My personal favorite U2 song so far would have to be "The Fly".
The song is just pure madness. In between the harsh guitar cracks, thundering bass riffs, and calloused drum trashing there are words of insects, cannibals, poets, liars, friends, and women. When I first heard the song I was blown away. The distorted Cohen-esque vocal deadly blinded by the "Fat Lady" singing sweet, spiritual, sexy testimony.
All the words ring true and remain ringing through out hours of insomnia and dark days full of dirt and gloss and pain and love and poetry and lust and inteligence and distortion and melancholy and fame and shadows and gambles and war.
The song changed the way I heard music. Changed the way I wrote music. It changed the sunglasses that I wore. It changed the way I walked. It changed the way I talked. The song made me feel that it's alright to lean back and say, "fuck it." It made the dark get darker and the bright lights shine with more gospel eroticism.
It's more than just a song. It's a state of mind. They call it the sound of 4 men chopping down the Joshua Tree. The LV says it was written like a man talking to his wife from a phone in Hell - but he liked it there. And just when you think you'd heard the last of the egomaniac - he gets reinvented and meaner.
The egomaniac turns and burns into a "sad motherfucker". He runs, he shouts, he bites, he kicks, he claws... he cries. The song is just filled to the brim with madness, fear, and love. No song can top it. This is the song that "kicks darkness to bleed daylight" - except no day light pours through any cuts or skin shatterings.
The song is madness. It shows you that true Insanity is having all the answers when there are no questions. It'll take you, shake you, and leave you lying in the gutter while feeling like a million bucks...
-[z]-