays live versions occasionally- I've only heard the studio version once on a radio station in Burlington, VT. I was shocked, as I had never heard it on the radio at all until Dec. 2006.
-NYD and SBS- established them as a radio and live force respectively.
-With or Without you, Still Haven't Found-smash hits from Joshua Tree, both #1 in US.
-One- without a doubt, this has to be mentioned, the band seriously was considering breaking up and had no idea what direction they wanted to go in. It saved their career, but more importantly, insured their place in history. If they quit after JT, U2 would have been considered a good band who were once on top in the mid-late 80s. Now they are considered possibly the greatest band ever with the longest amount of time putting out best selling albums and record breaking world tours. Without One, none of that would be possible.(half of their grammys as well)
Streets and Bad, while certainly 2 of my top 5, are, as others said, not even in the top tier of famous U2 songs known by casual fans and non fans. Streets is a song that people recognize when they hear, but they dont necessarily think of it as the signature U2 song, even though I and many others do. As for Bad, it is almost obscure among the general public and gets much less radio play than any of their other songs. Classic rock 100.7 in Boston plays live versions occasionally- I've only heard the studio version once on a radio station in Burlington, VT. I was shocked, as I had never heard it on the radio at all until Dec. 2006.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
Great question...
too bad I don't really have an answer.
Every song mentioned is a pretty good answer.
But I would have to lean towards WOWY, not because it's a big hit, but because if you look at the time it was released this song should have never been a hit. In a small way this was the first time U2 actually shaped popular music. This type of song structure is pretty common now, but at the time was very rare.
too bad I don't really have an answer.
Every song mentioned is a pretty good answer.
But I would have to lean towards WOWY, not because it's a big hit, but because if you look at the time it was released this song should have never been a hit. In a small way this was the first time U2 actually shaped popular music. This type of song structure is pretty common now, but at the time was very rare.
thelaj
Refugee
I think it has to come from:
SBS, ISHFWILF, WOWY, One or BD.
It depends what one means by "important".
If it means "gaining recognition", maybe SBS is it. If it means "becoming superstars", maybe WOWY is it. If it means "not breaking up", maybe One is it. If it means "not becoming irrelevant", maybe BD is it.
SBS, ISHFWILF, WOWY, One or BD.
It depends what one means by "important".
If it means "gaining recognition", maybe SBS is it. If it means "becoming superstars", maybe WOWY is it. If it means "not breaking up", maybe One is it. If it means "not becoming irrelevant", maybe BD is it.
diamond
ONE love, blood, life
Numb
vaz02
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
BonoVoxSupastar said:
Perfect summary.
CTU2fan
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Sunday Bloody Sunday. Other choices certainly make sense, but SBS is it.
Put it this way, yeah if you ask some non-U2-fan kid today to name a U2 song they'll say One (or BD or Vertigo), but I think basing it on a time when U2 has become somewhat irrelevant in the music scene is a mistake. U2 was at their most prominent in the 80s, and even the most casual music fan knew who they were...and if you asked them to name a song the overwhelming response would have been SBS, specifically live at Red Rocks.
Put it this way, yeah if you ask some non-U2-fan kid today to name a U2 song they'll say One (or BD or Vertigo), but I think basing it on a time when U2 has become somewhat irrelevant in the music scene is a mistake. U2 was at their most prominent in the 80s, and even the most casual music fan knew who they were...and if you asked them to name a song the overwhelming response would have been SBS, specifically live at Red Rocks.
Loosen my lips
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U2 became U2 on Sunday Bloody Sunday. There is no doubt in my mind that is their most important song. They found their voice and their identity in SBS- and because the u2 of UF and JT from the platformed established by SBS.
The below excerpt from the November 83 U2 magazine tells the story of SBS and its influence.
U2 and the U.S.A.
When 'Boy' was released in America in early 1981, Bono proclaimed, "I feel that we are meant to be one of the great groups. There's a certain chemistry that was special about the Stones, the Who and the Beatles, and I think it's also special about U2".
Shortly before 'Boy's release, manager Paul McGuinness received a letter from the A&R dept. at Warner Bros. Records, the company that distributed their label, Island, in the States. "I had sent Warner Bros.'a demo tape several months earlier before we had been signed by Island," McGuinness explains, "and they returned it to me with a curt letter saying they weren't interested in us." So he quickly fired back a response. "I thought they might like to know they were releasing our album in a few weeks."
The LP sold nearly 200,000 copies, but U2 was still far from being a chart-topping act in America. So when 'October' was released early the following year. Paul came up with an idea for a promotional gimmick - get the band a float in the massive New York St Patrick's Day Parade. An Irish band. An Irish Parade. Hundreds of thousands of people would see them. Genius, right?
Well, not exactly. After McGuinness had made all the arrangements to land the band a spot in the parade, he found out that there was a possibility that the honorary marshall was to be Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who had starved to death the previous year. Both Paul and the members of U2 had grown disillusioned with the incessant fighting between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and felt the IRA's terror tactics were definitely not helping to bring about peace. Surely, the parade's organisers would understand if the group no longer wanted to take part in the festivities...
