EdgeVox
War Child
1. Bilie Jean - Michael Jackson
2. B.O.B. - Outkast
3. Sweet Child of Mine - Guns & Roses
4. One
U2
The misunderstood breakup song that kept the band together
by Laura Sinagra
In the summer of 2005, no one was surprised to see Bono speaking out on world poverty from the stage at Live 8 one week, then giving a shout-out to Johnny Drama on HBO’s Entourage the next. But it wasn’t always that way. The U2 we now know — as anchored in the swirl of pop culture as in world politics — only emerged with 1991’s Achtung Baby album. And Achtung Baby would never have happened without “One.” In fact, U2 might not still be around today had they not stumbled upon this universally loved—though often misunderstood—ballad of struggle and fellowship.
“It amazes me,” Bono has said, “when people tell me they played it at their wedding or for comfort at a funeral. I go to myself, ‘Are you crazy? It’s about breaking up!’” Indeed, when the song was written, it seemed like the end of the line for the band itself. The four members were at a creative impasse after 1988’s bloated Rattle and Hum had left them pegged as tedious and pretentious. Pushing to change the band’s formula, a burned-out Bono and guitarist Edge were gravitating toward an interest in electronics; the rhythm section, consisting of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr., wanted to continue in the same anthemic direction that had made them platinum stars.
In late 1990 they had begun recording at Hansa studios in Berlin, where David Bowie and Iggy Pop worked up some of the ’70s’ best rock experiments. But after a few weeks, the location was starting to seem ill-chosen. Just yards from the recently toppled Berlin Wall, the band watched a city realize that unification alone wasn’t going to solve all its problems. Recalled engineer Flood: “There seemed to be this dark cloud hanging over the whole session.”
Then producer Daniel Lanois heard Bono working on some middle-eight fragments and, elsewhere, the Edge toying with a guitar line that sounded promising. He got the band together, and they reluctantly began to play what would become the basic structure of “One.” Immediately, the Edge said, “Everyone recognized it was a special piece. It was like we’d caught a glimpse of what the song could be.”
The finished product retains that initial hypnotic feeling. The opening, echoing guitar sounds more like a sad fade-out coda than a beginning — tenuous, even defeated. And when Bono’s voice enters, it’s with an exhausted question routinely asked by doctors, mothers and, most important, lovers who want permission to leave without being the bad guy: “Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?” Then, as he muddles through that achingly familiar script, something changes. Lines that could be pulled from any doomed couple’s final argument are capped by a larger idea when Bono sings the words “One love,” a little ambivalently. Of course, any devout Rastafarian or dorm-room pothead will recognize “One love” as Bob Marley’s call for solidarity among the poor — it’s as if Bono, while he ponders his failure to rescue a troubled partner, starts to consider his failure to save the world. The Edge’s guitar punctuates his every statement with a tight little riptide swirl, the sound of weariness in the face of a challenge to “do what ya should.” Amid these doubts, the drums and bass continue to urge Bono on to a nobler goal.
The complexity of “One” led to the band’s filming three different videos for it. One featured Bono alone in a bar, ruminating over a cigarette. Another gestured toward the AIDS crisis, with the band in drag and shots of Bono’s aging father, leading to speculation that the lyrics concerned the difficulty of communicating across generation gaps. A third took up the band’s beloved American themes again, showing a buffalo running in a field. Indeed, the song got the Americana stamp of approval when it was eventually covered by Johnny Cash, who stripped the song to its raw core.
“One,” which never actually made it to No. 1, charting only at No. 10, is certainly a breakup song. But it’s also very much about the duty to stay together, about finding some kind of connection in times of war, fragmentation, plague, poverty and cultural difference. About being too cynical to believe in the hippie version of global oneness, but too much of a believer to reject it.
“There’s the idea that ‘we get to carry each other,’” said the Edge of his favorite lyric. “‘Get to’ is the key. The original lyric was ‘We have to carry each other,’ and it was never quite right—it was too fuckin’ obvious and platitudinous. But ‘get to’ … it’s like our privilege to carry one another.”
Available on: Achtung Baby (Island)
I was procrastinating and I found this at www.blender.com.........not sure if they place anywhere else.........pretty cool to see it ahead of Smells like Teen Spirit for a change but where the hell did B.O.B. by Outkast come from??
