For comparison: Usenet discussion from 1991 about "The Fly"

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I love how on the Boston DVD version of the Fly they added a guitar part to the chorus where in earlier versions and in the studio the guitar was unheard of in the chorus. I wonder if they played The Fly even once during Popmart? :hmm:
Still think it's strange, i can just imagine those words on that big ass popmart screen.

They did use it as a snippet during Discotheque occasionally though. :)
 
The FLy is simply stellar

one exception: any bootleg where you hear Bono's guitar too much in the mix
Now it isn't that bad. I was happy his guitar was working at the sao paulo concert, great snippet of jean genie there.

Imho i think The Fly was at it's best on Vertigo especially later in the tour. Although the Elevation version is still amazing.
 
I'm just one of the few who's not a big fan of the Elevation version. Too distorted from the original concept and the key-change pisses me off. I don't like it. "The Fly"'s peak was during the last tour (specially in the nights when the instrumental became very similar to "Lady With The Spinning Head") - and I think the band agrees, counting on their statements.
 
I love how on the Boston DVD version of the Fly they added a guitar part to the chorus where in earlier versions and in the studio the guitar was unheard of in the chorus.

This thread made me throw in the DVD for the first time in a year or so. I must admit, I like the Boston Live version even better than the studio version (blasphemy!). I am not the biggest fan of the DVD in general (Slane is a much better film), but this version of The Fly reminds me of how this band reaches parts of my soul like no other band can.

I think that GOYB compares to The Fly in the attitude the band is taking. They are expanding again, pushing out. Is the leap from Vertigo to GOYB as big a leap from Desire to The Fly? No. (but a better comparison may be God Part II, which I think is a precursor to Achtung. In that case - the leap compares).

I love that the band, having already secured its legacy as one of the greatest bands of all time, is still willing to take risks while remaining relevant (and yes, GOYB is a risk. Bono singing the words "Sexy Boots" is about as brave as his falsetto for Lemon. And he pulls it off on both).
 
This thread made me throw in the DVD for the first time in a year or so. I must admit, I like the Boston Live version even better than the studio version (blasphemy!). I am not the biggest fan of the DVD in general (Slane is a much better film), but this version of The Fly reminds me of how this band reaches parts of my soul like no other band can.

I think that GOYB compares to The Fly in the attitude the band is taking. They are expanding again, pushing out. Is the leap from Vertigo to GOYB as big a leap from Desire to The Fly? No. (but a better comparison may be God Part II, which I think is a precursor to Achtung. In that case - the leap compares).

I love that the band, having already secured its legacy as one of the greatest bands of all time, is still willing to take risks while remaining relevant (and yes, GOYB is a risk. Bono singing the words "Sexy Boots" is about as brave as his falsetto for Lemon. And he pulls it off on both).

This part won me. :up:
 
Wow great thread!! It's cool to read those posts from the past and compare them with the ones today. I was only 2 years old in 1991 - I didn't even know who U2 were...
 
I think the Elevation Tour version of The Fly was the best. Too bad they dropped it during the later legs of the tour. I thought it was a highlight of the concert.
 
I'm just one of the few who's not a big fan of the Elevation version. Too distorted from the original concept and the key-change pisses me off. I don't like it. "The Fly"'s peak was during the last tour (specially in the nights when the instrumental became very similar to "Lady With The Spinning Head") - and I think the band agrees, counting on their statements.

Same here. My biggest qualm with The Fly on Elevation was the utter lack of falsetto.
 
While the Fly was a great first single because it wasn't a typical U2 sound so people were thrown off at first, and they also totally changed their look as well. I do get the INXS comparisons to an extent, but honestly I think Bono was trying more to ape Michael's look and mannerisms in the video for the Fly.

I don't think the album really took off until One was released as a single and the tour started. The album did sell well but it took years for it to become a classic U2 album.
 
Alright gang...I'm 36 and have been on board since I was 10. Achtung Baby was the first "jolt" in the music. Boy, October, War, Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum all seem to blend together for me. It's been years, but none of them caught me off guard. In '91, my first reaction after hearing "The Fly" was "what the f*** was that?!?" I literally couldn't believe what I was hearing. That song was THAT DIFFERENT from everything else we had heard. But that was the point. They NEEDED to move in a new direction...and move they did!

