Originally posted by TheRefugee:Great point. People need to accept that this IS the album U2 wanted to make, or at least it's the one Bono wanted to make. And let's face it, Bono is the driving force of U2 and his fingerprints are all over this album.
One of Bono's main heroes and influences was Bowie, music's greatest magpie or chameleon. So many U2 albums contain many different stabs at genres within the one record. There is no one set U2 sound. What links all their work is ambition, desire, curiosity, call it whatever you want. Pitchfork call it 'emulous', as if U2 wish to emulate others. Maybe they do, so fucking what. It might lead them down creative evolutionary cul de sacs, but what's the big crime in trying.
U2 have always been honest about where they come from musically speaking. Ireland had little rock heritage besides The Horlips (Celtic Glam fusion) Thin Lizzy (Hard guitar rock) or Rory Gallagher (blues based rock guitar). There was no template for U2 from the beginning, so they were going to be wide open for influences to the contemporary sounds that prevailed, e.g. post punk at the time. My point in short is: that the common accusation levelled at U2 by the critical consenus is that U2 are desperately trying to capture the zeitgest by clumsily aping current trends and sounds. But they have always sought to channel their creativity or give voice to Bono's muse by channeling various musical influences through their U2 filter, sometimes looking backwards (RnH), sometimes looking at current trends (Pop).
There is no pure sacrosanct U2 sound. They are magpies by nature, borrowing here, stealing there, but always there, surviving and often times annoying. On a separate note, I detect a touch of agism to many of the critics nastier reviews. Rock/Pop/whatever you call it may have its roots as a young person's thing, but setting rules that 50 year old men should not be allowed release music seems inconsistent with an art form supposedly with no rules or about breaking them.
Originally posted by MoFoNYR15:And as someone stated already, I’ll judge it after the tour. Some songs take on a whole new sound and meaning during a live show and I’m sure that’ll happen again with these songs
Originally posted by blueeyedboy:[..]
Well said. And exact... They've never hidden that fact either... If they hadn't gone to Berlin, taken in the industrial scene, and recorded where their influences had recorded previously, we might not have had Achtung Baby... Not sure why so people are so shocked or appalled by the fact that every artist is a cannibal and every poet is a thief... to be influenced and open minded is no crime... the great crime is making the same album over and over and just changing the words...