Xavier
2. B.O.B. - Outkast
3. Sweet Child of Mine - Guns & Roses
4. One
U2
The misunderstood breakup song that kept the band together
by Laura Sinagra
In the summer of 2005, no one was surprised to see Bono speaking out on world poverty from the stage at Live 8 one week, then giving a shout-out to Johnny Drama on HBO’s Entourage the next. But it wasn’t always that way. The U2 we now know — as anchored in the swirl of pop culture as in world politics — only emerged with 1991’s Achtung Baby album. And Achtung Baby would never have happened without “One.” In fact, U2 might not still be around today had they not stumbled upon this universally loved—though often misunderstood—ballad of struggle and fellowship.
“It amazes me,” Bono has said, “when people tell me they played it at their wedding or for comfort at a funeral. I go to myself, ‘Are you crazy? It’s about breaking up!’” Indeed, when the song was written, it seemed like the end of the line for the band itself. The four members were at a creative impasse after 1988’s bloated Rattle and Hum had left them pegged as tedious and pretentious. Pushing to change the band’s formula, a burned-out Bono and guitarist Edge were gravitating toward an interest in electronics; the rhythm section, consisting of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr., wanted to continue in the same anthemic direction that had made them platinum stars.
In late 1990 they had begun recording at Hansa studios in Berlin, where David Bowie and Iggy Pop worked up some of the ’70s’ best rock experiments. But after a few weeks, the location was starting to seem ill-chosen. Just yards from the recently toppled Berlin Wall, the band watched a city realize that unification alone wasn’t going to solve all its problems. Recalled engineer Flood: “There seemed to be this dark cloud hanging over the whole session.”
Then producer Daniel Lanois heard Bono working on some middle-eight fragments and, elsewhere, the Edge toying with a guitar line that sounded promising. He got the band together, and they reluctantly began to play what would become the basic structure of “One.” Immediately, the Edge said, “Everyone recognized it was a special piece. It was like we’d caught a glimpse of what the song could be.”
The finished product retains that initial hypnotic feeling. The opening, echoing guitar sounds more like a sad fade-out coda than a beginning — tenuous, even defeated. And when Bono’s voice enters, it’s with an exhausted question routinely asked by doctors, mothers and, most important, lovers who want permission to leave without being the bad guy: “Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?” Then, as he muddles through that achingly familiar script, something changes. Lines that could be pulled from any doomed couple’s final argument are capped by a larger idea when Bono sings the words “One love,” a little ambivalently. Of course, any devout Rastafarian or dorm-room pothead will recognize “One love” as Bob Marley’s call for solidarity among the poor — it’s as if Bono, while he ponders his failure to rescue a troubled partner, starts to consider his failure to save the world. The Edge’s guitar punctuates his every statement with a tight little riptide swirl, the sound of weariness in the face of a challenge to “do what ya should.” Amid these doubts, the drums and bass continue to urge Bono on to a nobler goal.
The complexity of “One” led to the band’s filming three different videos for it. One featured Bono alone in a bar, ruminating over a cigarette. Another gestured toward the AIDS crisis, with the band in drag and shots of Bono’s aging father, leading to speculation that the lyrics concerned the difficulty of communicating across generation gaps. A third took up the band’s beloved American themes again, showing a buffalo running in a field. Indeed, the song got the Americana stamp of approval when it was eventually covered by Johnny Cash, who stripped the song to its raw core.
“One,” which never actually made it to No. 1, charting only at No. 10, is certainly a breakup song. But it’s also very much about the duty to stay together, about finding some kind of connection in times of war, fragmentation, plague, poverty and cultural difference. About being too cynical to believe in the hippie version of global oneness, but too much of a believer to reject it.
“There’s the idea that ‘we get to carry each other,’” said the Edge of his favorite lyric. “‘Get to’ is the key. The original lyric was ‘We have to carry each other,’ and it was never quite right—it was too fuckin’ obvious and platitudinous. But ‘get to’ … it’s like our privilege to carry one another.”
Available on: Achtung Baby (Island)
I was procrastinating and I found this at www.blender.com.........not sure if they place anywhere else.........pretty cool to see it ahead of Smells like Teen Spirit for a change but where the hell did B.O.B. by Outkast come from??
Xavier
... another music list. 
