There was a recent flap over the amount of money that U2 spent on the stage rig for their new tour. There’s a good article on it over at the BBC site.
Personally, I find Bono’s reasoning for the elaborate stage perfectly fine. A big chunk of what makes a great rock concert is a certain degree of spectacle. That’s not to say that one guy on a bare stage with one guitar can’t hit the ball out of the park. But personally, I like the spectacle. It’s part of what I pay for when I shell out over $100 for a ticket. The design of their elaborate stage should help enhance the fan experience, especially for the fans in the cheaper seats.
Plus, the number of people that U2 must be employing in the towns where they play must be fairly high. That’s a lot of stage to assemble and disassemble on the timetable of a world tour, so the amount of both local and traveling labor needed is going to be pretty large. That’s a nice infusion of cash straight back into the local economy, and it would go straight into the hands of working class people. Those are the people currently being hardest hit by the current state of the world economy. Even though it’s a one-time thing, it’s more than a lot of people would otherwise have had.
So rather than looking at the U2 stage as being environmentally damaging, I personally see U2 helping to keep the money supply churning and generating wealth.
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Tags: U2