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

I looked at those and I though 'hola!'

okay I wasn't going to do any campaigning but have you ppl not actually heard "Elvis Ate America"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XF_hxuMMcI

We're beyond twenty ballots now, which was my target for the whole thing being viable - so thanks to you all (so far). Every ballot now can only make things better.

Anybody who's stuck could do a lot worse than just listing all of the first album and then figuring out nine more tracks.

I mean, there are songs in the U2 catalog I hate (hi dere "Angel of Harlem") but NOTHING can approach "Elvis Ate America" in terms of awfulness

I have never listened to that song as the title is just perfect as a standalone.

Huh. I only voted for 4 (maybe 5) of last.fm's most-played songs. I wasn't trying to be strictly-4-tha-headz and I love most of them when I hear them live but I guess they don't resonate that deeply with me.

Is Elvis Ate America the poem? That reeks.

"Who's gonna ride your wild horses?" remains one of the dumbest lyrics they have, imo. Worse than "a mole digging in a hole elevate your soul" or whatever it was.

don't make me post the "lyrics" to "Elvis Ate America"

No no no do it
U2 can take it

I'm with you re. the lyrics on that song. "Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around The World" is a pretty dumb lyric too; I groaned the first time I heard the "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" line because that's the kind of the bullshit I'd see in corporate & doctor & teacher offices, just awful bumper-sticker material, & Bono doesn't pull it off with any irony.

xp to La Lechera; "Elvis Ate America" is also horrible but way less high profile so I give it a pass.

omg the "arms around the world" thing was SO embarrassing to me when i first heard it. euler totally otm.

this is what made me unable to accept the "ironic Bono" that you guys seem able to love. i liked U2 the way they were at the time, and relied on them for something, and then they started being posers, i guess. i realize that for some people they were always posers, but not for me. i entered U2ville right when they were huge and then dug backwards and stayed there, for better or worse.

Here are the lyrics to "Elvis In America". The only thing worse than the lyrics are the song used to deliver them, which I linked upthread. Marvel at how it just gets progressively worse as it goes along:

Elvis... white trash
Elvis... the Memphis flash
Elvis... didn't smoke hash
Would've been a sissy without Johnny Cash

Elvis... didn't dodge the draft
Elvis... had his own aircraft
Elvis... having a laugh
On the Lisa Marie in a colour photograph

Elvis... under the hood
Elvis... with Cadillac blood
Elvis... darling bud
Flowered and returned to the Mississippi mud

Elvis... ain't gonna rot
Elvis... in a Memphis plot
Elvis... he didn't hear the shot
And Dr. King died just across the lot from...

Elvis... vanilla ice cream
Elvis... girls of fourteen
Elvis... the Memphis spleen
Shooting TVs reading Corinthian's 13

Elvis... with God on his knees
Elvis... owned three TVs
Here come the killer bees
Head full of honey potato chips and cheese
Elvis... the bumper stickers
Elvis... the white knickers
Elvis... the white nigger
Ate at king burger and just kept getting bigger

Elvis... sang to win
Elvis... the battle hymn
Elvis... the battle to be slim
Elvis ate America before America ate him

Elvis...

Elvis... stamps
Elvis... necromance
Elvis... fans
Elvis... psychophants
Elvis... the public enemy
Elvis... don't mean shit to Chuck D.
Elvis... changed the center of gravity
Made it slippy

Elvis... Hitler
Elvis... Nixon
Elvis... Christ
Elvis... Mishima
Elvis... Markus
Elvis... Jackson
Elvis... the pelvis
Elvis... the psalmist
Elvis... the genius
Elvis... generous
Elvis... forgive us
Elvis... pray for us
Elvis... Aaron
Elvis... Presley

I don't have much of a problem with that marginal track - what I WOULD like is for 'Elvis Presley and America' to have better words. That could be called a wasted opportunity.

