Hard to believe they managed to talk about the media landscape in 1991 and U2 without mentioning Negativland.
"Until the End of the World" is a Biblical song--it has Bono, as Judas, singing to the Edge, who represents Jesus by means of a righteous guitar solo--and, as the solo continues, confetti made from ripped-up books falls onto the crowd; when I reached up and grabbed a page, it was from Dante's "Divine Comedy."
I'll buy that, in various ways of construing the terms, this could be all of "inventive, absurd, and spectacular", but none of those is the first word that comes to mind.
True fact: The substance of U2's lawsuit against Negativeland was that people would mistake the Negativeland album for a U2 album. At the time the album came out, I worked at a Tower Records, and that Tuesday my job was to stock the new CDs that came in. I saw boxesthat said "U2 Negativeland" and dutifully filed them under U2.
But it looked wrong, so I went to my manager and said, "Annee, something is weird about this U2 album. Why would they release something that looks like this?" and she said "That's not an album called *Negativeland* by U2. That is an album called "U2" by Negativeland."
I'm really surprised people have heard of Negativeland and their lawsuits all these years later.
Burneko is a consistently fun read.
3: If it help reassure you, I hadn't heard of either until you mentioned them.
Burneko is a consistently fun read.
Yeah, he's also the author of that "I don't think David Brooks is ok" piece, as well as a great pan of Bill Simmons. I haven't read much else yet, but he makes me laugh.
Deadspin has actually put together a pretty entertaining stable of writers. Drew Magary makes me laugh a lot as well.
I was happy to see the Mekons' "Blow Your Tuneless Trumpet" show up in the comments.
3: More people have heard of Negativland, I bet.
It's pretty hard for me to care about U2, so I don't know the point of either article. U2 sucks, etc. etc. whatever.
3.last, 5 Well I'm glad, I suppose, I didn't come here to tell you all to stop jacking it to Don Joyce last week. RIP.
I still have their U2 cassette somewhere.
Negativland is why I always knew just how many time zones there were in the Soviet Union..
Some really wonderful found sound and collage. So much great stuff.
The Burneko was very entertaining.
Alan Finlayson on Bonoism is pretty great.
But Bono is also an example of a particular 'structure of feeling': an individualised aestheticised perspective on the world combined with a philanthropic attitude and scepticism about the formalities of political processes...
For the same reason, he is unhappy with the moral obligations of socialism--partly because they come from without, but also because they presume that he does not know what is the best way to make the world a better place. He wants to help the poor, but he wants to do it by setting up his own charity. If worried about the quality of education, the Bonoist will open up his own school.
So much great stuff there, well worth your time.
12./last, 13.last In short all I really wanted to say was "so much great stuff."
That seems to have some elements in common with Kochism- destroy the world, then make contributions that undo some small percentage of what you're fucked up but that make you seem like a generous philanthropist. Far more cancer would be prevented by the Kochs accepting government regulation that will ever be cured due to their contributions, but then they might only be worth 41B instead of 42B.
Unlike the Kochs, Bono didn't cause the problems he's trying to address (although are we really sure U2 music doesn't cause cancer?) but he ignores the fact that governmental action can do far more than his earnest faces.
The Gawker Media promise to writers is an explicit "It'll be just like your college newspaper, but real people may read your hobbyhorses until D/en/ton gets itchy, fires you and sets the new generation of dogs on your heels," right?
The sentences are witty and funny, but I think nothing more. Imagining what other people, objectionable ones, think and then taking them down for it, short-lived fun. Cartoonists do this-- the description of the intense sincere guy brought early Matt Groening to mind.
I usually like the Mekons.
Also Portishead, I like Portishead. Is Beth Orton, also kind of pretentious, but she's private if not onstage, is she less objectionable for staying quiet offstage?
I can't imagine enjoying small talk with Bono either, but think pieces about him seem misdirected. Effective structural criticism would aim higher than shoddy generalization from a single personality deformed by fame.
For examlple, Liz Phair-- she's left the limelight, hasn't she ?
As I recall, people were already mocking Bono's particular brand of earnestness back in the early 90s. When something's been going on for decades, does it become its own genre? The "Bono thinks he's saving the world but he's really just a big dumb celebrity" genre.
