What is your honest opinion of U2?

>>72992972
Good band. Feels a bit too nondescript at times but you can do worse as far as predictable rock-pop goes.

Given that the only situation where I'd really consider them bad is being offensively generic. Which really is the only reason anyone would want to knock them down, people just find it offensively inoffensive and want to knock down the people that praise them feeling it's undeserved praise. Given the passage of time it's kind of inevitable that things sound old-hat eventually.

>>72992972
an improvement from U1

Overrated, but they have good songs.

>>72992972
I sorta lost interest after achtung baby, but they had a good run with their first 4 albums. October is pretty underrated.

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Any before this I like. Afterwards, no interest.

/mu/core

Literally who

I thank them for make with or without you which is one of my favorite songs,,, aside from that I don't like much else they have made.

>>72992972
>Not the greatest band ever, but they have a pretty solid discography with a few stand out albums (Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby)

peak U2 is like a really awesome mushroom trip. You briefly believe in a spiritual kum-ba-ya when in their thrall but I dunno man. Even by Achtung Baby they knew it was just some hedonistic kick, so the rest of the career seemed kinda platitudinous

U2 is an awesome band all in all. But their legacy now carries a lot of post golden era baggage and people only seem to ever focus on that shit. But like check this shit out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kboUk9jzJs
their material, performances and attitude were completely on point there but you know. I don't often listen to anything they've done in the last 20 years but everything up until joshua tree is quality music.

They get a lot of hate for a band that's released many great classics.

>>72992972
8.5/10 band. their new stuff sucks though

Aight, I guess. I'll listen to their early stuff when I'm in the mood.

>>72993355
Triple double confirms it

>>72994079
Quite refreshing. Just a young band playing music they believe in and having a good time doing it with an appreciative audience. They had no idea at the time they would rise to very top of the rock world with the most successful live tours of all time.

You probably know by now that half the U2 haters basically just fell for the meme. If you're in your 30s or younger and didn't watch the rise of U2, you were likely fed a skewed perspective on them. They were overplayed, definitely. Bono can be sort of annoying, sure.

But they were an incredibly original band, doing cool off-the-wall shit up until about All That You Can't Leave Behind, then they started coasting. Sure, there's a million bands, singers, and one-off hits that sound like them now, (here's one example just off the top of my head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn7CBtdM3dE), but that goes to show you just how much they changed the game. That's their influence. Did it kind of open Pandora's Box, maybe, but that's another topic.

That brings me back to my original statement—the other half of people who hate them are frustrated that they can't pin them down. Even Robert Christgau, who's always got something to say, couldn't come up with anything at all when it came out and later admitted "after many, many tries, Achtung Baby still sounded like a damnably diffuse U2 album to me, and I put it in the hall unable to describe a single song." It was the best album of the '90s, and one of the best and most important rock albums of all time. No one made anything quite like it, before or after.

>>72995508
I always found Achtung a tad overrated. For me, Unforgettable Fire and Joshua are their 1a/1b masterpieces.

>>72995630
Was never super thrilled with the second halves of those two. Unforgettable Fire moreso; Joshua Tree sounds great if you play it all together, but I think some of UF's experiments are a bit flat.

>>72995963
Agree to disagree
Whenever I want to hear a U2 record I go straight to UF

>>72996121
aww yea girl
The Unforgettable Fire documentary is kind of cool if you haven't seen it. It's not super informative or eventful but it does an OK job letting you draw your own conclusions about what the U2/Eno/Lanois genesis was like and who Bono was at the time. Plus Slane Castle is really nice to look at, too bad the video quality isn't great.

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>>72996170
Thanks for the tip I'll check it out