Since then, I've discovered two U2 factions: fans of the "Joshua Tree U2" and fans who don't think U2 became U2 until Achtung Baby. I am part of the Achtung group. They broke into a universal stratosphere with that album. U2 is better BECAUSE of Achtung Baby, and I think it's their true masterpiece. Zooropa, to me, was an extension of Achtung Baby. The next "jolt" was POP. Same thing - "what the f*** is this?" Not to the same effect though, simply because POP wasn't as good. It never sounded fully cooked to me. Still, it was totally new, and regardless of what people say, Mofo ranks as one of my favorites. I just love that tune.

Then we hit ATYCLB and it was a return to the Joshua Tree with just a dash of Achtung Baby. Then came HTDAAB, which is a culmination. That album, Vertigo in particular, was like everything U2 has ever done melted down, concentrated and poured into a shiny little package. You can hear EVERY album on that album.

Now we come to this album...I'm hoping for another "jolt." And after the first single, which I like, we may be moving in that direction, but I'm not so sure. The song is definitely different, but not "The Fly" different. Let's wait until the whole album comes out and we have a full listen.
 
While the Fly was a great first single because it wasn't a typical U2 sound so people were thrown off at first, and they also totally changed their look as well. I do get the INXS comparisons to an extent, but honestly I think Bono was trying more to ape Michael's look and mannerisms in the video for the Fly.

I don't think the album really took off until One was released as a single and the tour started. The album did sell well but it took years for it to become a classic U2 album.


You know I never got the INXS comparisons as far as "The Fly" went....INXS at that point had never released a song that heavy and rockin'......what were they(critics) comparing? did Bono's voice in "The Fly" sound a little like Hutchence's voice in "Need You Tonight"???

Ironically the case can be made that INXS COPIED U2 when 2 years later in 1993 they released a song called "The Gift"....now THAT song sounded very much like a cousin of "The Fly"...problem was like I said...."The Gift" came AFTER the "The Fly".....not BEFORE it.
 
Another thing that made The Fly such a shock was the video. This was a time when MTV actually showed videos and I remember watching the premier. Nobody would have guessed to see Bono dressed head to toe in black leather, oiled hair, wraparound shade-goggles, and chest hair. It could have completely backfired - but it didn't, it actually worked. Under the cloak of irony, Bono and U2 were shockingly COOL - not just sprinkled with COOL, but swimming it and splashing around.

There will certainly be a video for GOYB, but it won't be able to deliver us that One/Two punch of music and image. And that's unfortunate that GOYB doesn't have that opportunity - I think. The video of The Fly was a big part of U2 expressing their new artistic direction.
 
"Face facts. A band could never followup War or The Joshua Tree. If they
had tried, I would have given up long ago."

"The Joshua Tree was a great album, and they may never
live up to it"

this is so brilliant! a lot of ppl consider Achtung Baby to be not just the best U2 album, but one of the greatest albums of all time! :D
 
It is indeed about perspective. Time evens out all critical listening maybe. There's more bad to mediocre (as well as good!) reviews on Achtung Baby:

Review: Achtung Baby

Rating: 3-1/2 out of 5 Stars

New Zealand Herald, November 29, 1991

Reviewed by Jill Graham


Story has it that while U2 were in the studio working on this radically altered album the number one rule was no songs that sound like U2 songs, please.

Well, they succeeded. This may be a new U2 album, but you can keep the urge to wave your lighter emotionally in the air firmly in your pocket.

Dark? Phew, you'd be lucky to get through this baby and keep a smile on your face.

Bono rarely sets his vocal cords free -- most of the time he just growls -- but he sounds much better than he did on that awful "Night and Day" cover the band did for the Cole Porter Red, Hot and Blue compilation.

The sound is subdued, tightly controlled, introverted -- none of this open, earnest anthemic business, thank you.

Produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno (The Joshua Tree, Unforgettable Fire) largely at the Hansa Ton Studios in Berlin -- where Bowie recorded some of his most eccentric and best work -- the band has with this album systematically reinvented itself. The reasons for this could range from sheer creative urge to astute business move designed to create a moderate slump in their career from which they could again build to their previous mega-heights.

For whatever reason -- and there will be many, many theories -- this is not the U2 of old. In fact, this album is really pretty damn good. Especially its middle section containing the ballad "So Cruel," "The Fly," "Mysterious Ways" and "Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World."

