Every album since Zooropa have a weird, shitty, pointless song. Its time for a change

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I've never seen anyone with a halfway decent opinion of Zooropa try to take down Daddy's Gonna Pay, usually people don't like Some Days are Better Than Others. I'll give you Miami for the vocal/lyric, & I'm no fan of New York but it's just kind of there not "shitty". Yahweh is a pretty song, though the alternate take was better. And Cedars is one of Bono's better lyrics in a long long time & a great chilly mood piece.

Also, for the record, you claimed that none of these songs were played live, when in fact all of them except Cedars of Lebanon were & I suspect that is just a case of being out of place in the 360 spectacle.
 
Daddy's gonna pay for your crashed car:

Carter: You're talking about sounds. In "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" it seems as if the sounds created the song.
Bono: Yeah, that's interesting because that's a combination of two traditions. See, that's a blues. In very basic form, that's a blues. Robert Johnson, that's what that (song) is. "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car," it's a song about dependence, the things that you need and the things that reek. It can be read any way -- it could be the Devil, it could be God. [...]
(from an interview by Carter Alan in Verona, Italy, July 03, 1993)


[Edge:] "I think that in this new era of U2, the songs that are the most abstract and disconnected from our own situation are the closest to revealing where we're at. The songs that seem to be more autobiographical I think are the ones that are more fictional. Which is the opposite of the way people have seen it."
One of these own-ups is the funky "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" -- ostensibly about addiction, another word for what the Edge calls dependency. "It's dependency on what? That's the question. It doesn't have to be illegal substances. You can be addicted to applause, you can be addicted to being on the road. I mean, being in U2 can be its own addiction. We have to recognize that. And there's a part of that in the lyrics. The image of Daddy is one of benevolence and in this song it's twisted around and become the thing that you're dependent on and that you look for support from."
(from "New 'Zooropa' Revue" by Hugh Fielder, Pulse! Tower Records magazine, October 01, 1993)


His divided mental state [after returning home from the Zoo TV tour] is affecting Bono's songwriting. A song called "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" begins "You're a precious stone / You're out on your own / You know everyone in the world but you feel alone." Sounds like a good description of U2 on tour in America to me. Bono tries handing me a line about the song as a religious metaphor ("Daddy may be God," he says, "but he could be the devil too.") and I say, "Ah, come on, Bono. Daddy is Paul McGuinness. Daddy is the organization that provides you with all these cars and planes and fancy meals and settles the bill after you leave, pays off the posse if you break something."
Bono says, yes, that's right -- but he would probably say that even if it had never occurred to him before. He may very well have in mind for these songs bigger metaphors and deeper meanings than life as a rock star, but the fact that he is so deep in a tour mentality while he's writing means that they are completely informed by that strange perspective.
(from "U2 At the End of the World" by Bill Flanagan, 1995)
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Miami:

While we're still in our Hawaiian shirts, what's behind the "Miami, my mammy" line? Are we talking about a serious Oedipal complex here?

Bono: "Al Jolson was down there! I dunno, it's just the humour of it. That's one bad mother, Miami (laughs). I could have said Miami, my granny, but I don't think it would've had the same force, somehow! Or 'nanny' would've done.

(from "The History Of Pop" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 19, 1997)



Where do the "lighter" songs on Pop come from -- "Miami" or "Playboy Mansion"?

[Edge:] There's a lot of irony in those songs, but also a genuine sort of appreciation of some of things that are talked about. "Miami" is like a little postcard, a few mad nights out in a very mad town. There are characters involved that are fictitious, but the general picture it paints is of a very fascinating and very crazy place we spent a couple of weeks in the midst of making the album. Everything we set out to do during that visit we failed to do, but what we came away with was a song. It's the accidents that often are the most valuable things.

(from "In Excess" by Gary Graff, Guitar World, September 01, 1997)
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New York:

