What makes those songs exceedingly good is the simple, memorable songwriting. What makes them great is the feeling running through them. A random example: Love is Blindness is a very simple song, great songwriting - but it's that Edge guitar part that makes it a heartstopper. There's always something. With Pride - a moronically simple, but infinitely great song - it's the passion you can hear in it. It's why, despite it being so simple and I assume dead easy for most semi-competent bands to perform, it never sounds anywhere near as good when done by anyone else. With or Without You, it's not just the songwriting/melody/structure, but the delivery, both as a band and Bono as a singer. It gives you a great sense of exactly where the person is - 4am and you can't sleep, too tired to be angry or upset, just sort of drained. I think it is the key difference with U2. Name 20 other examples of fine, brilliant, top of the class songcraft over the history of modern pop music, and you could also name or find a bunch of more than serviceable covers for most of them, some that are even better than the original. It's almost as if their genius is that they are so timeless and transferable. But for U2, great cover versions a very few and far between - it's damn near impossible to replicate the songs perfectly because it's so difficult to mimic the 'thing' that they all have, whatever that may be for whichever song, even if technically you are bang on note for note and are in your own right a fantastic, creative, unique band. If you go the other route and deconstruct and turn it into something of your own - it almost always fails on that level too. Thats the key difference, I think. It's also what connects a song like Pride with a song like Slug.That's where U2's strength is, and, to just drop some of my anti-Bomb sentiments in there, it's where that album falls down. If those songs lack anything, if there is a singular thing that I find wrong with them, it's that in trying to write those classic, timeless, transferable pop songs, they've washed the 'thing' out of them in the process. I actually think it would be dead easy for someone else to do, say, All Because of You a hundred times better than U2 have done.
Anyway, as you were. It's the LP that I think is the ridiculous part of this Radiohead deal, not the early/free download release. It's what would be jacking up the price as well, and I bet 90% of people who purchase have no way of, and never will, play the fucking thing. What's the point of that?
There is no need for you to make assumptions about me, thankyouverymuch. 