I thought the magnificent epic weirdness that was Tim Tebow's CFL Odyssey was from Deadspin, but nope: SB Nation.
13: Freed, I liked it. It was good. I recognized in it some of the elements of left-neoliberalism, post-marxism, post-structuralism etc that I read all the time, say at New Inquiry. Finlayson, I may have a book of his laying around here, mentions Richard Florida and the "Creative Class" Hardt & Negri, immaterial labour and its real subsumption. Whatev, not going to get into here.
Current reading, among others:Benjamin Noys, Persistence of the Negative
Here is a quote from the Noys:
What already emerges here is a political ontology of intervention that answers in advance the May '68 slogan 'Structures do not march in the street'. Slavoj Žižek has argued that Deleuze simply discards this earlier structuralist moment for the false solution of affirming productive becoming. He argues that there are two ontologies at work in Deleuze: the 'good' structuralist ontology of the sterile immaterial effect, associated particularly with Deleuze's The Logic of Sense (1969), and the 'bad' expressivist ontology of productive power, associated with Deleuze's work with Guattari. The illegitimate elimination of the first ontology results, according to Žižek, in fatal philosophical and political consequences - the valorisation of production leads to the over-coding of the distinction virtual/actual with the opposition between production and representation. This simplification results in a political model that opposes molecular political productivity, correlated with a libertarian self-organisation, to a molar, totalising power. In fact, this can help explain why today we have two contemporary affirmative images of Deleuze running side by side: Deleuze as a 'pure metaphysician' recovered from his political 'illness', and the quasi-anarchist political Deleuze of affirmative libertarian becomings. In both cases the subterranean link is the constriction of Deleuze to this second expressive ontology of production posed against political and philosophical representation.
We have one album of messiah rock, I think it's filed in the basement as the urge to play only seems to hit the better half every 18-24 months or so and usually fades after 1-2 songs. That has actually become a metric we use to weed out music - if it doesn't get played at least as often as bono, it's not earning its space. Even in the basement.
But I have a small fondness for u2 as a couple of years ago we were hiking on Stewart Island with my stepdaughter and her boyfriend who were staying with us for two nights very squozed up on a small sailboat and we were playing the music game on the hike. We are not easy people to play the music game with! Boyfriend was like are you kidding me, obscure Mingus tunes?!?!! The bass line leading up to Sarastro's last entrance?!!??? Although silently because he's super nice. And I was like psst! toss a u2 anthem at 'em! They'll never get it and then will be embarrassed! Worked a treat AND today they are getting married! Woo hoo!
Although generally messiah rock is stupidly pernicious.
Oh, here is another post on Real Abstraction which is partly what Noys is discussing. Sohn-Rethel, Albert Toscano. There is a link to the right "against accelerationism"
What is the point of this theoretical discourse? Well, Marxians always believed we have to take correct theory into the streets with us, then to be expanded and corrected by praxis.
The only question is:"Why don't they rise up?"
I was thinking of trying in the thread below and the link to Seth Ackerman at Jacobin (And the comments to his article is whay should be read), trying to connect this abstruse theory to practical politics, in particular say the "academic" dispute "Class vs Race" or "Gender vs Class)
They are "taking it to the streets." I'll use Greece as an example.
Syriza is doing the hard work of building a political coalition. The communists, KKE, are radical, purists, marginal, likely correct, and utterly irrelevant. As I understand it, Syriza's coalition contains the right of the hard left, the left of the center-left, and all the many factions we group under the rubric "identity politics": feminists, LGBTQ, Muslims, entrepreneurs that are socially liberal, of course Marxian college students,etc.
There may be similarities to the Obama coalition.
Unfortunately, this is a coalition that is by nature and interests cosmopolitan, e.g. strongly European-identified and not friendly to radical and painful economic tactics, like Grexit. This is the box Syriza is in, and the box we are all in, the box of late-capitalism, neoliberalism, and real subsumption of individuality.
The theorists are trying to find a key in.
