U2

[Guybrush]

There's been some surprisingly decent discussion around U2 on this forum, so maybe that's a good topic.

For myself, it was a band I was hugely into as a young teenager, but were rapidly becoming less cool towards the end of the 90s when I was discovering goth rock and The Residents and punk etc.

In the 2000s, my impression is they decidedly became uncool. I'm not quite sure what it is. Maybe you become too big and your music is too accessible so your fan base becomes significantly made up of people who have no real depth to their interest in music as an art form. Plus people tire of you. Probably more to it as well.

I no longer put on a U2 album. I haven't done so since I regularly listened to CDs. But on occasion, I do hear their songs and many of them are actually pretty great.

So let's share our love or hate for this band. Maybe someone can even answer this question well: where are they now? In an artistic sense, I mean.

Here's one of those songs that I really like:

[Lexi Darling]

I'd consider myself a fan. Aside from hearing their big hits as a youngster I didn't really get into them or listen to a full album until the later 2000s. But yeah, I like most of their 80s and 90s music and it's a precipitous drop off from there.

But I do give them a lot of credit for being a band with a pretty instantly recognizable signature sound, and for totally reinventing themselves in the 90s. I think Achtung Baby and Zooropa are my favorite albums, that era of the band is very vibrant and the music still holds up.

[Guybrush]

Today, I think of their pre-90s hits as the most timeless, but I listened to a lot of Achtung Baby and Zooropa back in the day as well as the Passengers album they did with Brian Eno and Pop which was the last album I bought from them.

One of the stronger songs of that decade, for me at least, is actually the Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me single they did for Batman Forever.

If it seems a little forgotten, it might be from getting overshadowed by Kiss From a Rose by Seal from the same soundtrack which, rightfully, should overshadow most things associated with that movie 😄

[Psy-Fi]

I got into them around the time they released their debut album. I heard a live radio broadcast of them playing at the Paradise club in Boston at that time and I thought they had a unique sound. I bought their first three albums and went to see them play live but started to lose interest in them around 1984. Can't say I dislike them now but I haven't listened to them since sometime in the late 80's.

[Guybrush]

So I'm thinking this might be one of their more underrated hits? I think it's a pretty great song, though I haven't heard it played much on radio and elsewhere.

I didn't even know it had a music video 😄

[Mindy]

[Guybrush]

The whole of U2 with Brian Eno became the group Passengers in the mid 90s and released an album of music that was quite unlike U2's regular output.

A favourite from that album, Original Soundtracks 1, was a song that played over the end credits of the Ghost in the Shell anime, One Minute Warning.

Though how much of this track is Bono and the boys and how much is Eno is anyone's guess 😄

[tristan_geoff]

U2 went from being one of my favs, to being a band I found cool to dislike, and then again and way more than before a fav band.

Their discog and story is very cool to read about, and some of Eno's finest production work is on their albums with Eno at the mixing board.

They were in one of those very UK-adjacent who will succeed competitions?  Kinda how like people pitted Blur and Oasis' popularity against each other, U2's rival was Echo and the Bunnymen, and we all know who won lol.  No shade on Echo, but their music was probably a bit to similar to the other post-punk bands at the time, while U2 went straight to making the genre sound large as fuck, I recently bought a bunch of early U2 CDs and I find that the first album, Boy, sounds remarkably similar to Joy Division if they were actually joyful lol.  Just a different emotional take on the same sound, and for that I think that U2 changed the world of punk, for good or bad depending on who you talk to, but with the discog they have it's hard to not find a few songs to connect to.

All that said, they are pop punk in a different sense of the term, a popular/poppy punk band idk.  Joshua Tree is one of the finest albums ever, but my personal favorite is the often forgotten (ironically) The Unforgettable Fire.  That album lives in my car CD player rent free.

[Lexi Darling]

I listen to their early 90s albums more often but yeah, they were really onto something special with those mid-80s records. The Unforgettable Fire is great, Bad is definitely a contender for my favorite U2 song.