Myself, 35, started liking them when I was 12. I've gone through so many different love/hate periods with them that it's hard for me to feel "superior" to any young fan. (Weird when I say "young." I look 10 yrs younger, and don't feel 35.) I can only compare it to marriage. Love is indeed amany-splendored thing; Complicated and ever-changing, but only as we change as people. But if you really sincerely love and respect the PERSON, if your relationship is built on a good foundation, you can weather the changes. It is only becuase U2 take themselves and their music so seriously, I respect and honor them, so that over the yrs, even as they've gone off in directions I may not have approved of at the time (like that cruddy stage show for POP) I could never gove them up. They've become like family.
One thing that I still confess to feeling "superior" about though, or at least, wish that younger fans could still experience. That's the old shows, when U2 were not danceable, but the raw heavy-metal power of the music, its primal explosive energy and joy, had us wanting to relase our emotions somehow. SO we just stood there and clapped along...anybody remembers Bono's "Amazing Grace" during "Electric Co".....
The younger audiences in the 90's never experienced U2 totally in their improvisational guise, when anything and everything pretty much did happen at shows. Maybe at 2nd night San Jose. when it was so good, I've read, that Edge stood there crying onstage. Since ZooTV the show has always been tamed to coincide with a screen presentation. I've always felt the band held themselves back. Younger audiences have never experienced "unembellished" shows. I'm not sounding like a fogey here, or a Luddite. But even during Elevation, where people politely stood in the Heart, or didn't start the a cappella sing alongs...you started to feel it a little, but the emotional level of the show was a sweet sense of grace rather than primal power. Went nicely with the album, I guess. I remember just starting to clap during SBS, wishing for more of crowd response....Bono started at me for a second and I blushed (can you always tell "old fans" when they clap at shows? There's a reason...those early shows really changed us for life. Amybe b/c I was so young then. But I really feel the quality of live shows is deteriorating, and I've seen a lot of bands. Since the video screens came in these new acts feel they can cheat on their audience and not have the guts to engage them directly, and just hide behind a massive sound and light show. The only ines who didn't were Live, and I will never forget what the music biz did to that band. They were America's answer to U2 and when the Britney Brigade came along they were thrown aside.
That was the genius of ZooTV, I finally realized all these yrs later..that the video show was a challenge: for the band to play "over" it, and take the audience's attention AWAY from it.
Did they? Can't say. It will be interesting to see what they do with this simpler material. I'm feeling the primal energy will be back! "Vertigo" was written for the stage! It has that "YOU MAY LEAVE YOUR SEATS NOW BOSTON!!!" vibe about it, and I haven't felt that way in a LONG time! I'm shivering imagining this live!I can imagine it now...the crowd's parts (Bono: "Hello hello"..holds out the mike...us: "HOLA!"...Bono: "swaying to the music..sway to the music..." us: "WHOA, oh oh, oh oh..WHOA, oh oh, oh oh..." it'll be like the new "Pride" call!)