Un Lapin said:
How To Stage a Rock and Roll Funeral
James Bastable
"It's a big occasion and you just got to be careful that you don't upset people. But, to be absolutely honest, I would really have liked this maybe 10 years down the line…It's a great institution, the Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame, and I'm just not sure that I'm quite ready to accept institutionalization." – Larry Mullen Jr.
Tragically, Mr. Mullen Jr.’s words betray a complete absence of self-consciousness on behalf of a machine that has been regressing since All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The Facile Four have been on auto-pilot since the critically disastrous but commendably adventurous Popmart debacle and, in reality, the timing of U2’s internment in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame could not have been better.
U2 is ready to take its place in the pantheon irrelevance alongside such non-acts as Aerosmith and Santana, a place characterized by predictable Grammy nods, Top 40 hits, movie soundtracks, bloated setlists and acoustic-versions, all of this enabled by the tacit approval of a fundamentally gutless fanbase.
U2 is ready for retirement and it seems that at least on a sub-conscious, that is to say, a private level, U2 knows it and has been preparing for it. Ethical backflips not withstanding, how exactly does Bono reconcile his campaign to forgive the Third World debt with iPod endorsements and $100 cheap-seats? And yes, it is Bono, that self-righteous rock ‘n’ roll martyr who must be held responsible for the public embarrassment that U2 has become for it is his ubiquitous mug that graces the covers of magazines, newspapers and news broadcasts. The wrinkles are showing, the inspiration is fading and I suspect that the other three know it.
As for the oatmeal-flavoured non-music that this dinosaur continues to churn out, the blame lies squarely on said “other three”: Mullen Jr., Adam Clayton, and The Edge (“The Edge?” Is there no end to the unintentional self-parody?) The post-punk bombast of the “early days” and the detached irony of ZooTV have given way to the cynical pandering of “Elevation” and “Vertigo.” As more discriminating listeners (i.e. anyone standing more than a fist-pump away from U2’s cabal of personality-cultists) have noted, these two songs are the same shitty, suburban grind. I am actually skeptical about whether or not Mr. Mullen Jr. has stepped foot inside a recording studio in the past ten years at all.
In the past, U2’s music, while not always good, has at least had an idea behind it. Yes, U2 has always been an insufferably self-important band, but the self-importance of Red Rocks, The Joshua Tree and ZooTV was, if not justified by, at least propped up on, an optimistic innocence. Bono mingled spirituality with sensuality and politics with post-atomic love stories. If Achtung Baby! and the Baroque post-modernism of the subsequent ZooTV tour represent the culmination of U2’s vision, then Pop is the sound of U2 going supernova. Everything since has been the paper on the walls of U2’s nursing home.
As a once passionate U2 fan, I must now declare without reservation that U2 is over. The question now is: will the members of U2 be able to recognize their own irrelevance and step down, as they always said they would? After all, what is more pathetic than an irrelevant rock and roll dinosaur? How about an irrelevant rock and roll dinosaur that once vowed it would never become one?
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You don't have to preface anything with "In my humble opinion". You can just own up to your effort to put a new spin on an old rant, and say "Look, I wrote a slightly different piece than the following review!" (See below...I call them dinasours and say "step down" instead of retirement...I am so brilliant!)
I changed things up by blaming U2's longevity on "
"the tacit approval of a fundamentally gutless fanbase." After saying that, I bravely posted it on a U2 fansite! After taking some heat, I claimed to be a fan and even said I tried to get tickets. They are on to me, though, so I'm backing off for now. Forever ranting,
Henry UnLapin Rollins
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Surrender to Peter Pan
U2's degeneration from the divine to the treadmill demands an answer to the question: why not disband?
By John Waters (aka, Henry Lapin Rollins)
The new album by U2 was feted as a masterpiece before anyone heard it. It is already No1 in the US, Britain and Ireland. But How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is in reality a nondescript collection by a band nearly two decades at the top and desperate not to slip.
