U2 - Actung Baby

I really didn't like this album when it came out. I didn't hate it, just didn't care for it, the first single "The Fly" had left me cold and that's how it all sounded to me, cold. After the passion that was The Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum the musical shift the band had begun (and probably should have stopped) with this album was a little much for my then 17-year-old taste. Close to a year later, I threw it on and it was like I had some type of revelation, it all became clear to me that this was an amzing album. Maybe I had matured in my time away, maybe having had to watch Def Leppard's "Let's Get Rocked" video one too many times on MTV that summer caused a paradigm shift in me, but I now knew that this was a great record. It seems like everyone else realized that too. Looking at the charts, 6 singles from this album charted (half the album!), so this pretty much dominated the air waves in the summer of '92. Unfortunately, the fall out from this album led them into their "Rock Star" phase which led to the (comparatively) dreadful Zooropa and Pop! albums. They then settled into middle-age with All You Can't Leave Behind, which certainly wasn't bad, but to me it signaled the end of the band as a vital force for defining where Rock N' Roll would go in the future. Anyway, here's a song that I truly believe was designed by the band, in lab coats, specifically to blow out cheap sub-woofers:

U2 - Until the End of the World

Getting off the main topic here, U2 is an interesting subject simply because they may be the last major rock band that were too good to hate. From the advent of the art form, there were always those stars that were at the fore-front of what was going on that, though you may not exactly like what they're doing, you couldn't help but understand their greatness (personally, I've never "got" Led Zepplin, but I understand their importance). You had Elvis, The Beatles, The Who, Springsteen, U2 and many others who were a the top of their games and got at least grudging respect from all. Nowadays, you look at the charts and you're hard pressed to find anyone who'll be around in 5 years, much less anyone that will gain and maintain critical acceptance over their career. This could be due to the fact that the music news cycle is no longer limited to Rolling Stone and the Arts section of your local paper, or due to the creeping cynicism that is endemic to today's society. It seems as soon as any band gets popular today, we immediately shuffle them off to the cut-out bin once their next release takes a mis-step. It also could be that nobody with that type of musical-landscape-changing quality has emerged since then, or it could be that the musical landscape has opened to so many different styles since them (along with the landscape of music writing) that it's almost impossible to get to the top and then do something truly "new". There's a point in there somewhere, if you can find it, I'll send you 57 cents and a copy of the Killers second album.

Thanks for listening to the babbling, I should be back (on-time) next Tuesday with a new one.