Too many downbeat moments where songs seem to be going nowhere prevent Achtung Baby from being a truly wondrous affair, but it's not half bad. Actually, it's more than half good.

-------------------

n 'Achtung Baby,' Rock's Righteous Messiahs Turn Into Fools For Love

Rating: 3 stars

The Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1991

Greg Kot


Rating: 3 stars

Although never a band to underestimate the significance of its music in recent years, U2 shelves the sanctimony on its new album.

When Achtung Baby (Island) arrives in stores on Tuesday, listeners will hear the garage band in U2 fighting to get out. Even though the Irish quartet doesn't wholly succeed, Achtung Baby is fascinating because it suggests that maybe these guys aren't such sticks in the mud, after all. Rather than play the pop messiah, the supergroup scuffs up its sound while its leader plays a fool for love.

Previously, U2 had embraced the grand gesture, the "big music," as singer Bono Hewson once described it.

More than any band of the '80s, U2 embodied the we-are-the-world impulse that led to such activist rock as the Live Aid concerts for Ethiopian relief and the Sun City anti-apartheid album.

This righteous streak, combined with anthemic songs and Bono's charismatic voice, turned the band into an international stadium act and made The Joshua Tree album a multiplatinum blockbuster in 1987. By then, major music publications were tripping over themselves in a rush to anoint U2 the band of the decade.

With Rattle and Hum, however, a 1988 album/movie huffing and puffing with self-importance, the quartet's relentless profundity had reached the point of self-parody. Even some longtime fans began wishing the guys would loosen up a bit and retire those brooding profiles, if only for just one album.

Although no one will mistake it for the latest Nirvana release, Achtung Baby -- from its fanciful title on down -- shows the band in a grittier light: disrupting, rather than fulfilling, expectations.

A surprisingly unwashed set of 12 love songs, it opens by trying to out-demolish Ministry on "Zoo Station," with grating, metal-on-metal percussion and a belching guitar. Among superstar albums of the last dozen years or so, this rude awakening has only one parallel: the fingernails-on-chalkboard guitar scuzz that introduced Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" on Rust Never Sleeps.

After the bludgeoning abates on "Zoo," Bono enters the mix, but his usually stentorian voice is barely recognizable. It sounds distorted and distant, as though he's singing through a megaphone from the bottom of a well.

Whereas U2's sound has traditionally been expansive and cinematic, "Zoo Station" is compressed, nagging, aggravated.

Just as disconcerting is the first single, "The Fly," in which the Edge's guitar spits exhaust fumes over a rugged, neo-Bo Diddley beat. "The Fly" is less a great song than an irreverent gesture, its defiant lack of melody and sheen practically daring radio programmers to play it.

The rest of the album builds a bridge to the epic sound pioneered by U2, producer Brian Eno and engineer Daniel Lanois on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree.

Lanois handled most of the new album's production by himself, and his three-dimensional touch is most evident on "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," which gallops into listening range like a legion of oncoming chariots. "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" pits Adam Clayton's rumbling bass against the Edge's distant-thunder guitars, "One" builds with the stately grandeur of a Roy Orbison ballad and "So Cruel" unfolds sensually around a simple piano riff.

Yet these sonic ideas aren't just touchstones to the past but jumping-off points, as well. Clayton's bass is more prominent than ever and, along with Larry Mullen's syncopated drumming, it pushes "Mysterious Ways" (the album's most obviously "commmercial" song) in the direction of the dancefloor, previously uncharted territory for this band.

The Edge plays with bite and bile, eschewing solos in favor of choppy rhythms and hurricane squalls. Thanks primarily to him, U2 sounds punkier than it has since its 1980 debut, Boy.

Perhaps inspired by this garage-rock backdrop, Bono's voice and lyrics are earthier and less preachy -- gone are the once-obligatory pronouncements on the state of the world or the future of rock 'n' roll.

Although the subject of love -- between God and man, countrymen, races, creeds, nationalities -- has been an important subtext for every U2 album, on Achtung Baby it is framed exclusively in terms of an adult relationship.

It's rare enough for women to be treated in rock songs as anything other than objects of lust or abuse, but Bono not only addresses his love as an equal, he tries -- and inevitably fails -- to fathom her mystery.

That doomed romantic quest is what most of these songs seem to be about, and they present Bono at his most vulnerable and personal. Rather than trying to speak for his generation, here he is speaking his heart.

