The Joshua Tree - 30 Year Anniversary Tour - Opening Night - Vancouver

Okay... after five days, my in depth review of the opening night of U2's 30th Anniversary Joshua Tree Tour...

As I've said elsewhere the worst U2 concert I've ever seen, is STILL a pretty great show.  And yes, this was the worst.

Let's place that in context a bit by reviewing quickly what it was up against:

November '87 at BC Place - the original Joshua Tree Tour.  Not only was U2 arriving to the position of being the biggest band on earth, but the concert itself occurred right after the Enniskillen bombing. They had already done the San Francisco show that is featured in Rattle and Ho-Hum but Vancouver was the next day after San Fran and they were still very fired up. I've said it a thousand times before, that show was like going to church. I've never been in a crowd that was SO with the band. Though the show was relatively simple - no enormous screens yet - it was the single best concert experience I've ever had.

April '92 at Pacific Coliseum. I still have the concert shirt. December wore it this past week to the latest concert. It was the last show of the Achtung Baby tour - which was the first leg of what was to turn into the ZooTV Tour. It was in effect the practise tour for ZooTV - they came back to Vancouver again for ZooTV. The Pixies opened for then (and were terrible... but they played the Commodore Ballroom the next night and promptly broke up... so I guess they were "good" for a band who hated each other.) Meanwhile the practise run was in full-bloom and it was a technical marvel the likes of which had never been seen. It was amazing. The overload of ideas and technology directly influenced the next Juanabees tour. Absolutely in the top 5 concerts I've ever seen.

May '15 (Only 3 days short of two years before this past concert.) The second night of The Innocence + Experience Tour. The technical aspects of this show were the most amazing thing I have ever seen. Totally amazing. The band were beginning to show the effect of being in their 50s and that stuck out to me more than I wish it did.  They were STILL great, but let's just say that Bono was long past his days of hanging off the balcony rail. As much as I enjoyed the show I did ask myself if I would ever see them again, as I'm not keen of watching them age past being the consummate rock stars of my youth. Also one of the top 5 concerts ever.

When the Joshua Tree 30 year Anniversary tour was announced and Mumford & Sons were announced as the opener, I knew what my last U2 show had to be. Mumford is a favourite of my daughter, and Joshua Tree is my all time desert island disc. It had to be her first concert and my last (U2) concert. The symmetry was too good.

As much as I want to try to put aside the venue issues (which did not directly effect me) it is hard to ignore the effect it has on a crowd as a whole. Certainly if I am going to credit the energy that the emotional perfect storm stirred in the crowd in 1987, I can't simply discredit the effect of having a third of your crowd angry before they got to their places in the stadium.  I also have to acknowledge that there is an effect of 30 years upon the audience. We've long since past the point where there the energy level of the audience is divided by those who stand for the whole show and those who stand only for the great songs. We are now at the point where the divisor is those who stand for the great songs and those who sit for the whole show. For the record - I stood for almost the whole thing - including absolutely all of the pre-encore set.

Looking at the set-up for the show it appeared at a glance as though the show was going to be less tech-heavy than the concerts since Achtung Baby, but not stripped down as far as the original tour. The poetry scrolling up the stage left side of the screen was a give-away that the backdrop was not as inert as it looked like in passing. There was also the now ubiquitous presence of the second stage which was not present in '87  (Also an Achtung Baby innovation). 

It was hard not to be disappointed by Mumford and Sons. From where we were the portion of the screen where the band was projected was almost entirely obscured by a PA & lighting tower. This had the added effect of making me fear that the only portion of the back drop that would feature the feature act would also be obscured. Spoiler alert - it wasn't. But that in itself caused frustration - knowing in retrospect that the support act COULD have been shown on both sides of the stage. But instead we were forced to choose between watching Marcus Mumford's elbow in high definition at twice his standing height, or the actual Marcus Mumford... was that him?... it was hard to tell from our distance.