Behind us, as we lounge on U2's waterside patio, the final mix of discursive travelogue "New York" wobbles out of a crap Sony boom box. With little Eve Hewson on his lap, Bono sings along...
"I hit an iceberg in my life / But here I am still afloat / Lose your balance, lose your wife / In the queue for the lifeboat / You've got to put the women and children first / But you've got an unquenchable thirst... for New York."
Like a few of Bono's characters on All That You Can't Leave Behind, the lyric outlines a man on a moral holiday, braving the temptations of escape and infidelity. Encouraging the theory that it's autobiographical is the fact that Bono has just bought an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
"It's important to describe your demons in order to deal with them," says Bono. "I have a side of me that wants to run really fast away from everything that you could call home and responsibilities. But I have another side, which is stronger, that draws me towards home and those very same responsibilities. When I'm at work I play out those things... but maybe if I hadn't found Ali and this community of people, then maybe I'm just lazy enough to have surrendered."
You kept in the bit about midlife crisis...
"I was seriously wondering whether to or not. Just looking at you when we played it to you in Dublin, I could see you writing the headline [laughs]. But it's just funnier, that line. From this character, it's believable."
Bono laughs, then frowns.
"It's not autobiography. It's quite the opposite in the sense that I'm coming out of a period: I have run off, I'm back now. I'm more at home... with myself. I had a bit of fright, basically, and the song 'Kite' comes out of that too. I hadn't been around for a while and was determined to do the proper Dad thing. I took the kids to Killiney Hill in Dublin county to fly a kite. Up it went and immediately down it came, and smashed to smithereens. The kids just looked at me: [affects unimpressed child look] 'Come on Dad, let's go and play some video games.' How cruel is that?"
(from "The Elastic Bono Band", Q Magazine, November 01, 2000)


There is one line that really irritates me on the album. It's in "New York," when you sing "I just bought a place in New York!" and I'm thinking 'typical fucking rock star!'
[Bono:] "I was gonna change the line to something less consumerist but why I left it in was... I had just got a place in New York! (Laughs) And it kinda made me smile. Even though the song is not autobiographical. OK, now you're thinking 'the bastard's got a nice place on Central Park' but the character of the song it could be a shoe box, you don't know! In fact, the song originally ended with a free-form conversation about Frank Sinatra and I had to take it out 'cause I think it became self conscious: now it was me talking and then the apartment suddenly got turned into a penthouse and it became a Bono song about mid-life crisis. But it's a true story. I was at dinner once with Frank and he took a blue paper napkin from the table, he was just staring at it, and he said, to no one in particular, 'I remember when my eyes were this blue'. He put it and kept it in an inside pocket. It was very cool."
(from "Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot Press, December 15, 2000)


MTVi News: "New York" has nods, it seems, to both Lou Reed and Frank Sinatra. How did that song come together?
Bono: There was a verse about Lou Reed, that didn't make it, and a verse about Frank Sinatra (that also didn't make it). And Lou has an album called New York, and he mentions my name on one of the tracks, "Beginning of a Great Adventure." And I just think he is to New York what James Joyce was to Dublin. And I just couldn't help -- I just did a little impersonation of him in the first verse, and I hope it'll make him smile. But when I saw him a few weeks ago, I didn't tell him. A lot of the lyrics were written on the spot over two takes, and then I went away and kind of, collaged it up based on my experience in the summer in New York last year. It's not autobiography, but it is based on -- I was there when it was 104 degrees, and I watched some people do their very best to destroy their peaceful lives.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)


Amazon.co.uk: In the song "New York" on All That You Can't Leave Behind, you sing about having a mid-life crisis. People would assume that it's autobiographical...
Bono: They would. I've realised that. There used to be a verse at the end about Frank Sinatra, because if I was going to be singing about New York, New York, I felt like I should. It went "When I'm down on my luck / I sometimes think of Frank Sinatra / I met him once / He was more than generous / At dinner one evening he found a blue paper napkin ... and he stared at it and said to no one in particular, I remember when my eyes were this blue." Which is how the song ended. And it's a true story, though what actually happened was that after he'd said it, he carefully folded it up and put it in his pocket so he could look at it again later. It was this moment of melancholy that I'll never forget. But I took out that scene because I didn't want people to think the song was autobiographical -- you know, I did that song with him and everything (on Duets Vol. 1). If I had a mid-life crisis, it was when I was 27. I have electrical storms of a different kind now. The character I was writing about was someone who'd come to New York to burn himself out, to lose himself, and that's not me.
(from an interview at Amazon UK)
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Yahweh:

