Canadiens1160 said:
I have to say I think of U2 as exactly the opposite. They barely touched or changed anything in popular music - and that's why their 80s material is so revered by U2 fans.
They existed in a musical bubble, an alternative to the synth pop, the dance music factory turning out similar-sounding hit after another. They were the alternative to the crap. Sure, they took their initial sound from Television and Echo & the Bunnymen, but no one who liked pop music knew who those bands were anyway. U2 took that specific, spidery sound and made it their own. Even co-awesome band The Poilce's 80s stuff sounds dated today. But listen to The Unforgettable Fire. That wasn't music made in the 80s, it's not music from this world. And you'd be very hard pressed to find anything seemingly similar today thanks to that album's existance.
With a few notable exceptions, U2 haven't changed the face of much of anything, except for what 4 honest guys and some delay can do.
Honestly when you talk about U2 influencing any kind of chunk of music, it's probably car commercials with chimey guitar and delay.
Wrong. The 80's (and until the late 90's) proved that the popular music was not only made and created by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley... And then, the 80's were not just marked and affected by synths and electronic music. The 70's started the great diversity of genres that coexisted sucessfully.
Don't you think that Madonna or Michael Jackson were landmarks so big as The Beatles in popular music? Don't forget that popular music (and that means since The Beatles era) is not only the music. It means everything related and evolving it, from the music, to the image, from the studio to the iconic images.
In the 60's no artist managed its career in the way to manipulate the media and the public sphere. Madonna is keeping on making it sucessfully. No other artist till then was capable to metamorphise its image in the way those two make. How many "Madonna's" (imagetic and musically) have you seen since 1983? And Jackson? Is that really the same kid that used to sing in a brothers band? Hummm... I guess not.
Take U2's example. They're not loved by the entire world. But they're probably the only "big band in the world" that experimented and crossed lots of musical genres sucessfully and could bring it to the masses without turn off's.
There's a reason why these more recent generation of artists are still active after 25 years and still puting singles and album at the top charts.
That's why they changed the popular music's history in the same granditude than The Beatles.
Then, The Unforgettable Fire was sightly different than what U2 had make till then, and different too than the 1984 music, but it's easy to identify that as music made in the 1980's. Just listen to Indian Summer Sky, Pride, Wire, 3 Sunrises, TUF or even Boomerang II.
In the late 80's, U2 was seen as the only great surviving band in the world. And by the late 90's no other band had created the kind of structures U2 did.
And well, if you think that "U2 haven't changed the face of much of anything, except for what 4 honest guys and some delay can do"... what's the point of spending time posting here?