So Paul called the friend who had helped the band get the float in the first place. The two got together in a bar in New York, but McGuinness soon got in a rather heated debate about the IRA. "He kept telling me to keep my voice down," he recalls. "The place was full of New York policemen - Irish cops - and he thought I was going to get us killed."
As it turned out. U2 didn't ride up Fifth Avenue on a float. Instead, they played a show at the Ritz, one of New York's rock halls, that St Patrick's Day. But the whole experience was to have a profound effect on the direction of the band's music.
Several months after that concert at the Ritz, U2 was onstage in Belfast. Partway through the set. Bono took the mike to introduce a new song. "Listen, this is called 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. It's not a rebel song. It's a song of hope and a song of disgust," he told the audience, most of whom no doubt identified the title with the day in 1972 when British troops opened fire on a group of unarmed Catholic demonstrators, killing thirteen of them.
Then Bono read some of the song's lyrics - lines like "Broken bottles under children's feet/Bodies strewn across the dead end street/But I won't heed the battle call/It puts my back up my back up against the wall" - before continuing "We're gonna play it for you here in Belfast. If you don't like it, you let us know." The band pounded into the song, and when they were done, the audience wildly cheered its approval.
"It was very emotional," says Larry of that performance. "It's a very special song, because it's the first time that we ever really made a statement."
It had been the band's experience with IRA supporters in New York that prompted them to write 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. (In fact, the original lyrics to the song began 'Don't talk to me about the rights of the IRA') "Americans don't understand it", says Larry, "They call it a 'religious war', but it has nothing to do with religion. It's like the Dylan song 'With God on Our Side'. During the hunger strikes, the IRA would say, God is with me. I went to Mass every Sunday.' And the Unionists said virtually the same thing. And then they go out and murder each other. It's very hypocritical."
In fact, the key lines in 'Sunday bloody Sunday - lines that critics who have viewed the song as purely political have missed - are those at the ends: "The real battle just begun/To claim the victory Jesus won/On a Sunday, bloody Sunday."
As the Edge, who initially came up with the idea for the composition, points out, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is not a song in which U2 takes sides with either faction in Northern Ireland. Instead, it's about the futility of war: "There's many lost," sings Bono. "But tell me who has won?" Though U2's members haven't personally experienced the violence between Catholics and Protestants In the North, they have witnessed the segregation that exists between the two religious groups in their homeland. Indeed, a mixed marriage like that of Bono's parents - his father is Catholic and his mother was Protestant - is still scorned by many Irishmen.
"In their relationship, they ware proof that the bitterness between these two communities is ridiculous," Bono says of his parents. "I see in both of their churches aspects of things I don't fully like. But I like to think that I'd be able to able to a Catholic church or a Protestant church."
Bono was the first member of U2 to embrace Christianity. "When I was very young, I experienced death, and that can wake you up to certain facts," he says, referring to his mother's death when he was fifteen. It wan also a death in the family that turned Larry to God; his mother was killed a few years ago in a motor accident.
But the band members shy away from discussing their beliefs in public. "It's a personal thing," says Larry. "If you talk to a person about it, you should be telling him, not the public at large. It shouldn't be an angle." "People would love to sensationalise our beliefs until they meant nothing," adds Bono. "Three of us are committed Christians. We refute the belief that man is just a higher stage of animal, that he has no spirit. I thank when people start believing that, the real respect for humanity is gone. You are just a cog in a wheel, another collection of molecules. That's half the reason for a lot of the pessimism in the world."
And though the band members had religious upbringings - Larry case from a Catholic family, while the Edge and Adam had Protestant parents - they don't like to refer to their beliefs as a religion per se. "All religion seems to do is divide," explains the Edge. "I'm really interested in and influenced by the spiritual side of Christianity, rather than the legislative side, the rules and regulations." So the members of U2 aren't regular churchgoers, preferring to meet together in private prayer sessions.
The below excerpt from the November 83 U2 magazine tells the story of SBS and its influence.
U2 and the U.S.A.
When 'Boy' was released in America in early 1981, Bono proclaimed, "I feel that we are meant to be one of the great groups. There's a certain chemistry that was special about the Stones, the Who and the Beatles, and I think it's also special about U2".
Shortly before 'Boy's release, manager Paul McGuinness received a letter from the A&R dept. at Warner Bros. Records, the company that distributed their label, Island, in the States. "I had sent Warner Bros.'a demo tape several months earlier before we had been signed by Island," McGuinness explains, "and they returned it to me with a curt letter saying they weren't interested in us." So he quickly fired back a response. "I thought they might like to know they were releasing our album in a few weeks."
The LP sold nearly 200,000 copies, but U2 was still far from being a chart-topping act in America. So when 'October' was released early the following year. Paul came up with an idea for a promotional gimmick - get the band a float in the massive New York St Patrick's Day Parade. An Irish band. An Irish Parade. Hundreds of thousands of people would see them. Genius, right?
