“20” – U2 TRACKS POLL (voting closes midday, Thursday 4 August)

hella down for u2 trax poll, i mean

can I just do a negative vote? ;-)

I did wonder if I'd get this request! I think you'd probably better put in a plausible ballot first. If I open this up to everyone who hates Bono, it'll look like a golf leaderboard.

The two 'No Line On The Horizon's will be counted together.

Votes for the ILM-only release of No Line On The Horizon are not eligible.

Wait, wha? Link please!

let's release the U2 album before U2 releases the U2 album

The HATED TRACK option makes for interesting strategy (not least because there are so many to choose from). Do you pick one that no one's gonna plausibly vote for because it's so awful, or do you to try to stick it to a song that might place otherwise?

also I still have a hard time believing the names of the songs on No Line On The Horizon---I don't remember how any of the songs sound, but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking, ffffuck, "Fez - Being Born" & "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight". Though actually "Original of the Species" is another appalling title. I threw a brick through a window indeed.

I don't know if it will even get any votes, but I know without any doubt that I'd give "Walk On" an anti-vote. (This is because I'm pretty certain no one will even bother voting for any of the Spider-Man songs.)

Live At Red Rocks is what I was referring to as 'absolutely spectacular' btw - the album's great, but the film is incredible.

If you like Atomic Bomb, you'll like All That You Can't Leave Behind

Yeah, I checked out that and their most recent album after liking Atomic Bomb so much (I now even own a copy of ATYCLB, found it for like $3 used), but neither of them grabbed me apart from a song or two.

Dude, "Walk On" is my No. 2 at the moment. The downside of the -20 votes is that we'll end up with a far more "tasteful" and less embarrassing and therefore boring list--I'd almost rather the hate votes not count at all but just be added as a note after each placer, so you potentially have a No. 1 that's also the most hated.

On first impulse, my hate vote was going to be "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," but I have to say, seeing them play it live a couple of times took the energy out of my hate. "Where the Streets Have No Name" still won't make my list, but seeing that live made it undeniable in that context too. Also hated "Mysterious Ways" until seeing my 2-year-old niece dance to it, at which point its awesomeness became obvious, and now that's at the bottom of my list. Those are probably my least favorite albums, but to hate a song, you have to remember it. I'll probably go with "Angel of Harlem."

Rattle and Hum has a buncha contenders. When Love Comes To Town is dire, and the two remakes are hilariously bad.

I honestly don't think I could do 20 songs for any band and def not U2 however I do count one of theirs as among my favorite ever songs and that is "Out of Control". Why? Because it is the best. That's why.

Oh and I got to meet Bono a couple years ago when I was working on a project dealing with HIV/AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa and he was tiny, funny, charismatic as hell and pretty great all around. Fuck the Bono haters imo. I think he's sort of awesome.

I honestly don't think I could do 20 songs for any band

seriously?

Out of Control is terrific. On my listen to Boy yesterday it was the standout.

she also said bono was awesome, so grain of salt.

lol - he really was!!

Seriously. OK well maybe I could but I don't have the attention span for that sort of thing and I'm not really a list person. I'm also not and never have been an album person. I honestly can't remember the last time I listened to a whole album start to finish without skipping some songs. Some of these polls have sort of amazed me insofar as that (for example) I was like "Oh man, I love the Pet Shop Boys!" and then I opened the thread and it wasn't until like half-way through that I started recognizing songs and then I was like "Well damn, maybe I don't love them as much as I thought I do".

Ok so maybe I like U2 a little more then I let one because I did once (albeit a very long time ago) sit in my car all night in freezing weather so that I could be at Tower at 5:00 am to buy what, aside from the first Pixies shows in London, remain the most expensive concert tix I've ever bought.

BUT when they played Out of Control that night I may have jumped and screamed a little bit. OK, I totally did.

it's okay. i went to a they might be giants concert once. we all have our skeletons.

lol

.

.

.

.

.

so did i

yeah def. voting for "out of control". heres a lesser known U2 track thats up in my top 5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ9sLF1sSp8

"love comes tumbling" is pretty great from that e.p. as well

For many years I forgave most of U2's, er, indulgences because I loved Bill Flanagan's protrayal in U2 at the End of the World, still one of the best rock biographies: catching a band shedding one skin for another. They really do like the best kind of bros if you never have to listen to them.