All these complaints aside... the reverence that Mumford has for U2 - a respect that caused a genuine headlining act to want to open for their heroes - was clearly defined by the glowing words used to express their gratitude. I probably only really know four Mumford songs well - they played all four of them and my six year old daughter was delighted to sing along - for once allowed to sing the F-word lyric in Little Lion Man. While there would not have been a big difference for us whether Mumford was really in the building playing or if they had just put some cut-outs on guide tracks on stage and played the album tracks, it was still great to share those songs live and dance with my kid. But this was truly just a warm up.

And that brings us to U2...

There is a mixed bag of good and less good to follow, and I am going to do the band and show a disservice by focusing mostly on the good first, while ending largely with my criticisms, but I want to start by saying something I've already said: This was a really good concert. U2 suffers by being measured against their own success. All three of my previous U2 shows rank in my top five all time concerts - they have made themselves a hard act to follow as I inevitably grade them on a different scale from almost anyone else. By being quite possibly the best arena/stadium act of all time (and definitely in the conversation about the subject) its almost inevitable that they would disappoint... and you could even argue that they always have after that first show took my number one all time spot and held onto it for (presumably) the rest of my life. But this show definitely makes my top ten concerts of all time and I have a bag filled with literally hundreds of event tickets I've saved up since the mid 80s.

So... what did I love?

The opening was great. Simple, but great. Building the presence of the band up one piece at a time - making me think of Stop Making Sense (John Demme, only having just passed away, reinforcing the idea for me) but accelerated over the opening of a single song.  My kid's favourite U2 song is Sunday Bloody Sunday, so both of the night's acts blew their wad for her in their second and first songs respectively, but it was great to be able to sing along with her from the outset of the show.

I appreciated the structure of the show as a whole (but will get into quibbles in the second half of this), putting the songs from before the Joshua Tree first - a quick primer on "how we got to the Tree" - then the main attraction - then encoring with songs that followed their most significant album.

A Sort of Homecoming may have actually been the highlight of the show for me. I kind of forgot just how much I love that song (which they haven't played live for over a decade and a half).

I also really enjoyed the transition from the Pride into The Joshua Tree. Simple. Using the full length of the screen behind them to mimic the set-up of the original opening. Where the original used a giant cyclorama washed in red lights over a silhouetted Joshua Tree, the update used the (biggest high-definition single panel) screen to similar effect while the band gathered under the  outstretched arms of a pin-lit tree while the opening sequence of Where the Streets Have No Name informed the audience - if they had not yet figured it out - that we were about to begin our journey through a re-invented version of one of the greatest albums in the history of rock and roll.

That screen... wow.  Gorgeous... even if they seemed to be working a few bugs out of it - entire sections dropping out for several frames at a time. The vivid colour and the enormous seamless size of it... awesome. And relatively simple, given the shows U2 had staged in the past. The images they put up there... I am less excited about. While they were all visually arresting, the curation of them left me wanting... but I'll come back to that - because right now, I'm my emotional self who could not sit for as much as a note of the next eleven songs. Singing along with my kid and her Mom and her cousin - I think the only words I missed were those Bono had changed sing pressing vinyl. I appreciated an additional nod to the original tour in Bullet the Blue Sky wherein Bono revisited the hand-held lighting instrument lazzi seen in Rattle and Hum. The lady behind us was moved by my daughter climbing up into my arms for Running to Stand Still (a song I've used as a lullaby on many nights) and took a photo of us - not a great photo, but it will stake down that corner in my memory forever.

Those first five songs - side one - could hardly fail and they didn't. Flip the cassette and get into side two and things get a bit more challenging. The band had never played Red Hill Mining Town live before that night - so what were they going to do? This is where the reinvention was most evident - bringing the horns into the fore (both audibly and visually). While I doubt the song is suddenly going to take over as one of their concert classics, it felt like a small honour to be there when it finally debuted. 

