What the hell was Passengers all about anyway?

[Zoots]

Hold Me Thrill Me has an awesome video!

 

[JOFO]

A cartoon tying in Batman?

Ok, to each his own.

 

[zoopop]

What the hell was Passengers all about anyway? Brian Eno explained it in the book A Year with Swollen Appendices.

I thought that Slug, Miss Sarajevo and Blue Room were going to be U2's future : albums with very classy and elegant songs, Miss Sarajevo is so powerful even if there's not a big guitar solo, big drums or Bono screaming.
Then.... I heard "Let's gooooo, discotheque" on the radio a few months later and watched Bono disguised as a young clubber

LOL, I could picture you sitting in chair listening to Passengers with headphones with a nice glass of red wine. The album finishes and you close your eyes with smile to pure musical satisfaction then you here the Edge strum-strum-strum (intro of Discotheque) ,then the base, then "You can reach...". After the 1st verse your eyes start bleeding from mass distorted confusion

 

[U2DMfan]

As a musician sometimes you just want to make some cool music for cool music's sake.

And then you forget about being a musician and the 'rock star' angle takes over and you end up recording more 'Elevation' than 'Slug'.

 

[KhanadaRhodes]

I don't know. I thought Discotheque was fun. I didn't even mind the video one bit!

same here. i like the discotheque video. i just take it at face value, a fun video poking fun at themselves and pop culture. not everything U2 does has to be serious.

passengers is great too. to me it was they were probably burnt out of the whole image they'd created for themselves in the early 90s, so they just wanted to take the experimentation as far as they could on one album and get it out of their system. and they (again, this is all my opinion/theory, not face of course) released it under a different name not because they were ashamed of it or anything, but because they just didn't care how it performed on the charts. 10 million people or 10 people could've bought it, they didn't care, they just made it for themselves. to me that also explains why brian eno was so involved with this, he became a band member. they were so burnt out by this point they didn't want to strive to find a niche for the album, they just let him guide the ship, to paraphrase a bono quote.

 

[cobl04]

As mentioned above, the title says it all: Original SOUNDTRACKS. These are songs for different films, so I don't believe it's meant to sound particularly coherent. Also, it's not verse-chorus-verse (for the most part), it's not formulaic U2, so you can't look for that.

I think it's rather pointless to listen to this album without the liner notes. If this is something you downloaded or ripped from someone you really don't have the right vantage point to experience this properly. Some may say music should stand on its own merit, but this is conceptual art. You have to at least know where they're coming from.

My suggested listen is to read the description of each movie before you listen to its respective track. You can probably find this online somewhere if you don't actually have the CD insert. And you will see that this album is far from being a failure--they accomplished exactly what they set out to do, which is conjure up an atmosphere befitting the stories and their themes.

my #1 laz post

You really can't critique this album the way everyone has been so far. I enjoy it greatly for what it is; you cannot compare it to U2's other work. It's not a U2 album. A side project. A highly experimental moment.

 

[LemonMelon]

My suggested listen is to read the description of each movie before you listen to its respective track. You can probably find this online somewhere if you don't actually have the CD insert. And you will see that this album is far from being a failure--they accomplished exactly what they set out to do, which is conjure up an atmosphere befitting the stories and their themes.

And, before you really dig in, I suggest you give some of Eno's '70s solo works a spin so you can fully understand the context of the album; Another Green World, Before and After Science, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, and especially Music for Films will take some of the shock away from the proceedings for dyed-in-the-wool U2 fans.