For a band with so many haters they've never had a rep for treating people badly. Like, Bob Geldof seems like a bully and by all accounts is a bully, but you don't hear horror stories from people who have worked with U2 or with Bono in an activist capacity. I can see people finding him annoying or hating U2's music but I can't work out what's underpinning the current consensus that he's one of the worst people in music - there are many terrible human beings out there and I don't believe he's one of them.

ilxor sonofstan has told a few tales of u2 douchebaggery from their early days

Ah, that's interesting. Haven't heard them.

Guitar solo on "Out of Control" is all-time. I do love how they play pretty much any song from their catalog at one point or another--did "Zooropa," "Scarlet," "Please," and "Discotheque"on Saturday. Speaking of U2 hate, my incoherent spill from that show: http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2011/07/u2_at_tcf_bank_stadium_review_setlist.php

it was Stewart Osborne-

"I encountered U2 on what I believe was their first UK tour, which they were supposed to be co-headlining with Delta 5.
I wasn't aware that they were supposedly Christian at the time, but the way they and their entourage conducted a concerted campaign of bullying and intimidating Delta 5 (who, lest we not forget, were 3 girls and 2 guys) until they had effectively relegated them to being U2's support band, didn't seem to be exactly overflowing with "Love Thy Neighbour" Christian spirit to me.

Sounds completely right."

They behaved exactly like that in their early days in Dublin too.
Pricks then, Pricks now.

― sonofstan, Monday, April 13, 2009 11:19 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

xp Lovely review Pete. Reminds me what a patchy strike rate those snippets have though - sometimes great (I saw them do Two Tribes during I'll go Crazy), sometimes excruciating. Wish he'd give them a break.

Lest we forget, Christians always come off "bullying and intimidating" around atheists and skeptics.

I loved Bill Flanagan's protrayal in U2 at the End of the World, still one of the best rock biographies

I've just picked this up based on your recommendation, Alfred. (On some old thread while I was researching this, like I say I'm doing this *properly*). Must say I was taken aback when it arrived - how the hell can it be 500 pages long?! - but I had a long run at the first quarter yesterday and it's most entertaining. The best bit so far is only tangentially related to U2 (Mel Gibson, Gary Oldman and Phil Joanou being total dicks) but them meeting Bill Clinton is also pretty choice.

Thanks! The best chapter: Eno and the boys recording Zooropa, especially the scene where Eno lectures the band on the perils of salt poisoning.

That's the kind of thing I want to hear! With that album I don't even know where to begin in 2011---at an Obama rally in 2008 they played "City of Blinding Lights" & it sounded pretty great but it was just the moment, I think?

― Euler, Wednesday, July 27, 2011 5:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

imo that's their last great song, totally in my top 10

since its release it has graced every school function as "inspirational" music

cool!

Are the same song with different versions added for the final results? Like 'Out Of Control' EP or Album version, will that just be added up?

Because the bitch needs to make the top 20, yo.

No need to specify a version - all remixes, live versions and alternates will be counted together. You can explain, post youtubes, etc during the countdown.

(PS cut that out, can you imagine Larry Mullen talking like that?)

lol thanks :)

Ballot sent!

1980-91 trax: 18
1992-present trax: 2

If I open this up to everyone who hates Bono, it'll look like a golf leaderboard.

As someone who wouldn't be able to get more than a Top 5 together, that's a great line.

i'm actually having a hard time thinking of a song for my negative vote -- i'm not the biggest U2 fan and there are a lot of songs i'm kind of indifferent to, but very few i actively dislike, aside from a few of the really glaring duds from the last couple albums that hardly need to be taken down a peg

I'm excited for this poll. I just saw them play in NJ last week and was phenomenal. I saw them twice before, on the Joshua Tree tour and the Achtung Baby one, and this was far and away the best.

Why all the hate for Bono? It seems very 1989.

^^^ a man who has grown tired of the peacemakers of the west

"Angel of Harlem," "When Love Comes to Town," "God Pt. 2" -- lots of contenders from R&H for worst ever. Also: three quarters of Pop and half of ATYCLB.

yeah i just saw them live for the first time this summer so i'm very primed for this poll

i don't particularly dislike any of the R&H or Pop hits. don't like all of them (but actually am thinking of putting "Angel of Harlem" and "Discotheque" on my ballot).

What's the take here on the "Desire" remix?

I loved it in '88. In South Florida the Top 40 station played every hit in its dance remix iteration.