The next three tracks are the best that side two has to offer (IMHO In God's Country would be at home with the quality of the side one tracks). I doubt there were many casual U2 fans in the crowd - so the energy lost on the last two (and arguably least beloved) album cuts ought to have been relatively minor, this was after all what we came for. Bono squeezed in a costume change during an interstitial video clip (which I'll get back to) in order to visually quote the look he wore back in the late 80s - a black-broad brimmed hat and his glasses now absent while channeling his Mirror Ball Man preacher alter-ego from ZooTV. Exit's nearly impenetrable mid-song guitar bombast has grown over the years for me and Edge does a good job of representing in concert what he achieved with 48 tracks in a studio. Mother's of the Disappeared is Exit's tonal negative and more wound-down the experience than sent it off... but that is how the album is structured, so what can you do?

The encore was, by almost any standard, the performance's primary weakness. Bringing the energy back with Beautiful Day and Elevation was the right move (except... read on later), but then things kind of go a bit pear shaped energy-wise.  Ultraviolet and One are both excellent songs in their own right, and the band has managed to get WAY more mileage out of Miss Sarajevo than can be believed, but the three of them together combined with an above average concentration of Bonostheletizing took the concert into a late-show sombre space that it never clawed its way out of. Bono's attempt to incite the audience into a chant that was both melodically and verbally more complex than could be pulled off by 50k people struck as being a combination of a mis-read of the crowd's engagement and (more so) their ability... which the front man of a band that has mastered the art of the stadium show should have long since figured out.

Before the show I had wondered if we might be treated to a road test of a song from the upcoming album and the good news was we were! The bad news was that it was another down-tempo song. The good news was that it picked up energy a bit by the end. The bad news was that it STILL wasn't enough energy... and that was the LAST SONG OF THE NIGHT!  Structurally, I "get" it. We went from what had come before the Joshua Tree to the album itself to the songs that followed and then ended with the future yet to come - conceptually it works... but the implementation just can't stick the landing - certainly not with that song. Ironic that they plan to call the upcoming album Songs from Experience, 'cause that felt like a rookie mistake.

Which leads me to my biggest complaint outside of the energy of the back end of the encore... The set list is broken - which happens to be a direct cause of the energy issue. But it also breaks it's own unity. The entire show is in chronological order - except for Beautiful Day and Elevation. I appreciate that they need high energy songs coming out of Mothers of the Disappeared (which makes me ask the question 'why did they realise that, yet blow the last four songs?') but there are answers to that which don't betray the unity of chronological order.  Come back for the encore with Even Better Than the Real Thing or Mysterious Ways - or both or do Desire then one of the above. Give us One and Ultraviolet as part of the Achtung Baby segment and put Beautiful Day and Elevation next to last - then we will probably not blink at the relative let down of The Little Things that Give You Away... and if that is still an issue either pick a better new song to go out on, or go full circle by closing with an original hit - either I Will Follow or Out of Control. (NOTE: In Seattle two nights later they did end with I Will Follow.) That adds three more songs to the set list, so something probably has to go - Miss Sarajevo, your time has come - I'd consider axing one of either Ultraviolet or One as well. (Though that would rob Bono and the boys their standard moments to speak up for refugees, women's rights, and HIV respectively if all three of the sombre songs were cut. Some people would think this a plus. I speak simply of the benefits the performance of the show would get from it - I accept that the political side of U2 is part of the territory and its part of why I've liked them since I was a teenager.)