It is, you might say, U2's fourth White Album, following Zooropa (1993), Pop (1997) and All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000). The White Album marked the beginning of the end of the Beatles and, though not without magic, was so underpinned by a sense of imminent disintegration as to be less a Beatles album than the first wave of a federal farewell
Achtung Baby (1992) was U2's Sergeant Pepper, combining a conceptual and sonic unity with a startlingly original vision of love as life. This is U2's fourth past-their-best anthology, comprising 10 competent songs and a couple of greatish ones, a showcase of impressive talents and occasional genius, but nothing that, really, a disintegrated U2 couldn't have left unsaid. It isn't the album U2 should be making now, at the age they are, in a sequence defined from Boy to Achtung Baby. Sure, it has resonances that evoke different parts of their journey, but it all adds up to no more than a massive unit-shifter.
U2 promised more. They said the world could go far if it listened to what they said. They gathered up a ragged medium and sought to reintroduce it to its roots. They demanded of pop no less than that it grow up. Having started as pop illiterates, they acquired an awesome competence, implying an exalted purpose. They hinted at some sacred mission, which the attuned understand to transcend the Christian simplicities of the early years. There was something here about redemption, about taking the devil's music back, about demonstrating some connection between inspiration and faith, love and rigour.
It wasn't just about giving God a good guitar sound, but showing how implausible connections might be extended into the stratosphere of the pop imagination, infiltrating the secular consciousness with something neither commercial nor cool.
With The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, it seemed as if U2 were about to reach out and touch the thing they had existed to divine. Since then, the band seemed to settle for a treadmill of repetition, walking tall but on the spot. The new album carries further a sense that what U2 embody is no longer a collective passion born of friendship and ambition, but four individual forms of craftsmanship acquired in togetherness and rapidly diverging.
There is, in the adherence to fashion and formula, in the self-consciousness of Bono's singing of his own lyrics, a sense that the individual contributions are mediated through a language established outside the rooms in which they convene. They are prisoners of success. They know whom they have to beat now, and how to do it. But they have lost the collective recklessness that made them great.
Politics tells why. Bono, highly regarded in the real world for campaigning on debt and Aids, has unburdened the band's artistic crucible of any implication in a political agenda. But while avoiding agitprop is always a good idea, there remains the necessity for content.
Latterly, Bono has acknowledged that art or music cannot make a direct difference. "I'm tired of dreaming," he told Time in 2002. "I'm into doing at the moment." U2, he said, was "about the impossible", and he had become resigned to the discrepancy between this and the art of the merely possible. The trouble is that the "impossible" begins just beyond the possible, just as heaven possibly happens beyond the sky.
It comes down to the growing-up thing. In western society, rock'n'roll provides the soundtrack to what Robert Bly, after Alexander Mitscherlich, dubbed the sibling society, where adults regress towards adolescence and adolescents stay where they are. This Bly diagnosed as a turning away from the "vertical" plane of tradition and devotion towards the "horizontal", self-referential culture of the young and wanna-be young.
U2 sought to find a source in those elements of tradition and devotion this culture derides, successfully living off the sibling society while subverting it from inside. But for a decade they have been incrementally surrendering to the Peter Pan ethic, and Bono's politicking has been as much a grieved response as a contributing factor.
While Bob Geldof, liberated by creative failure, can describe the world as he finds it, bestowing unambiguous praise even on George W, when the facts justify it, Bono, still with something to lose by telling the full truth, must affect a studied embarrassment, dispensing wry comments about how his mates look askance at him as he goes around the world "shaking hands with dodgy politicians".
His geopolitical adventuring, it seems, has become to the U2 collective as a unilateral golfing obsession is to a dodgy marriage: at once safety valve and harbinger of divergence. But its exposure of an escalating loss of cohesion asks that final unspeakable question: why do U2 not just dismantle themselves?
But you, my dear, are one of the prime offenders. 
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Best post on the thread.