From 'Pop', 'The Playboy Mansion' is great

Still love Neil Tennant's quote from '89:

What [rock critics} basically want is for it to be like 1969 again. It 's this thing where British –- or in U2's case, Irish –- groups discover the roots of American music. U2 have discovered this and they're just doing pastiches [his voice rises] and it's reviewed as a serious thing because DYLAN PLAYS ORGAN on some song and B.B. King plays on some throwaway pop song "When Love Comes to Town" that could have been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It could have been Starlight Express if you ask me.

...We hate everything that they are and stand for. We hate it because it's totally stultifying, it says nothing, it is big and pompous and ugly. We hate it for exactly the same reasons Johnny Rotten said he hated dinosaur groups in 1976. To me U2 are a dinosaur group. They're saying nothing but they're pretending to be something. I think they're FAKE."

But my favorite track still is 'Gloria'

U2's recorded legacy would probably benefit from if they were one of those bands who issued a collections of outtakes and alternate versions (or Passengers-type side projects) after every album or two.

I think they're one of those bands, like Rush (fittingly, the longest running stable line-up outside U2), that doesn't leave behind much in the way of detritus. Even the famed Achtung Baby outtakes are mostly just take after take of an evolving "Salome" - a b-side.

Side projects, on the other hand, I can get behind.

I don't actually think NO LINE is just a retread in the same mould as the previous 2. I think it does try to do different things. There's much more spoken-word stuff isn't there - 'stand up' and 'cedars of lebanon'? and that and 'white as snow' are newly muted.

But it might just be that it feels different to me cos I bought it on vinyl. I actually think I like it more than the previous 2, though, having made that vinyl-flipping effort.

I guess I agree with Josh that bands can get good again by simplifying things - Trinity Session style etc. It's a pity that that wouldn't work with U2: they're just not that good at playing music together, are they?

I love U2 and value what their creative process has issued, but I get frustrated by talk of 'writing in the studio', 'creative process', 'going away to the south of France for initial sessions, then relocating to New York to work together in a new way' etc ... because I have written many songs and I know all it needs (or WHAT it needs, as Chance in Rio Bravo might clarify) is a pen and paper and maybe an instrument to hand, for 15-30 bewildering minutes, no matter if it's a wet Wednesday in the same old town you grew up in. If you don't have that spark (and one usually doesn't) then the studio shenanigan thing is probably going to be a self-deceiving waste of time.

But it does devalue the creative currency of both bands when their product starts to sound like product, especially since, as I noted, I believe both bands still have it in them to be great.

Does it? Again, I hope I don't sound obtuse. That U2 keep churning out product (as they have since 2000) doesn't devalue by one cent Zooropa, Acthung Baby and the assorted singles and album tracks I consider their best work, in the same way that Stones albums don't devalue their classics.

Unless I'm not reading you correctly...?

also Bowie was churning out unremarkable album after unremarkable album for so long that i honestly didn't realize it'd been 8 years since the last one until you just mentioned it.

So has U2! But we won't agree here.

love U2 and value what their creative process has issued, but I get frustrated by talk of 'writing in the studio', 'creative process', 'going away to the south of France for initial sessions, then relocating to New York to work together in a new way' etc ... because I have written many songs and I know all it needs (or WHAT it needs, as Chance in Rio Bravo might clarify) is a pen and paper and maybe an instrument to hand, for 15-30 bewildering minutes, no matter if it's a wet Wednesday in the same old town you grew up in. If you don't have that spark (and one usually doesn't) then the studio shenanigan thing is probably going to be a self-deceiving waste of time.

But every album since at least The Joshua Tree has been recording in so, er, itinerant a manner (so was Exile on Main Street for that matter). The biographical data doesn't matter so much.

* recorded. Bleh.

Changing my mind with these guys is inevitable, but from where I sit 20 years on, the album being issued as a boxed set that folds out into a jet-ski has fewer good songs than the most recent one--which has a much better and more original production IMO--or each of the three preceding it. As for them not playing well together, I call nonsense.

I am enjoying flipping through parts of the U2 by U2 book, and finding that they withhold a lot of songs for many years before they're done. "Wake Up Dead Man" first took form in the Zooropa days, while "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" dates back to Pop, before Bono came up with the falsetto part. He sang a version of it as his father's funeral.

also Bowie was churning out unremarkable album after unremarkable album for so long that i honestly didn't realize it'd been 8 years since the last one until you just mentioned it.

So has U2! But we won't agree here.