Well, not exactly. After McGuinness had made all the arrangements to land the band a spot in the parade, he found out that there was a possibility that the honorary marshall was to be Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who had starved to death the previous year. Both Paul and the members of U2 had grown disillusioned with the incessant fighting between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and felt the IRA's terror tactics were definitely not helping to bring about peace. Surely, the parade's organisers would understand if the group no longer wanted to take part in the festivities...
So Paul called the friend who had helped the band get the float in the first place. The two got together in a bar in New York, but McGuinness soon got in a rather heated debate about the IRA. "He kept telling me to keep my voice down," he recalls. "The place was full of New York policemen - Irish cops - and he thought I was going to get us killed."
As it turned out. U2 didn't ride up Fifth Avenue on a float. Instead, they played a show at the Ritz, one of New York's rock halls, that St Patrick's Day. But the whole experience was to have a profound effect on the direction of the band's music.
Several months after that concert at the Ritz, U2 was onstage in Belfast. Partway through the set. Bono took the mike to introduce a new song. "Listen, this is called 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. It's not a rebel song. It's a song of hope and a song of disgust," he told the audience, most of whom no doubt identified the title with the day in 1972 when British troops opened fire on a group of unarmed Catholic demonstrators, killing thirteen of them.
Then Bono read some of the song's lyrics - lines like "Broken bottles under children's feet/Bodies strewn across the dead end street/But I won't heed the battle call/It puts my back up my back up against the wall" - before continuing "We're gonna play it for you here in Belfast. If you don't like it, you let us know." The band pounded into the song, and when they were done, the audience wildly cheered its approval.
"It was very emotional," says Larry of that performance. "It's a very special song, because it's the first time that we ever really made a statement."
It had been the band's experience with IRA supporters in New York that prompted them to write 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. (In fact, the original lyrics to the song began 'Don't talk to me about the rights of the IRA') "Americans don't understand it", says Larry, "They call it a 'religious war', but it has nothing to do with religion. It's like the Dylan song 'With God on Our Side'. During the hunger strikes, the IRA would say, God is with me. I went to Mass every Sunday.' And the Unionists said virtually the same thing. And then they go out and murder each other. It's very hypocritical."
In fact, the key lines in 'Sunday bloody Sunday - lines that critics who have viewed the song as purely political have missed - are those at the ends: "The real battle just begun/To claim the victory Jesus won/On a Sunday, bloody Sunday."
As the Edge, who initially came up with the idea for the composition, points out, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is not a song in which U2 takes sides with either faction in Northern Ireland. Instead, it's about the futility of war: "There's many lost," sings Bono. "But tell me who has won?" Though U2's members haven't personally experienced the violence between Catholics and Protestants In the North, they have witnessed the segregation that exists between the two religious groups in their homeland. Indeed, a mixed marriage like that of Bono's parents - his father is Catholic and his mother was Protestant - is still scorned by many Irishmen.
"In their relationship, they ware proof that the bitterness between these two communities is ridiculous," Bono says of his parents. "I see in both of their churches aspects of things I don't fully like. But I like to think that I'd be able to able to a Catholic church or a Protestant church."
Bono was the first member of U2 to embrace Christianity. "When I was very young, I experienced death, and that can wake you up to certain facts," he says, referring to his mother's death when he was fifteen. It wan also a death in the family that turned Larry to God; his mother was killed a few years ago in a motor accident.
But the band members shy away from discussing their beliefs in public. "It's a personal thing," says Larry. "If you talk to a person about it, you should be telling him, not the public at large. It shouldn't be an angle." "People would love to sensationalise our beliefs until they meant nothing," adds Bono. "Three of us are committed Christians. We refute the belief that man is just a higher stage of animal, that he has no spirit. I thank when people start believing that, the real respect for humanity is gone. You are just a cog in a wheel, another collection of molecules. That's half the reason for a lot of the pessimism in the world."
And though the band members had religious upbringings - Larry case from a Catholic family, while the Edge and Adam had Protestant parents - they don't like to refer to their beliefs as a religion per se. "All religion seems to do is divide," explains the Edge. "I'm really interested in and influenced by the spiritual side of Christianity, rather than the legislative side, the rules and regulations." So the members of U2 aren't regular churchgoers, preferring to meet together in private prayer sessions.
Spinning_head
The Fly
"Loosen my lips"...
Thank you for that. I now agree with your choice. What would they be like without that experience, I wonder...
The Spinner
Thank you for that. I now agree with your choice. What would they be like without that experience, I wonder...
The Spinner
angelordevil
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thelaj said:
I concur.
the tourist
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vaz02 said:
Fixed it for ya.
kingofsorrow
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drowning man.
Loosen my lips
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Spinning_head said:
Thanks Spinner.
I know it was a long quote but I thought everyone would enjoy it. I love hearing about U2's early days.
The key phrase in it (for those who didn't read it) was this quote of Larry's after the very first SBS performance in Belfast:
"It was very emotional," says Larry of that performance. "It's a very special song, because it's the first time that we ever really made a statement."
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