I have to admit that I don't understand the resentment against U2 (or Bono): it smacks of protests-too-much or jealousy or something. I didn't know U2 was still an active band, to be honest.
Having read the second link in the OP, the Burneko: it's just naked snark. well done for its genre, admittedly, but why is he so *angry* about some guy? One could write so snarkily about virtually any public figure, celebrity, or any band. What's the problem, that U2 (or Bono) are political at all? Is there a notion here that bands/musicians should not be political at all? I ask because other musicians have been attacked for being political at all: the claim is that one doesn't want politics (or ethics) in one's music at all.
I get the complaint that Bono has a messianic approach. I grant the validity of the Finlayson quote in 13: 'He wants to help the poor, but he wants to do it by setting up his own charity. If worried about the quality of education, the Bonoist will open up his own school.' At the same time, isn't that pretty much what Bill Gates, and for that matter Bill Clinton, do?
Meh. While U2 aren't my go-to listening preference, I just don't find them irritating at all. {I just asked my housemate, while one of the linked videos from the OP was playing, what he thought of it, and he said, "It's okay. It's listenable. Kind of generic. I only know half a dozen U2 songs anyway."}
Aren't there any number of other musicians in the same category? Sting? Paul Simon?
I think that if the complaint is that Bono is political in the wrong way, a comparison (the right way) is needed. Who would that be? Billy Bragg?
18 I like Portishead and Beth Orton too. I don't care if she's a bit pretentious and really never even noticed anything of the sort from her that doesn't come with being a rock star. But she doesn't pal around with war criminals like Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and Tony Blair as if she's one of them the way Bono does. At least not to my knowledge.
Bono has a way of making every cause about him and sucking all the oxygen out of the room for any other kind of public recognition for the urgent causes he purports to care about. Let's see him do something genuinely unpopular, like lobbying his powerful friends for a major rescue effort and asylum for migrants in the Mediterranean. I won't be holding my breath though.
what 25 said.
Bono's a bit too earnest for me these days, but he's no less so than he was in 83, when U2 started their string of great albums.
and, fuck any music critic who judges a band on what he imagines goes on in the heads of that band's fans. that's not music criticism, that's strawman slaughter.
she doesn't pal around with war criminals like Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and Tony Blair as if she's one of them the way Bono does
I was not aware of this, about Bono.
Have to agree with 28.last.
Good lord, there are so many bands who are or who have been political in some possibly strained way. Radiohead isn't exactly bubble gum pop. Are they doing it the right way?
Still, if Bono is hanging out with Tony Blair and whatnot, that does give one pause.
What about Elvis Costello? Doing it right, I imagine. I'm guessing that it's U2's tremendous celebrity that causes Burneko to throw a hissy fit. I'll need to see a case made that they're (U2 are) doing active damage in order to see the need for the hissy fit.
Big Black had a song called "Bombastic Overture." That could be the title of every single U2 song ever.
Then there's the moving offshore to avoid millions in Irish taxes.
Elvis Costello doesn't pretend to have the cure for what ails the world.
"Bombastic Intro." Point still stands.
Then there's the moving offshore to avoid millions in Irish taxes.
Okay. If that's true, okay, I see.
I thought the essential U2 takedown was in 1960.
33 is very funny. OKAY. I relent.
I was tempted to say before (but feared that my terminology was wrong) that U2 is, um, power rock, by which I mean it's all effect driven. Yes, that's true. It was a thing, back in the day.
Is it not any more?
Also, you know, I'm sure, that the musical refrain "One Love" is not actually a U2 original, so criticizing them for the sentiment seems wrong-headed. Are we taking issue with U2 for being too earnest, or for relying too heavily on guitar effects, or for Bono's political ties? Which is it?
Pink Floyd relies heavily on guitar effects.
Probably it's the combination of the three complaints that has people in a fit. But mostly the last: Bono.
What's the 1960 reference?
Francis Gary Powers, the first worldwide U2 star.
I see.
Since this is a noodling around thread, I'm going to be bold and say this: if you are not reading Bill Moyers place, you should be.
