Rate The Song: Stranger In A Strange Land

[digitize]

I am so sorry about skipping putting polls out two days ago. Some major personal stuff came up. Anyway, let's continue ranking October today.

Please rate Stranger In A Strange Land on a scale from 0 to 10, using whatever criteria you feel allows you to best evaluate the song as a whole. I will not set criteria for people to based on, but if you feel like your best evaluation of the merits of a song comes from voting only based on, say, the studio version, go right ahead and vote that way. Full information on the Rate The Song series may be found in this thread.

Have fun! This poll will close in 96 hours.

Also, Interference ranks Boy as follows:
1) The Electric Co.
2) Out Of Control
3) I Will Follow
4) An Cat Dubh/Into The Heart
5) A Day Without Me
6) Shadows And Tall Trees
7) Another Time, Another Place
8) Twilight
9) Stories For Boys
10) The Ocean

 

[The Panther]

Not a good track. (The guitar doesn't even sound like U2... which could be an interesting thing... but isn't.) The "sleeping on the floor" line is awful.

 

[prbiker15]

I love the guitar riff at the beginning, but I don't really like the rest of the song. It's not bad, but it's one of the worst songs on October. I give it a 5.

 

[Padj]

One of my favourite tracks on October. Love the ending. 9.

 

[The_acrobat]

First time I heard this song, I thought "oh man, this is gonna be awesome"... then the first few seconds ended. Just a very mismatched, sorry excuse for a song. It's like they had a bunch of random pieces of music and decided to fuse them together into one clusterfuck of a song.

 

[silkensky]

I love the intro and the chorus is pretty cool (actually it kinda reminds me of the chorus to NLOTH). The guitar work is mildly interesting. The verses just plain suck though and pretty much kill the song for me. Should have really been a b-side and replaced with A Celebration, which is too good a song to not be on an album.

 

[pcfitz80]

I don't think "A Celebration" had been written yet.

I love the intro and the chorus is pretty cool (actually it kinda reminds me of the chorus to NLOTH). The guitar work is mildly interesting. The verses just plain suck though and pretty much kill the song for me. Should have really been a b-side and replaced with A Celebration, which is too good a song to not be on an album.

 

[An Cat Gav]

8.

I never paid a great deal of attention to this song until the reissue, when, like With A Shout, I got into it in a big way. An unusual track in many ways for U2, unusual then and unusual even now, cold and sparse, like October (the month) itself.

 

[cobl04]

Gave it a 10 to compensate for the criminally low scores that almost everyone else gives it. Best song on the album.

 

[redhill]

Agreed

 

[digitize]

Gave it a 10 to compensate for the criminally low scores that almost everyone else gives it. Best song on the album.

I would request that people not do this sort of thing, but I won't try to force it.

 

[The Panther]

I would request that people not do this sort of thing, but I won't try to force it.

That's the problem with these sorts of polls -- certain people form their opinions based on (or in opposition to) others' opinions, which totally skews the results (just wait 'til we get to "One", Interferencers most hated U2 song). One mathematical way to possibly avoid this is to discount a certain number of "outlier" scores in the results (like, the top 2 and the bottom 2 or something like that), but this requires a knowledge of math far beyond mine.