Elvis... stamps
Elvis... necromance
Elvis... fans
Elvis... psychophants
Elvis... the public enemy
Elvis... don't mean shit to Chuck D.
Elvis... changed the center of gravity
Made it slippy

WOW

Elvis ... changed the conversation
Elvis ... in many parts of the nation

OF AMERICA.

Elvis... owned three TVs

Oh shit me too, hi five EAP

I keep waiting for Bono to sing, "Elvis....was fat."

xp I always took Elevation's "mole" lyric as deliberately goofy but I guess people don't see any goofiness in Bono. If that line was in a New Order lyric people would find it adorable.

some people are allowed to giggle and others are not

elvis would have known that

I just genuinely can't fathom how he's playing all the notes that he does on 'bad', for instance (think of the highest note on the opening chord), without a capo (I managed it with a high capo + C shape the other day, but he's not doing that on that video, no capo. ditto I finally nailed 'pride' with a capo and a D shape but that doesn't fit what he's doing either).

I've seen an interview with him where he mentions the fact that he's got a slightly deformed little finger on his left hand, which allows him to stretch to frets that most people can't reach.

xp That's true. Just because you can write a line doesn't mean you can sing it.

Kool G Rap shares the "Drowning Man" love.

done. didn't expect to vote in this tbh as been a bit of a hata over the years but thought why not and surprised myself by finding 20 songs i quite like, some of them quite a bit. nice memories of listening to 'the joshua tree' in my dad's car too.

"Bad" is pretty badass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zIW8qDPhos

I haven't received it xp - have you sent it yet?

(anyone else: I've acknowledged every one I've received, if you haven't had an email from me, holler)

mine? really, it says 'sent'. right, just forwarded again.

Your second email bumped it through, thanks.

:)

Yeah "Elvis Ate America" is unbelievably awful. They should have quit after one Elvis + America song.

For anyone too timid to search for it, here it is. HOW TRULY HORRIBLE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW-C8GQguMw

Quick question... should we add notes to our picks? I've got my twenty, but am wondering how much annotation to write...

Bloody hell, I was just such a big dumb fan of this band.

No annotations, please - just be here on Friday for the results thread. Appraisals, anecdotes and abuse belong there.

I have a couple of questions. I was going to rephrase them to make them seem less lame than they are, but what the hell:

• Is Bono attractive? Seeing him as a young man I can totally imagine that the hair, the passion and the charisma would make men want to be him. But would women want him? He's been getting ropier since, I can see that.

• How Irish are U2? There are a few obvious references like An Cat Dubh, Sunday Bloody Sunday, or the arrangement on Tomorrow. What I mean is - are there other resonances that mean a lot locally but that the rest of us might not be getting?

- my wife still has a mad crush on Bono; I find this unfathomable

- there's also the gaelic bit at the end of 'Another Time, Another Place'; all the onstage waving of the tricolour that they used to do; the ruins of (?) Slane Castle on the cover of The Unforgettable Fire - a lot of this stuff was ditched from The Joshua Tree onwards.

Oh shit, I forgot about that Bono & Clannad song.

I think Bono is less attractive than many pop stars have been

but then, many pop stars are not attractive to me

especially the male ones.

But even by those standards

I think he has not been that attractive

He is very small, this may possibly not help.

Yes, early U2: Ireland

later: not so much, occasional returns like 'Please'

But there is also a genuine lingering enigma here I think -- that the Edge's guitar playing DOES often seem to encode a Celtic flavour even when he's not playing on Celtic material - when he's not playing big blues-guitar solos, that is.

I feel that this is not wholly intentional - I feel that it is a strange case of a kind of cultural DNA operating - as though 'traditional music' went into the Edge and came out without his especially intending it.

The claim sounds like hokum and something I would not normally buy, but I think the musical evidence is there, though I can't point to examples on the spot.

The outro of 'Mofo' might be an example -- the big heavy dance number moves into something else as he sprinkles guitar on the fade.

