Did You Like It Better When U2 Were "Cool"?

[Saracene]

Some arguments (that I don't necessarily subscribe to):

If any other band that wasn't called U2 released ATYCLB, I wonder if it would have won 7 grammies?

Hmm... if some other band released ATYCLB that didn't have Bono's singing, Edge's guitar playing, Adam's bass, Larry's drums and wasn't produced by Eno and Lanois, then yeah, perhaps not many people would have paid much attention to it,

Anyway, it's easy now to look back and say, oh yeah, this album sold like hot cakes because of this and that, but I think that at the end of the day, no one knows anything for sure. People may spend gazillions on promotion and do all the obviously right things, yet no one would show up.

As for the Coldplay/U2 or Coldplay/Radiohead comparisons, I don't really think that Coldplay has that much in common with either except maybe for some very basic touches. Chris Martin seems much more naive and romantic than Thom Yorke and much more subdued and less aggressive than Bono (or at least a younger Bono, although the mid-Bullet rant in the Elevation video shows that he can still get fired up and scream his head off).