"Yahweh" was written by U2 and recorded by How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb producer Chris Thomas. Prior to the song's initial recording, the band's lead guitarist The Edge had the ideas for the music already planned. Lead vocalist Bono later added the vocals spontaneously during the song's first take.[1] The original vocal take by Bono was so inspiring with "soaring and brilliant" melodies that it carried "Yahweh" in a dramatic new direction from what The Edge had previously envisioned.[1] Moreover, most of what was recorded by the band and Chris Thomas during the initial take survived production. Subsequent recording attempts of "Yahweh" were made by two other producers for the album, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite, with Lanois even adding a mandolin in one take of the song.[1] Ultimately however, the original Thomas recording of "Yahweh" was left mostly untouched.
During its first take, Bono came up with the "Yahweh line" almost immediately. Afterwards, the band decided that "it was one of those songs that had to be written".[1] When talking about ideas for the song's theme Bono remarked, "I had this idea that no one can own Jerusalem, but everybody wants to put flags on it." he explained, "The title's an ancient name that's not meant to be spoken. I got around it by singing. I hope I don't offend anyone."[2]
"Yahweh" (יהוה) is the name of the Judeo-Christian God in both the Hebrew Bible (sometimes referred to as the Old Testament), and in the Christian-Greek Scriptures (sometimes referred to as the New Testament).
The oldest Hebrew manuscripts present the name in the form of four consonants, commonly called the Tetragrammaton (from Greek te·tra-, meaning “four,” and gram′ma, “letter”). These four letters (written from right to left) are יהוה and may be transliterated into English as YHWH (or, JHVH). “Jehovah” is the best known English pronunciation of the divine name, although “Yahweh” is favored by most Hebrew scholars.
Although, it is often believed that the name does not appear in the Christian-Greek Scriptures or New Testament, the oldest fragments of the Greek Septuagint do contain the divine name in its Hebrew form. The Tetragrammaton was later replaced by "kyrios” in the Septuagint copies.
For some of the Jewish faith, the name "Yahweh" is associated with taboos against pronouncing it.
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Cedars from Lebanon:

Cedars of Lebanon, a stark, finely drawn tale of a war correspondent preoccupied with his personal problems, ends with some of the most chilling lines in U2's catalogue: "Choose your enemies carefully, 'cause they will define you," Bono speak-sings, his voice echoing as the music behind him drops to silence. "Make them interesting, 'cause in some ways they will mind you/They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends/Gonna last with you longer than your friends."

The lines are, in part, a condemnation of the Iraq war, a topic that Bono largely avoided while he had to work with George W Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair on aid to Africa.

"I think of all the energy that went into that," he says quietly. "And the bravery of the men and women who served, and I think of what those resources could have achieved, if only the lives of the poorest of the poor were as valuable as the idea of bringing democracy to the desert."
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Case closed. :D
 
powerhour24 said:
I've never seen anyone with a halfway decent opinion of Zooropa try to take down Daddy's Gonna Pay, usually people don't like Some Days are Better Than Others. I'll give you Miami for the vocal/lyric, & I'm no fan of New York but it's just kind of there not "shitty". Yahweh is a pretty song, though the alternate take was better. And Cedars is one of Bono's better lyrics in a long long time & a great chilly mood piece.

Also, for the record, you claimed that none of these songs were played live, when in fact all of them except Cedars of Lebanon were & I suspect that is just a case of being out of place in the 360 spectacle.
Click to expand...

Please read again...
 
Ok, you want to talk about lyrics, about Cedars. Let me tell you something about Lebanon; that country suffered for 5 decades. It has civil wars, the Christians betrayed their country in favour of Israel. Beirut was destroyed and constructed again many times. There are million of Lebanese people living abroad. Israel attacks them everytime they feel like it. The French imposed their democracy there and divided the country.
The lyrics about some foreign journalist say nothing to me. Nothing. There are thousands of stories to be told about that country. Million of parents waiting for their sons who chose to make a better life in another countries. The same sons who take 30 years to go back to their homeland, and when or if they go back their parents are 9 feet under ground. How about a story like this to tell? How about a story of a woman, a old woman, who kisses some relative 30 times in their forehead, to express their love and how she missed them...
So please, do not talk about those lyrics, at least no to me, and please, don't call me a troller, its the last thing I came to do here.
And the musically speaking, the song is very very weak.

Ps.: every word I wrote I wrote from the bottom of my heart.
 
BoyOnTheHorizon said:
Ok, you want to talk about lyrics, about Cedars. Let me tell you something about Lebanon; that country suffered for 5 decades. It has civil wars, the Christians betrayed their country in favour of Israel. Beirut was destroyed and constructed again many times. There are million of Lebanese people living abroad. Israel attacks them everytime they feel like it. The French imposed their democracy there and divided the country.
The lyrics about some foreign journalist say nothing to me. Nothing. There are thousands of stories to be told about that country. Million of parents waiting for their sons who chose to make a better life in another countries. The same sons who take 30 years to go back to their homeland, and when or if they go back their parents are 9 feet under ground. How about a story like this to tell? How about a story of a woman, a old woman, who kisses some relative 30 times in their forehead, to express their love and how she missed them...
So please, do not talk about those lyrics, at least no to me, and please, don't call me a troller, its the last thing I came to do here.
And the musically speaking, the song is very very weak.

