Category: Music

For the longest time, I’ve preferred Bono the spritual guy versus Bono’s band. With the occasional bright spot, U2’s singles have really failed to really grab me since The Joshua Tree, which I exchanged for a copy of The Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs,

a decision that I do not regret even to this day (more tracks, less suck).

I reiterate: U2 have

occasionally come out with singles that I liked, but not in that same

way that every track in their early albums such as Boy, October and War got me. It may have been my youth (I was a spiky-haired teenager when those albums came out, and I got them on vinyl), but their later work has often left me feeling rather like His Holiness in this photo:

“Forgive them, for they know not how much they suck.”

However, the new single, Vertigo,

impresses me. In fact, it impresses me to the point of my wanting to

say “All right, impostors: where are U2 and what have you done with

them?”

Nicely done, gentlemen. I’m interested to hear what the rest of the album sounds like.

Bonus link: The Negativland single, U2, featuring studio outtakes of Casey Kasem swearing during a recording session of American Top 40 over the tune of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

When MTV and MuchMusic
debuted, I remember some people complaining that what was shown in
music videos often had nothing to do with the song or that they
imagined comepletey different visuals for the song. With the rise of
cheap and plentiful broadband, good audio compression and tools like
Flash, making your own video for your favourite songs is easier than
ever.

Indie artists often don’t have the money to make videos (which means
that they also don’t have the money to hire lawyers to hand out
cease-and-desist nastygrams), so a good number of these homemade videos
are for songs that wouldn’t otherwise have them. Notable ones
include  Wesley Willis’ Merry Christmas and geek troubador MJ Hibbett’s ode to computers of the 1980s, Hey Hey 16K (which I first mentioned in this entry).

The threat of lawsuits doesn’t stop everyone, however — especially if
they live in places where the observation of copyright is a little,
shall we say, relaxed. A Chinese site whose URL I can’t find has a
number of videos, most of them dreadfully bad, save for this video of Nirvana’s Dumb.
I rather like the artist’s cartoony renditions of Kurt, Krist and Dave;
if Nirvana had a Saturday morning cartoon show just like one of their
chart contemporaries, they’d probably be drawn like this.