(02-15-2005) U2, Universal Masters of Reinvention -- Entertainment Irelad*

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dsmith2904

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U2, Universal Masters of Reinvention

U2 are not particularly attractive - in the MTV sense of the word. While not quite wizened, they are certainly not the post-modern spring chickens they used to be. Only Larry Mullen Jr appears to have remained relatively ageless.

Eggs being eggs, rock 'n' roll was never meant to be played by people in their 40s. Yet U2 are still passionately relevant after all these years, still selling out Croke Parks without breaking sweat. It is an enduring mystery for some. Allow me to solve it for you.

Bruce Springsteen once described the opening of Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone as "the snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind". Hearing the words to U2's One for the first time possibly had a similar effect on many of us: "Is it getting better/Or do you feel the same?/Will it make it easier on you, now you got someone to blame? "

Who could forget the rhapsodic moment when he sang"One love, we get to share it/Leaves you baby if you don't care for it?" Or Aids-sufferer David Wojnarowicz's images of bison running off a cliff to their fate turning the song - perhaps Bono's greatest ever composition, his Let It Be moment - into an anthem for HIV and Aids sufferers?

For the rest of this registration-required story, visit http://www.unison.ie/entertainment/music/stories.php3?ca=61&si=1340038.

--Entertainment Ireland

Thanks sue4u2!
 
Seems like a pattern these days that if a reporter or news article has something nice to say about U2 - they first have to say something insulting about them - such as their age or some other shit that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
It's so annoying. :madspit:
Geez, have some guts for pete's sake, if you like them just say so.
 
Depends on how you define "attractive". In physical terms, there's the obvious cliche of beauty being in the eye of the beholder, which wouldn't have become a cliche if it wasn't true.

I do find Bono quite physically attractive - but I think that Bono comes across as being a talented, charismatic and intelligent man, who is naturally as flawed as any other human being. His determination to help others shows that he has a kind heart. As far as I'm concerned, those are the qualities that make him beautiful - whatever his faults may be.

Just thought I'd slip that one in!
 
Okay, looking back, I should have noticed the 'MTV sense of the word' before I started banging on about defining the term "attractive". :eek: Ah well - it's 3am and I haven't slept in 2 days!

I stand by my last post, regardless!:D

Time for more Nytol.
 
Please, everyone, get a grip. The writer obviously meant they are not attractive in the MTV sense of the word because people at MTV considers anyone over 30 as over the hill.
 
I don't give a damn if MTV doesn't think they are attractive, I do, but that's not the most important thing about them. Bono, while hardly a saint or a sage, has some amazing traits as a human being, the ability to reach out and touch anyone and a kind heart. That's more important than something transient like looks. The others, while being more private, are all heavily involved in various charity projects. I mentioned in one of my other posts that it was leaked to the press that they'd given *millions* to finance an important campaign of Oxfam's. This was maybe three years ago. It's quite obvious they are all heavily committed to making the world a better place to live but obey the Biblical command to not be showy about their charity, trying to keep it out of the press. I think they were quite annoyed about the leak to the press.
 
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Still, I didn’t like it. I got the negative vibe by reading “U2 are not particularly attractive” as the first line.:eyebrow:

Can we honestly think that this person respects U2?
I know what this person thinks about the song “One” but I didn’t get to know what this person thinks about U2.
:hmm:
 
The writer seems to have an absolutely glowing opinion of U2 based on the snippet of that article posted here. He/she compared the band to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, for cripe's sake. Who knows, maybe the writer is trying to make a point as to how ridiculous it is for media outlets such as MTV to dismiss a great band simply because the members are over 40 and don't look like male models (except for Larry, of course! :wink: )
 
Ok, this is long but it's the rest of the story:

A child of a Protestant mother and a Roman Catholic father, Bono was never going to be your identikit cretinous rock star with nothing to say in his songs and a 12-album deal from a Japanese-owned multinational on which to say it. (Though, for a while there a decade ago, I did have my doubts.)

Bono writes about the death of a father in a way that all of us can understand and identify with at a deep level. All of us have fathers who, sadly, are either dead or will die one day. (The title of How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is a homage to his late father, Robert Hewson. "I should have called it How to Dismantle the Atomic Bob," he remarked last year. Bob died in 2001. After that, 1974 was probably the most relevant year of Bono's life: the year his mother passed away suddenly. On a happier note, 1977 was another year not to beforgotten: the year he met a certain Alison Stewart.)

There's a universality, a depth of humanity, to U2's lyrics and music that resonates with just about everyone over 25 who realises manufactured teen bands are not the future. That's no disrespect to Westlife, who deserve their success, but their music can never say anything about our lives in the same way that a U2 song about mortality and the ongoing dilemmas of human existence in the 21st century can.

In part, it is this kind of mass-audience identification that has continued to invest U2 with meaning at an age when they are older than some fans' parents.

Naturally, U2 are a long long way from becoming our Rolling Stones, whose albums are becoming increasingly lacklustre, to put it at its most charitable. This seems to have zero effect on the world's desire to spend huge money to stand in a field and gawp at Richards and Jagger's Antique Rogues Show.

I suspect Bono would pack it in rather than, in ten years, drag his bones onstage for a pointless nightly run-through of Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, One and Walk On.

That's an important point to remember: nobody actually believes U2 - or their bona fide charismatic frontman - are going through the motions for the money.