BTW Johnny Marr has talked of growing up surrounded by trad Irish music
and people have made a lot of 'please please please' etc and tried to say he's an Irish guitarist

but really this pales next to the Edge - the comparison shows how marginal the influence is on Marr
it's like in the Edge that really DID happen
wasn't just a critical fantasy.

That's interesting, I'll open my ears for that. It's more than that the effects he uses bring to mind a kind of pipey/flutey celtic atmosphere, I take it?

I also wondered about them treating faith as a fundamental, serious question; certainly with religion early on but throughout their career in various ways I suppose. It seems to me, though I can't really think of an equivalent, that British bands would not have camped on that territory in that way.

Yes, IK, it is the notes he plays.

And yes, the 'faith' business works from an Irish background (ie: you can get away with it) as it wouldn't here - I think that's a good observation.

Bono has done all this 'reading the Gospels together' business with extreme right-wing US senators. I wonder if he has done the same with the surely less malign Cliff Richard?

Well, I suppose the Edge did cop a bit from the Skids, who were not Irish but whose music did glimmer with a little bit of that stuff. But really, it seems to me the Irish stuff, what there was, went out after "War." Unlike a band like, say, Midnight Oil, which remained Aussie-centric til the end.

I can't think of two more different guitarists than Johnny Marr and the Edge, in almost every single regard.

If you mean Irish stuff disappears in lyrics, images, etc, yes

(though lots of exceptions: Van Diemen's Land, Please, Peace On Earth, Hands That Built America, Breathe)

If you mean it disappears from the guitars as I tried to suggest, then obviously I disagree

I could think of many, many guitarists more different from each other than Marr and the Edge, in many significant regards.

I think the Edge himself makes this fairly clear on the Yentob Imagine video that's on youtube, where he says there are gunslingers vs sidemen, the latter are about 'supporting the whole song', and aligns himself with Keith Richards & Marr in this group.

I think he is broadly correct here (in fact so much so that it's a bit of a truism, a bit of an easy unsurprising victory, like a lot of what the Edge says)

I don't mean his general role, I mean his style. I would align Edge with Keith, sure, but not Marr, at all. Nor would I align Keith with Marr, either. That's just crazy talk. Though I concede all three do play guitars.

The people that I hear in the Edge's guitar playing are Tom Verlaine (especicially in the earlier stuff e.g. check out the solo in 'Another Time, Another Place') and John Martyn (don't know if they used any of the same gear, but some of Martyn's echoplex stuff certainly has sonic similarities to the Edge circa The Unforgettable Fire)

Marr has always said, for about 25 years, that KR is his model of the guitar player, and that kind of thing. Undoubtedly he sees himself as in that bracket or tradition. He could hardly have been more explicit about it - he called 'Bigmouth' 'my Jumping Jack Flash'. I think the way KR moves between rhythm and lead (an old guitarist friend once told me that KR had made the distinction redundant) is pertinent.

In fact I think Marr and KR are closer than they are to The Edge. Mainly because Marr had a bit more of a blues / rock / twang tradition in his play ('nowhere fast', 'vicar in a tutu', 'queen is dead' etc) at a time when the Edge seemed more about purity of scales and textures (though the Edge did later join the rhythm & blues party somewhat with 'the Fly' etc).

Is Bono attractive? Seeing him as a young man I can totally imagine that the hair, the passion and the charisma would make men want to be him. But would women want him? He's been getting ropier since, I can see that.

Going to say no, not really. Appealing in some way, sure, but not attractive. His hair was horrible, he's self-absorbed, and like I said before, I could never get over feeling betrayed by the terrible lyrics on Achtung Baby. Larry was (and let's face it, remains) pretty hot. My choice was always The Edge (TM). He's quiet, thoughtful, skilled, and not prone to embarrassing himself.

Also, he goes by a pseudonym: THE EDGE