In these songs, love is treated as a sacrament, and womanhood is entertwined with the notion of godliness. The unflinching sincerity of Bono's pursuit is both a blessing and curse, for the singer risks playing the fool everytime he opens his mouth.

Achtung Baby has its share of clumsy couplets and out-and-out howlers, such as in "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)": "When I was all messed up/And I heard opera in my head/Your love was a light bulb/Hanging over my head."

Or, from "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World": "A woman needs a man/Like a fish needs a bicycle."

Yet in "One," Bono offers one of the pithiest insights yet about the contradiction of marriage: "We're one/But we're not the same."

He's a great singer because he doesn't just tiptoe to the brink of excess, he flies over it without bothering to wait for a parachute: "A man will beg/A man will crawl/On the sheer face of love," he whispers on "The Fly."

He clings to the sheer face of these songs -- some resonant, some half-finished -- with equal resilience, and he invests even the most trivial conceits with his belief.

Cliches such as the sleek "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" don't do justice to his desperation, but the unwieldy "Acrobat," which abandons the verse-chorus structure of pop, suits it perfectly. The tension between Bono's worst and best instincts yields an epiphany, a desire to consume and to be consumed: "To take the cup/To fill it up/To drink it slow/I can't let you go."

In the very next song, "Love is Blindness," he compares love to "drowning in a deep well."

Achtung Baby is Bono's free fall into that deep well, a magnificent search for transcendence made all the more moving for its flaws.
 
Achtung Baby is Bono's free fall into that deep well, a magnificent search for transcendence made all the more moving for its flaws.

that line right there :up:

pretty much sums up my attraction to this band in one

ps .. . reading through all this stuff has me hurtling back in time . . . in a teeny little bedsit just off O'Connell Street, sitting on the bed with my fellow u2-o-phile, newly arrived from oz on our 'european vacation', cd newly purchased from record shop in temple bar . . .walkman headphones split between the two of us, trying not to bounce off the bed with excitement lest we skip the cd . . . :heart: bono whispering in our ears :love: :love: :love: . . . stupid stupid grins on our faces all day . . . and the next and the. . .well, you get the picture :)
 
that line right there :up:

pretty much sums up my attraction to this band in one

ps .. . reading through all this stuff has me hurtling back in time . . . in a teeny little bedsit just off O'Connell Street, sitting on the bed with my fellow u2-o-phile, newly arrived from oz on our 'european vacation', cd newly purchased from record shop in temple bar . . .walkman headphones split between the two of us, trying not to bounce off the bed with excitement lest we skip the cd . . . :heart: bono whispering in our ears :love: :love: :love: . . . stupid stupid grins on our faces all day . . . and the next and the. . .well, you get the picture :)


Love your description! Walkman headphones! I feel like I'm right there with you just off O'Connell Street. :)
 
It is indeed about perspective. Time evens out all critical listening maybe. There's more bad to mediocre (as well as good!) reviews on Achtung Baby:

Review: Achtung Baby

Rating: 3-1/2 out of 5 Stars

New Zealand Herald, November 29, 1991

Reviewed by Jill Graham


Story has it that while U2 were in the studio working on this radically altered album the number one rule was no songs that sound like U2 songs, please.

Well, they succeeded. This may be a new U2 album, but you can keep the urge to wave your lighter emotionally in the air firmly in your pocket.

Dark? Phew, you'd be lucky to get through this baby and keep a smile on your face.

Bono rarely sets his vocal cords free -- most of the time he just growls -- but he sounds much better than he did on that awful "Night and Day" cover the band did for the Cole Porter Red, Hot and Blue compilation.

The sound is subdued, tightly controlled, introverted -- none of this open, earnest anthemic business, thank you.

Produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno (The Joshua Tree, Unforgettable Fire) largely at the Hansa Ton Studios in Berlin -- where Bowie recorded some of his most eccentric and best work -- the band has with this album systematically reinvented itself. The reasons for this could range from sheer creative urge to astute business move designed to create a moderate slump in their career from which they could again build to their previous mega-heights.

For whatever reason -- and there will be many, many theories -- this is not the U2 of old. In fact, this album is really pretty damn good. Especially its middle section containing the ballad "So Cruel," "The Fly," "Mysterious Ways" and "Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World."