Which leaves me with my quibbles with the imagery on that massive screen. Again its mostly a matter of unity. I'm not terribly fond with how on the nose much of it was... an unending desert highway for Where the Streets Have No Name, a big red moon for One Tree Hill being among the weakest choices. But as a whole the sequence of images set-up a unity which it gradually picked away at until it was absent. Which perhaps was the point - just perhaps. But briefly, first how did it do so?  The opening - once the wall of red that echoed the original tour disappeared - gave us the aforementioned un-ending desert highway which presumably winds through Joshua Tree National Park in California all in black and white. Next song - more of Joshua Tree Park in black and white - as the camera searches... get it? DO YOU GET IT?!?! I Still Haven't Found... more on the nose imagery, though not quite as obvious... quite. But again we have Joshua Tree Park in black and white and a baseline for the unity is set. Next up With or Without You and we have.... more Joshua Tree, but now in saturated colour. A single shot (and a stunning one) taken from dawn to sunset. But now we've let go of the black and white - that's okay, it probably would have got boring soon anyhow and this shot would not have been anywhere near as remarkable without the colour. But the first step down the slippery slope has begun. Bullet the Blue Sky back to black and white, but now its the band with an exciting but extreme post-effect added in real time. Hey - it's the band - of course they are an acceptable image - it's their concert. I'd be mad if we didn't get to see them up on the screen. (And yes, there was more on the screen, but... regardless another step away fro the unity. Later songs - bring us to other desert locations - corrugated shacks with a semi-nekkid rope-trick doin' dancer who simultaneously paints us a US flag; a rather uninspired shot of a Salvation Army horn band presumably playing the horn portion of the new Red Hill arrangement (also in the realm of on the nose - "Hey, here's a visual representation of the thing that now stands out in this song.") That damned "moon is up over One Tree Hill" - GAH!!!  Possibly these were all images from Joshua Tree still? Possibly the additional parts of the park that were used as single covers back in 1987? Certainly from similar landscapes, so that part of the unity remains.... Oh no... wait... For Exit first we break for the costume-change interstitial with footage from (I believe - please correct me if you know better) The Rainmaker... so that pretty much ends that unity - The Rainmaker, taking place in Kansas, MAY have been shot in Joshua Tree, seeing as its that much closer to Hollywood, but is still stretching the unity further... and it breaks entirely at Mothers of the Disappeared - yet another single shot of the eponymous mothers walking slowly forward through roscoe fog (in a controlled environment of a set) with candles... the mothers from Nicaragua and El Salvador as per the song - its... it just doesn't hold any longer no matter how hard I try to maintain an argument for unity.

So... perhaps that is the point. An eroding unity.  The original name for The Joshua Tree album was The Two Americas. They have said that part of their reasoning for re-touring the album was that America has never been more "two" than it is now. So... an eroding unity...? Its a pretty big stretch. I'm more likely to believe that they just made some weak artistic choices. Better no unity than the false promise of one.

One more thing that elevated this experience. The night before the concert I met a British music journalist in a bar and had a great conversation about music, football (soccer), art and of course U2. It seemed to be a mutually enjoyable conversation and that was cemented by him texting me between acts about the show and then the next day wanting to meet for coffee for more debriefing of my post-show perspective as well as the reaction of my kid. He mentioned that he rarely considered the dramaturgical aspects of concerts with the depth that I got into (pretty much everything I said above) and that that was good value for him as well as getting a view from a local who had attended the '87 concert in the same venue. There was the vague promise on the Thursday that he would pass on a "thank" from me to The Edge in an interview he was scheduled for the afternoon of the show, but as it didn't come up on the day after and reading in some subtext around how his day went (including but not limited to: he too had some troubles entering even with a press pass) I suspect the interview did not happen... but I'm going to tell myself that I did have a very short one way discussion with The Edge by proxy.

Now with it all in the rearview, the eleven songs of The Joshua Tree was a magical tribute to the most important album of my life and their career, I will always cherish sharing it all with Jodie and December, I can't get A Sort of Homecoming out of my head, and briefly, I had a new friend who gave me two excellent conversations.  It was a great show.

Defending the Music XX: How Long to Sing Their Song..?

I've been putting this off.

