The thing that disappoints me about the discourse around here...
I visit many different music forums. And on none of them is there such an issue about lead singles, sales, charts and all the like. I understand it's part of figuring out what U2 might do...but still it's disappointing that it should matter so much. I had to Google to find out what were the biggest selling albums last year. I couldn't have guessed more than half of the top 10. I haven't really cared about sales since I was a teenager. And I think lead singles don't matter all that much, unless you make it a turd.
The bottom line is this - the single biggest 'tell' in the history of Bono's bullshitting is his comments to Greg Kot (in 2005) about how Discotheque needed to be a #1 hit for POP to make sense. It really is the best example of his 'politicking' and excuse making for the creative direction they would later take (and at present when he was speaking) and the 'issue' he was trying to sell in that particular conversation. Which amounted to, his answer to why they were disowning POP (in their setlists and otherwise) and most of the rest of the 90's material. It's just bullshit. You don't release The Fly and Numb back to back as lead singles, with certain success between both of them and them come back and complain that a song that hit #10 (higher than the previous two lead singles) suddenly tanked that album. The problem was the Village People video + the tour + half of that album was substandard. But if Bono can convince some of his fans that he's telling the truth, then he can excuse away why (insert 21st century single here) is so annoyingly poppy and accessible. More or less saying
'Don't you see? This is what we had to do?'. It's just bullshit.
And the most amazing thing is...there are people around here that agree with Bono.
And it's one of the primary reasons there is so much time spent on discussing Boots as a lead single. Yeah, it was a bad choice. There were probably a lot of bad choices in '09, but I think it's too simple to pin it all on Boots. Although it is an easy argument to make.
I'll say it again, you either have the goods (songs) or you don't. I don't see on forums anywhere else where fans are complaining about a lead single. The problem with NLOTH was that U2 was due for some pop culture comeuppance. And specifically Get On Your Boots didn't 'work' because of the song, the video and the album itself was all over the place. Had they put all their chips in on...something, creatively, it might have stood a better chance. But since they CLEARLY pandered in the middle, they got that kicking - at least in a lot of loud circles. So let's stop the excuse making. It was U2's time to get kicked and they gave people an excuse to do it. Same thing happened with Rattle.
It didn't matter
when they released it. It was all inside of the songs. I mean, yeah...maybe it sells X more copies. But who cares?