Too many downbeat moments where songs seem to be going nowhere prevent Achtung Baby from being a truly wondrous affair, but it's not half bad. Actually, it's more than half good.

-------------------

n 'Achtung Baby,' Rock's Righteous Messiahs Turn Into Fools For Love

Rating: 3 stars

The Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1991

Greg Kot


Rating: 3 stars

Although never a band to underestimate the significance of its music in recent years, U2 shelves the sanctimony on its new album.

When Achtung Baby (Island) arrives in stores on Tuesday, listeners will hear the garage band in U2 fighting to get out. Even though the Irish quartet doesn't wholly succeed, Achtung Baby is fascinating because it suggests that maybe these guys aren't such sticks in the mud, after all. Rather than play the pop messiah, the supergroup scuffs up its sound while its leader plays a fool for love.

Previously, U2 had embraced the grand gesture, the "big music," as singer Bono Hewson once described it.

More than any band of the '80s, U2 embodied the we-are-the-world impulse that led to such activist rock as the Live Aid concerts for Ethiopian relief and the Sun City anti-apartheid album.

This righteous streak, combined with anthemic songs and Bono's charismatic voice, turned the band into an international stadium act and made The Joshua Tree album a multiplatinum blockbuster in 1987. By then, major music publications were tripping over themselves in a rush to anoint U2 the band of the decade.

With Rattle and Hum, however, a 1988 album/movie huffing and puffing with self-importance, the quartet's relentless profundity had reached the point of self-parody. Even some longtime fans began wishing the guys would loosen up a bit and retire those brooding profiles, if only for just one album.

Although no one will mistake it for the latest Nirvana release, Achtung Baby -- from its fanciful title on down -- shows the band in a grittier light: disrupting, rather than fulfilling, expectations.

A surprisingly unwashed set of 12 love songs, it opens by trying to out-demolish Ministry on "Zoo Station," with grating, metal-on-metal percussion and a belching guitar. Among superstar albums of the last dozen years or so, this rude awakening has only one parallel: the fingernails-on-chalkboard guitar scuzz that introduced Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" on Rust Never Sleeps.

After the bludgeoning abates on "Zoo," Bono enters the mix, but his usually stentorian voice is barely recognizable. It sounds distorted and distant, as though he's singing through a megaphone from the bottom of a well.

Whereas U2's sound has traditionally been expansive and cinematic, "Zoo Station" is compressed, nagging, aggravated.

Just as disconcerting is the first single, "The Fly," in which the Edge's guitar spits exhaust fumes over a rugged, neo-Bo Diddley beat. "The Fly" is less a great song than an irreverent gesture, its defiant lack of melody and sheen practically daring radio programmers to play it.

The rest of the album builds a bridge to the epic sound pioneered by U2, producer Brian Eno and engineer Daniel Lanois on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree.

Lanois handled most of the new album's production by himself, and his three-dimensional touch is most evident on "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," which gallops into listening range like a legion of oncoming chariots. "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" pits Adam Clayton's rumbling bass against the Edge's distant-thunder guitars, "One" builds with the stately grandeur of a Roy Orbison ballad and "So Cruel" unfolds sensually around a simple piano riff.

Yet these sonic ideas aren't just touchstones to the past but jumping-off points, as well. Clayton's bass is more prominent than ever and, along with Larry Mullen's syncopated drumming, it pushes "Mysterious Ways" (the album's most obviously "commmercial" song) in the direction of the dancefloor, previously uncharted territory for this band.

The Edge plays with bite and bile, eschewing solos in favor of choppy rhythms and hurricane squalls. Thanks primarily to him, U2 sounds punkier than it has since its 1980 debut, Boy.

Perhaps inspired by this garage-rock backdrop, Bono's voice and lyrics are earthier and less preachy -- gone are the once-obligatory pronouncements on the state of the world or the future of rock 'n' roll.

Although the subject of love -- between God and man, countrymen, races, creeds, nationalities -- has been an important subtext for every U2 album, on Achtung Baby it is framed exclusively in terms of an adult relationship.

It's rare enough for women to be treated in rock songs as anything other than objects of lust or abuse, but Bono not only addresses his love as an equal, he tries -- and inevitably fails -- to fathom her mystery.

That doomed romantic quest is what most of these songs seem to be about, and they present Bono at his most vulnerable and personal. Rather than trying to speak for his generation, here he is speaking his heart.