The essential U2 takedown is the marvelous cover of Where the Streets have No Name by the Pet Shop Boys. I can now never hear the original without an overlay of Paul Anka.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3Zpks05Ns
41: Anyone can do an awful, unbearable cover: it doesn't count as a take down.
No, it's so awesome that it improves the original beyond measure.
No, it's so awesome that it improves the original beyond measure.
Wait. I am old, but U2's string of great albums ended in 83. Well, last good album 83, first crap album 84. (I was a 14yo eagerly awaiting The Unforgettable Fire, then I read [probably in Creem!] that they were not going with Steve Lillywhite to produce because they wanted a "less guitar-driven" sound and I thought, "Oh. This is going to suck, isn't it?" It sucked.) Boy is really perfect, though.
45 is the essential The Rolling Stones takedown.
it improves the original beyond measure.
Disagree. I find it awful and unbearable. You could speed up "Hey, Jude" in such a way and I wouldn't find it an improvement. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
I'm on parsimon's side here. This article is some would-be clever person assuming everyone in the audience agrees with him and wanting to say the same thing 50 times in one article. Didn't we get tired of "fisking" 10 years ago?
Isn't it essentially true that we get the pop culture we deserve?
That is, like the man says, the fault is not in our stars.
48: Noooooo. I love Brian Eno! But that was a pretty good guitar sound on those early records. ("I Will Follow"? Come on!)
46 is correct, though the last sentence is maybe a little strong.
U2 is perfectly fine. They have a lot of good albums.
Screaming Females just finished their set, fucking brilliant!
Everything I know about U2 I learned from Cassey Kasem, like the commenter in #1.
But also noted:
Jimmy Page schools The Edge: http://youtu.be/ODidAgdL40Y
Richard Cheese's covers are not quite tributes.
I still like the U2 from the era between Joy Division and New Order, when Martin Hannett was producing.
This was the best argued takedown of U2 I remember from before the Internet:
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/16/arts/recordings-when-self-importance-interferes-with-the-music.html
Look at that time stamp.
on preview, close enough.
Guitar hero for a day:
http://youtu.be/4Su4UMSVZZo
Screaming Females are great. Here, have a video.
Bono does the world a great service, by giving lots of people someone to hate. U2's best albums were when they were pretentious iroonically, which seems to be something they forgot.
Various music writers have been trying to convince the world that "U2 is not all that" and "Bono is a tool" were big stories for how many years now? I wonder when they'll figure out why nobody really seems to care.
"U2 is not all that" and "Bono is a tool" articles are the wet bread of music journalism. No ideas this week? Remind everyone that you've totally rumbled that Edge fellow and that you know more about saving the world than that asshole in the blowfly glasses. Throw some wet bread at the wall and see if it sticks.
No ideas this week?
I still haven't found what I'm looking for.
60: I didn't notice this so much last year, but apparently pretty much their entire fan base consists of young, small queer women and older, portly straight guys. Marissa P. is really developing her stage presence. I would say that, technically, her guitar brilliance only came through on the last couple of songs, but that's just part of the deal with live shows -- sometimes things are just a little bit off and that can be a noticeable difference.
Huh. 63 because 62 had seemed to post.
63 was an improvement on 62, babe, and made me laugh.
Hey, meanwhile, this being the music thread and all: this about the new Broadway musical Hamilton is terrific. Watch that video, man, of the creator Lin-Manuel Mirand's initial rap performance at the White House. So great. I hadn't heard anything about this.
I think we should all listen to U2 and shoot lions.
If Bono went to Zimbabwe and shot a lion, would the resulting social media frenzy cause the internet to collapse?
I think we should do the experiment. For Science.
The problem is that attacking U2 is like shooting fish in a barrel, except, you know, with really annoying deserve-to-be-shot fish.
I've always hated U2, which dates, I think, from the kinds of kids at high school who liked them. I used to have a downer on the Smiths for the same reason, but later came to see the error of my ways on that one. I've seen no reason to revise my U2 views.
Saw Lucinda Williams last night. She rocks.
I've always hated U2, which dates, I think, from the kinds of kids at high school who liked them
This is also the reason for my opinions on soccer, monster trucks, and Jesus Christ.
IF someone else had not posted 33 already, I would have.