Bono being Bono in 1984, with a running commentary.
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Nordic » Tue Feb 10, 2015 10:32 am wrote:Back when "Achtung Baby" came out, I thought it was one of the best rock albums ever.
I listened to it again recently and it doesn't really hold up very well at all.
Which is sad. I had some key moments of my life with that as the soundtrack back in 1992.
stefano » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:45 am wrote:Nordic » Tue Feb 10, 2015 10:32 am wrote:Back when "Achtung Baby" came out, I thought it was one of the best rock albums ever.
I listened to it again recently and it doesn't really hold up very well at all.
Which is sad. I had some key moments of my life with that as the soundtrack back in 1992.
Yeah, me too hey. I think it resonated with teenage me mostly because it has a certain sort of sound that sounds like it is moving - and that Bono's ability to appear deep and sincere has the same sort of appeal, which is why he's a rockstar. That album did bring some new things to rock though.
Part of the disenchantment's also just from growing older, I think. When I was a kid Jimi Hendrix literally gave me gooseflesh, but listening to it now it's pretty basic blues with lots of reverb.
At the intersection of all the annoying things a rock star can be—messianic, pretentious, vapid, dumb, old, creatively bankrupt, grandiose, utterly bereft of self-awareness, calcified into a grotesque oily wire-rack-in-the-grocery-store knockoff of himself, part of U2, et cetera—there sits Bono in his stupid housefly glasses, playing with his dick. He is, in the words of Deadspin’s own Tim Marchman, “the worst music man of all time.” He is puke, and I want to punch him in the ear.
No one thing encapsulates The Bono Experience better than the fact that U2’s last album, Songs of Innocence (barf), was released in the form of malware forcibly uploaded to every goddamn iTunes account in the world. The megalomania and cluelessness and howling bottomless smarm: Here, jaded inhabitants of the post-industrial world, I, the Bono, bestow upon you the gift of free U2 music you didn’t even know you wanted. The blinkered certainty that the world wants what he wants to give it.
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