I was waiting for something specific to happen. Something relating to the band I'm dealing with in this post, but then the night it was supposed to happen (night before last) it was totally upstaged by something relating to the artist I've been saving for last! So I figure that it's shit or get off the pot time for both artists...

First up - U2.

Yeah, they are almost too easy a choice. But I do get to genuinely make the claim that I was a fan before they became huge.

I recall sitting on my friend Scott's bed when he snuck into his sister's room to borrow a record (you know records - those big black CDs with two sides) and put it on the stereo... the first U2 song I ever heard was Sunday Bloody Sunday. That strident riff permanently seared upon my ears.
I remained aware of U2 over the next year or two, even though I didn't really emotionally tie myself to them until the night of my senior prom.
I was a big fan of The Cult. Electric was released the same week as The Joshua Tree. I bought them both. For the next two weeks I listened to Electric non-stop and never cracked the U2 album. I don't recall what it was that finally inspired me to listen to it, but that evening as I was getting ready I pulled out the cassette and put it my bedroom deck. Before Bono's vocals on Where the Streets Have No Name cut in, I had sunk into my bed, rapt. I quit getting ready and simply listened to the entire first side. It was a life changing moment. As I drove out of the driveway (late) to pick up Shannon, my girlfriend, With or Without You came on the radio. It played again that night at the dance. There's no doubt that a moment in time can profoundly tie the music you hear to it and make it special, and perhaps that happened that night to some degree, but that first listen was so profound - the rest was just gravy. To this day, The Joshua Tree is my number one desert island disc. It is music as vast as the space between here and their Dublin home.

Six months later I was at BC Place with 50000 other true believers watching the best concert I have ever seen. The less than three days before had been the Enniskillen Bombing. If you've seen Rattle and Hum, the footage of Sunday Bloody Sunday was filmed the night of the bombing. They were still four extremely angry Irishmen the night I saw them. I'm betting that at that point in their career they had played few concerts that were more intense. It was awe inspiring.

Now, over twenty years later, they have managed to remain relevant. Not to say that they haven't had worrisome low-points (Pop, I'm looking at you.) but even those have grown on me, and they also allowed the band to rise again.

Never satisfied to rest upon their laurels they've constantly tweaked and updated their sound and techniques, and as amazing as anything else they are still the same four guys that started the band together in 1976. Their ability to put new songs into heavy rotation after being indoctrinated into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (something a band isn't even eligible for until they've been recording for twenty five years) makes the claims of a certain other self-proclaimed "Greatest Band on Earth" laughable. Here is their R&RHoF induction - it's wicked, and The Boss does a better job of canonizing them than I can. Trying, would just be embarrasing, I'll let him do my work for me: Part 1, Part 2, Bono's Acceptance, Adam's Acceptance, Vertigo & Larry's Acceptance, Edge's Acceptance & Still Haven't Found....

Indeed, with the way music has fractured (not a bad thing), U2 may well be the last band to ever unequivocably be the best. No doubt they always will be my best.

They are so huge, that there is a separate line item in the Irish revenue service's budget just for taxes collected from U2.

I could go on ad nauseum itemizing their achievements, but this is not intended to be a history. Leave that to Behind the Music, so let's skip to the recent past and glance a little ways back and project a bit forward.

A month or so ago I saw their new concert movie - U23D. It was amazing. This was the material 3D was made for. Sonically it is spectacular. These guys still put on an amazing concert. Additionally, the director of the film knew enough to put hte 3D camera in places where we'd get to see things which we normally don't. Seeing the crowd amorphously jump up and down in time ot the music from just about their heads was very cool in 3D - which really played up the speed of sound, as the crowd didn't actually jump as one, but in visible ripples towards the back of the stadium. But the most amazing technical sight was a lens flare in 3D. We do not naturally see lens flare with the naked eye, so we don't typically get to experience it with our binocular vision. All we ever see is the flattened version on a normal movie screen... but not this time. 3D lens flare is one of the first sights in the film. It's mind blowing. And it sets the stage for what follows.