In these songs, love is treated as a sacrament, and womanhood is entertwined with the notion of godliness. The unflinching sincerity of Bono's pursuit is both a blessing and curse, for the singer risks playing the fool everytime he opens his mouth.

Achtung Baby has its share of clumsy couplets and out-and-out howlers, such as in "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)": "When I was all messed up/And I heard opera in my head/Your love was a light bulb/Hanging over my head."

Or, from "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World": "A woman needs a man/Like a fish needs a bicycle."

Yet in "One," Bono offers one of the pithiest insights yet about the contradiction of marriage: "We're one/But we're not the same."

He's a great singer because he doesn't just tiptoe to the brink of excess, he flies over it without bothering to wait for a parachute: "A man will beg/A man will crawl/On the sheer face of love," he whispers on "The Fly."

He clings to the sheer face of these songs -- some resonant, some half-finished -- with equal resilience, and he invests even the most trivial conceits with his belief.

Cliches such as the sleek "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" don't do justice to his desperation, but the unwieldy "Acrobat," which abandons the verse-chorus structure of pop, suits it perfectly. The tension between Bono's worst and best instincts yields an epiphany, a desire to consume and to be consumed: "To take the cup/To fill it up/To drink it slow/I can't let you go."

In the very next song, "Love is Blindness," he compares love to "drowning in a deep well."

Achtung Baby is Bono's free fall into that deep well, a magnificent search for transcendence made all the more moving for its flaws.

They barely say anything about One. Intersting:hmm:
 
Honestly, what U2 fan didn't put in that disc for the first time and think "Whaaaaat the effffffffff?" during Zoo Station?
 
Yes. And the leaps of logic. Just because there was debate about the fly and 18 years later there was debate about GOYB, NLOTH was supposedly going to be as good as AB.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using U2 Interference mobile app
 
I think this thread is always a worth reading when we are near an new album :)
I actually never saw this thread.

I was here in 2009 - but it was a very intense year for me; a lot not in a good way. I wasn't always around as much to read EYKIW & WTAHNN more consistantly. NLOTH & 360 were saving graces for me!

But very interesting stuff!
Are you supposed to be able to actually link & read the rec. BBs? ( I have a older computer so -- miss stuff) Maybe you could back then in 09 still, but not now?
Honestly, what U2 fan didn't put in that disc for the first time and think "Whaaaaat the effffffffff?" during Zoo Station?
Honestly...um....actually, no. I loved ZS from the start!

Perhaps because I spent a bunch of time between 88 - 91/92 in a totally different non-musical fandom (though music was a portiion of it).

I was a serious U2 fan (from 80/81 onward) but had no Superfan friends or acquaintances to hear the approaching "rumbles" on the ground of AB, "just" friends who were also serious rock & U2 fans at around the same level of knowing/not knowing more connected people (vs SF acquaintaneces way further back for The Who whom we got cool news from ).

I also was not really reading RS, The Brit Music mags as I had done so in the early 70's - mid? 80's. So i was away from U2 as the earnest, often issues & anthems band they were media mix. And certainly listening to (a variety of bands in the INXS, Joy Division/NO, etc sonic areas maybe also "prepared" me for the drastic change.

I heard about it a bit before it's release. And then loved most of it very much once I heard it.
 
What was UseNet?

Like an early AOL?

As a side note, I think because of U2's popularity and variety people are going to like and dislike very different parts of their catalog. Pop is popular on here, but other groups of fans hate it and love "War" or "HTDAAB". It just depends. I personally like it all.
 
Wow, Usenet! I remember going to something called alt.fan.u2 back in the POPMART days. I think I got online around a month or two after POPMART started. The amount of info online back in those days was nothing compared to today, obviously, but going from nothing to internet was amazing. Suddenly having the access to so much info was mindblowing. I remember trying to find reviews of the early 1997 shows and falling to the U2 rabbit hole. There was a website that transcribed a ton of U2 shows, I guess from Bootlegs. I remember seeing the transcript from April 25th, 1997. It gave attendance figures, celebrities that showed up (Robert DeNiro, Samuel L. Jackson and "an unfunny comedian named Carrot Top") lol.

Usenet had bootleg traders and sellers with so many rules. I bought a bunch of audio tape boots from the Zoo TV days and prior.

Man those were the days.
 
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