No Line On The Horizon

Am I the only one who hears "Heart Of Glass" here?

Unfortunately, that Blondie song was more memorable.

The verse of this track sucks.  The chorus is better than anything in "Get On Your Boots", and that is good.

But the reason I focus on U2 is because of the collision of the old paradigm with the new, through the lens of a band that needs to be number one.  Can you be number one still?  Or do you have to give up on that goal?

Rather than create a new "Enter Sandman", Metallica went back to its roots and made music in the vein of "Master Of Puppets".  End result?  No Top Forty breakthrough, but incredibly satiated fans.  My source says "Death Magnetic" will end up being the second best-selling Metallica album EVER!  This in an era where album sales have been halved from their peak.

How did Metallica do it?  By changing the formula.  Working with a new producer, who brought fresh ideas, who pushed the band to its limits.  Rick coddled Metallica a bit, but mostly he kept telling the band they needed more.

Did U2 need more?

Metallica was all about the set-up.  Realizing they came down on the wrong side of Napster, that despite music needing to be paid for history was moving in the other direction, Metallica gave away all kinds of material, and allowed fans to buy in at a zillion different levels, with all kinds of products.  Metallica realized it was 2008.  U2 seems to think it’s still 1992.

It’s not about the mass play.  Not about spraying bullets in every direction, but targeting your audience, the people who care.  Bruce Springsteen is projected to sell 50-55,000 albums next week (thanks "Hits"!), which will still leave him shy of gold.  Will "Working On A Dream" even get to gold?  There was massive publicity, but it didn’t move the masses to lay down their cash.

U2 should stop trying to be the biggest band in the world and just BE the biggest band in the world.  The Stones could say they were the world’s greatest rock and roll band when there were comparatively few acts out there and everybody was paying attention.  Now every Mac comes with GarageBand and even kids record music, when they’re not busy playing videogames.  The key isn’t to let everybody know you’ve got a new album out, but to inform your core, to satiate your core, and then they won’t stop talking about your new work.

The core isn’t talking about "Working On A Dream".  Word is not spreading from the center.  And the rest of the world is more concerned with that inane insane woman who just had eight babies and the doctor with the lame in vitro track record who implanted her.

Train-wreck used to work.  To the degree it still works, it’s momentary.  If Kelly Clarkson has a hit single, we’re interested. If not, she loses almost her entire audience.  Whereas a band with cred can tour even if it doesn’t have a new album.

I’m flummoxed by these two U2 tracks.  They’re just not…good enough.  And just not off the wall enough to be seen as experimentation.  It’s okay to experiment, it’s okay to fail.  But not if you need to succeed.  And there’s an air of desperation coming from the U2 camp.  Which does not draw people to you.

We’re drawn to the dark and sinister, the different, what’s underground.  The mainstream ruled in the MTV era, from 1981-2000.  But we’ve seen a splintering of the audience worse than the one in the late sixties, when free-form FM started making inroads into AM’s audience.

And now radio is a backwater.

You listen to this new track.  You tell me.