Indeed, only the very cynical would accuse Bono of being a posing conman with a heart of gold Amex. During the live telecast benefit for victims of 9/11, U2 delivered a potent performance of Walk On - Bono ending the song with a powerful and fitting segue into Hallelujah.

One Christian critic cited the lyrics - " You broke the bonds / You loosed the chains / Carried the cross / And my shame / You know I believe it" - as the most succinct theology of the cross found inany commercial music. Another key part of theband's continued authenticity was being clever enough to reinvent themselves and rebrand themselves at key points in their poplife.They have always managed to move with the times without seeming overly concerned with fashion.

(I'm loathe to use the word strategy because "strategy" implies an evil Machiavellian scheming in a band that probably made it up as they went along.)

Sean O'Hagan wrote in the Observer last year; "They were definably and recognisably Irish, both in the unbridled emotionalism of their songs and, initially at least, theirutter lack of cool.

"Interestingly, their trajectory from rock wannabes to global icons has directly reflected Ireland's transformation from a parochial to a modern European state."

2000's back-to-basics All That You Can't Leave Behind LP put them firmlyback on course after their mid-Nineties mini-meltdown: an excess of irony, club music and dodgy giant lemons almost became their ruination. As records go, 1997's Pop was officially U2's dog's dinner. Things could only get better; and that would not happen overnight.

I was at the opening night of the Elevation tour in Miami in 2001. When the members of U2 walked onstage with the house lights on and dressed in civilian duds it was as far away from the overstylised pomp and ceremony of the 1997 Popmart Tour as it was possible to get. It was intentionally so.

Their unmistakeable presence soon filled the entire arena that night in Florida. What followed was one of the best shows I've seen in years. This was a stripped-down U2. Not surprisingly, their 11th studio album, How toDismantle an Atomic Bomb, is the most U2-sounding album since The Joshua Tree. It toois a memorable moment in U2's cannon.

There are other moments to recall. Bono - and his mullet - surfing the crowd at Live Aid in 1985 was remade in the eyes of the billion people who watched it. Bono, dressed as Macphisto, getting Salman Rushdie to appear on stage with him and U2 at Wembley Stadium in August 1993. This was at the height of the fatwa.

After the brilliant-but-unhip Rattle & Hum LP in 1988, U2 had to go away and start again. Many thought they were staring into an abyss. They returned via Berlin with their best record ever inAchtung Baby.

The Zoo TV Tour presented an altogether different U2: seeming random words and phrases - Whore, Pussy, ******, Bomb, Racist, Everything You Know Is Wrong and Watch More TV - were fed across the giant vidiwalls as Bono rang the Pope and Bill Clinton on a phone from the stage. Plans to construct a gargantuan model baby that would answer the call of nature over the audience were mercifully scrapped, but a dalliance with decadence began in earnest. Suddenly, a freshened-up U2 were hip and on the cover of Vogue.At least Bono was, in December 1992, with supermodel Christy Turlington.

A few months previously, in October, Bono took me out for a surreal evening's entertainment in San Francisco, sadly sans Christy. It was one of the greatest nights of my life. Bono talked of seeing the death squads in South America as he brought me to a late bar at the red light end of North Beach, California, on a Sunday night. He explained his shock at hearing that Miles Davis asked to have The Unforgettable Fire played to him before he died.

The wine loosening his tongue, Bono talked also about his father getting him drunk in a Paris nightclub not long before, which resulted in the leather-clad icon going on stage drunk for the first time in years. Bono looked out the window and mentioned that the joint across the road was the same dive in which he had set a play he was working on about a stripper with HIV who uses painting as a catharsis.

On the other side of San Fran was the gospel church where we had spent that Sunday morning singing and dancing. Bono was amused by the preacher's dissertation on how his wife's hot flushes during their lovemaking kept the whole house warm and saved on the heating bills.

"Cultural experiment!" Bono suddenly piped up. He then asked the waitress for one glass of root beer and four straws. The waitress looked slightly bemused; rock stars with an estimated £40m in the bank apiece are supposed to be able to afford their own sodas and not have to share them with friends. We each took a slug, nonetheless.

"Ugh! It's like the stuff you get for soccer injuries at school!" I said.

Bono's bloodshot eyeballs lit up. "Wintergreen! You're exactly right!"

He sat in the window booth and held a friend's sleeping baby girl in his ample arms; eventually admitting that he's had some practice at it.

"Don't let me breathe me on her," Bono laughed, "or it might kill her!" Later that night, Bono's good mood had not lessened. Sighting the area's famous boozer, Tosca, in the middle distance, he dragged me across the road. Then he was off, into his own world, quoting Tom Waits: "The teach's dead on the street and the horses go down Violin Row and steam comes through the open grille like the whole town's gonna blow."

So why does anyone still care what U2 have to say any more at this stage of the game?

Ask me in Croker during the summer because that's when the whole town is gonna blow . . .

Barry Egan
 
whoa? just how many faces can be considered "attractive" these days? any of the rappers you find attractive... why do they have to wear those bling blings for. or say, what if they did not have their bling blings on.. they would all look flat. or if not for those almost naked dancers and singers gyrating and raising viewers temperatures 2 notches, then those mtvs would certainly look boring and tacky. yeah i think tacky is probably the key word here. attractive perhaps but tacky.
 
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Hi!

Music is........Music {the sounds / the feel / the dance}

the rest is all entertainment............

besides U2 looks great to me and that's all I care about.....

carol
wizard2c

:|
 
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