Ps.: every word I wrote I wrote from the bottom of my heart.
Click to expand...

And all this could have been solved if the soldiers had brought more oranges.

Bono's lyrics were right on. :up:
 
Imagine you beautiful country torn apart, people don't have work, but you don't see violence. Would you mind about some journalist? I know Bono have good intentions, but the reality is much harsher and darker. What he wrote doesn't even scratch the surface... sorry.
 
BoyOnTheHorizon said:
The lyrics about some foreign journalist say nothing to me. Nothing.
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OK, that is possible. But do consider that they might mean a lot to others.
I have no problem with Bono's lyrics in this song, using the story as a war correspondent as a metaphor for the Lebanese situation. It's not as direct/hectoring as say a Sunday Bloody Sunday or Silver And Gold, but that does not mean that the complete and complex history of Lebanon is brushed away.
 
The lyrics for Cedars of Lebanon are incredible. The song is a masterpiece. There's so much depth to it, and the imagery is vivid. I wish the whole album was like that.

I don't know about useless songs popping up on post AB albums. Zooropa is flawless. I don't like If God Will Send His Angels or Last Night on Earth very much, but I can understand why they're on the album. They fit thematically, and musically they're key to the dynamic flow of the album.

New York is a great piece of music let down by Bono. Elevation is pretty weak; if they'd wanted a rocker to give a bit of energy and fun to a lyrically morose record they could have done better than that. Or maybe not, since they didn't. Still, everything on the album serves its purpose.

Bomb, that's a different story. There's no point to the album. There's no unifying theme, there's no sonic identity, there's no logical flow to it...it's a terrible album despite there being a few passable songs. It's filled with dodgy tracks that should have been replaced with the outtakes and alternate versions. Then a cohesive album could have been made.

NLOTH is the greatest offender for songs that are useless and don't fit. Inserting the three wannabe hits in the middle of the album was the biggest artistic mistake in U2's career. They don't fit in any way. What the fuck were they thinking replacing Winter with Crazy Tonight? It was an insane decision to make. Winter fits lyrically and musically, while Crazy Tonight is like finding a bunch of skittles on a piece of pizza. Remove the middle three and add Winter and Soon and you have an album that isn't great but at least makes sense.
 
OP threw down the "older fan" card, so now the only people allowed to argue are those who have been here since IWF.
 
BoyOnTheHorizon said:
Ok, you want to talk about lyrics, about Cedars. Let me tell you something about Lebanon; that country suffered for 5 decades. It has civil wars, the Christians betrayed their country in favour of Israel. Beirut was destroyed and constructed again many times. There are million of Lebanese people living abroad. Israel attacks them everytime they feel like it. The French imposed their democracy there and divided the country.
The lyrics about some foreign journalist say nothing to me. Nothing. There are thousands of stories to be told about that country. Million of parents waiting for their sons who chose to make a better life in another countries. The same sons who take 30 years to go back to their homeland, and when or if they go back their parents are 9 feet under ground. How about a story like this to tell? How about a story of a woman, a old woman, who kisses some relative 30 times in their forehead, to express their love and how she missed them...
So please, do not talk about those lyrics, at least no to me, and please, don't call me a troller, its the last thing I came to do here.
And the musically speaking, the song is very very weak.

Ps.: every word I wrote I wrote from the bottom of my heart.
Click to expand...

BoyOnTheHorizon said:
Imagine you beautiful country torn apart, people don't have work, but you don't see violence. Would you mind about some journalist? I know Bono have good intentions, but the reality is much harsher and darker. What he wrote doesn't even scratch the surface... sorry.
Click to expand...

I'm genuinely interested here: are you Lebanese?
 
I mean, are The Ocean, Is That All, Red Light, 4th of July and Love Rescue Me really any different in purpose or quality than any of the tracks mentioned by OP? I wouldn't remove anything from JT or Achtung, but basically all of the others have a flaw somewhere. The line he drew was completely arbitrary.
 
Last edited:
Cedars Of Lebanon must be the worst piece of music U2 has ever put out

There, I said it (again... and again and again)
 
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