Music for Cultural Zombies: A Meditation on the New U2 Album
I’m thinking about all this now that I’ve listened to the new U2 album that is partly famous because iTunes has released it for free.
Martin Cothran : U2 is one of the few classic rock bands that is still together and writing new music. Like the Heartbreakers, who also have a new release, U2 is one of the many classic rock bands that believed in meta-narratives. They couldn’t actually provide any, but they at least believed they existed. Aside from disco and other subgenres in pop music at that time that were about little other than having fun (through various means, including sex and drugs), many of the classic rock bands at least attempted to say something they thought might be significant. Most of the time they ended up trying to say too much, in which case they ended up just being pretentious (I’m thinking of Rush here).