― livin in my own private Biden hole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, August 6, 2011 6:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

hey the last few U2 albums are definitely unremarkable, sure (the difference is that Bowie's were also uneventful, and turned out at a much faster clip)

anyway that posted wasn't actually comparing Bowie and U2, i was really just remarking on wow it absolutely hadn't occurred to me that Bowie finally gave it a rest

'wake up dead man' goes back to 1990-1, it's on the Achtung Baby rehearsal tapes. I was very surprised when they pulled it out 7 years later.

I suppose the Edge, AC and LM can play well together, but I'm not sure they can really improvise, jam, go in and out of other songs, the way that a lot of musicians would. Take a country act like Union Station as a model of 'playing together' - a band really intuitive with their instruments and listening to each other (don't think it matters if you don't like country) - I don't see U2 as able to do that. I think they're too flat-footed, even the Edge too distracted by his epic boxes to really go with a flow. And even if the others can do it, Bono can't play an instrument well enough to join in - though his vocal improvisations on the AB roughs show a different way of joining in.

I think U2 can sound great together, playing a song they know, but I think there's a different sense of 'playing music together' and in that sense I suspect that they're still rather awkward at it.

yeah i don't think anyone's saying they're secretly great jazz musicians or anything, just that in the course of their songwriting method they probably stumble upon and then abandon some interesting ideas.

hopefully this Achtung Baby/Zooropa reissue box set coming out this year will have some cool stuff on it

If Zooropa was the sound of a band whipping something together over a short span, then certainly U2 used to be capable of stumbling into something great. Maybe the problem is that Eno and Lanois are not the producers they once were? I wouldn't discount that, as it's not like those once reliable dudes have been sterling across the board lately, either.

Zooropa was almost twenty years ago; maybe the band's not capable of writing songs that good anymore?

btw A Bigger Bang is better than any Stones album of the last twenty years, and certainly better than anything by U2 released since '93, but U2 could never rely on craft like the Stones (Bono has said repeatedly that they're the worst cover band in the world).

Yeah, Bigger Bang is mostly good, except for the song that sounds like INXS.

I blame Mick for that one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loo1I2b7KWY

It was a filthy block of flats
Trash was on the floor

U2 has this problem that I've mentioned a few times here in different contexts, and that is they seem to have lost the ability to write compelling melodies. That last record doesn't have a single memorable tune. Think of how much more melodically engaging songs like "Lemon" or "Stay" are in comparison. I really think that for most songwriters, the "melody muscle" loses tone with age.

"melody muscle" sounds like a euphemism for Hongro dong

haha

I've got greedy. This is going to be a top sixty after all - twenty each on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll get things rolling some time tomorrow morning.

xp: "Moment of Surrender" has a great melody, whatever else you think of it--I started softening toward the lyric upon reading somewhere it was about addiction, which makes much more sense than love/salvation/whatever else, and it wound up making my Top 20. "Get on Your Boots" has a great chorus, as dreamy as "Stay" at high speeds.

Is it possible--just throwing this out there--that you guys listened to early-'90s U2 with more open ears?

If anything, I was more dubious of imminent "Achtung" U2 after "R&H" than I am of current U2. I vividly remember my reaction to "The Fly" as some variant of WTF? Nu-U2 I've given plenty of chances and always come away disappointed. To the albums, at least.

I loved U2 pre-Achtung Baby

when it came out I was keen, resistant and disappointed
it took me a while to come round to it

I still don't like it as much as 1984-7!

but I always liked 'the Fly'

I listen to the later U2 LPs a lot so I don't think a lack of openness is a problem here

Having spent so much time on this thread, I am going to allow myself to predict 20 songs that I think will do well in the ILM poll.

No, make it 22.

1 drowning man
2 the unforgettable fire
3 with or without you
4 beautiful day
5 i will follow
6 out of control
7 gloria
8 new year's day
9 heartland
10 bad
11 where the streets have no name
12 bullet the blue sky
13 exit
14 zoo station
15 until the end of the world
16 the fly
17 acrobat
18 love is blindness
19 numb
20 lemon
21 stay
22 daddy's gonna pay for your crashed car

maybe 'drowning man' and 'gloria' are red herrings

OK, a short list of 10 that I think will do well:

1 the unforgettable fire
2 with or without you
3 beautiful day
4 i will follow
5 out of control
6 heartland
7 zoo station
8 until the end of the world
9 the fly
10 lemon

Take it to "It's a musical journey" - U2 POLL RESULTS