Artist: U2
Album: Rattle and Hum
I’ll be the first to admit that I usually don’t like U2′s work. Like I’ve said before, I’ve always thought that their stuff was totally inaccessible. And I’d forgotten that I even had this song.
Posts Tagged ‘U2’
Random Song: When Love Comes to Town
Friday, February 25th, 2011Random Song: New Year’s Day
Friday, May 7th, 2010Artist: U2
Album: War
I’m not a particularly big U2 fan. They’re the darlings of critics and serious music aficionados everywhere. But for some reason, I always found their music to be a tad inaccessible. (Most of the bands that I listen to don’t require frequent trips to Wikipedia to understand what the lyrics are about.) I always feel like there’s some deeper subtext that I’m just not getting when I listen to their stuff.
That being said, I do enjoy an occasional song of theirs, and ‘New Year’s Day’ is one of those songs. This particular song has always stood out to me for its beauty. Listening to this song is what led me to recognize the true amount of skill that goes into their work–and made me realize that in many ways, they do deserve a lot of the praise that they get.
What has especially struck me about this song is how well-balanced this song is. No one part of the mix is allowed to overwhelm anything else. The bass and drums are the driving force here–but Bono’s voice manages to shine like a jewel. In a song with this sort of structure, it can be easy to let the bass overwhelm all else–but nothing ever gets lost here.
Perhaps some of that balance can be put down to good production, but I think a lot of it has to do with the skill with which the song was composed.
An Economic View of the U2 Tour
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009There 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.