U23D should do for Love and Peace or Else, what Live Aid did for Bad - make the song a career-classic.

A new album is on the way. It's been a while since they've fallen flat on their faces, so I'm prepared for that. But I have little doubt that like Pop and Rattle and (Ho) Hum before it, even if it is a disappointment, there will be diamonds in the ashes, even if it takes some digging to find them

It's been nearly 21 years since I first started considering the message, and I keep finding new depths to it. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For is a manifesto to celebrate. U2, despite their outrageous success, continue to appreciate the journey and may they never content themselves with a destination. I aim to live my life the same way.

Defending the music XII: A Sentimental Journey into Sight and Sound

There aren't many bands who you can blame more for emo, than Green Day.

There are precious few bands that have made it further on as much lack of talent as Green Day... but, like the Clash (You knew I couldn't last much longer, could I? C'mon I narrowly avoided mentioning The Clash entirely in the OLP entry.), they honed their understanding of their abilities into increasingly adept incicive songwriting.

I was the demographic to blame for shooting Dookie to the top of the charts in 1994. It was hardly the paradigm setting moment it's since been hailed as when Mike Dirnt had his teeth fed to himself by a security guard at Woodstock '94 - if you actually watched the incident - well, you can't see it happen. Green Day's set was over, and the director cut to long-shots of the stage as the marauding fans rush the stage. However, the preceeding band incited mud-fight was great - harmless fun. The 'band violence' (I repeat: The mud-fight was harmless, and the punching actually had the band on the victim end.) helped catapult Green Day into the stratosphere. Oh yes, we were a disenfranchised lot, us Gen-X'ers. What's new? Every second wave of adolescents gets to be angry at the opulence of the intermediate generations... gawd, can I hardly wait for that phase to swing back around... perhaps kids will start re-fucking-cycling again! But I digress....

Yes, Dookie was a lot of fun. Revitalized punk - with harmonies! Who didn't get off screaming along with 'Basketcase's "Am I just paranoid or UHh-Muh-Glaaaaauuuh!" (Which, for the record, was actually "...or am I stoned?")

But then they had to go and write that fucking song.... You know the one. 'Good Riddance.' (Oh how I wish it appropriately WOULD go away.) Changes are you know the somg by it's refrain - "I hope you had the time of your life." Would someone please kill me if I ever have to hear that song again? And don't you DARE play that song at my funeral - which I think is the real problem with it. It went from release to overplay inside of three days. Okay, realistically, three months. (Okay, so there are occasional exceptions to the 'I will listen to anything they release' rule.) Until their most recent album, this has been the flagship song of their career - fuuuuuuck....

It took me a long time to let Green Day back in. In fact, they had to actually start channeling The Clash in order to do it. I don't really know what happened, but somewhere along the line Billy Joe Armstong quit acting upon kneejerk defiance and started speaking about real problems. "Warning," while just a warm-up to what was coming, is still my favourite Green Day disc. Their next album, "American Idiot" went for the throat. It was great. And somehow the Dixie Chicks took all the heat for pointing out what a mess the USA was.

Perhaps the most complete acknowledgement of their political validity was the release last year of a collaborative effort between Green Day and the band that has best mixed music and politics ever - U2; 'The Saints are Coming.' A pretty kick ass song to boot.

Oh... and final proof: The drummer's name - is Tre Cool. Literally.

The True Believers

One of my Auto-Playlists in my media player is labelled "True Believers." It consists of all the music of the twenty bands of whom I will pretty much listen to anything they release. It doesn't mean that they have never released crap, or that they haven't had a fall from grace. It simply means that the balance of their music has at one time or another in my life meant enough to me that I am willing to listen to everything they've ever done, just to keep it fresh.

In a very rough countdown from 20...

20) Van Halen
When I said "fall from grace" - Van Halen was foremost in my mind. When I was in grade 8, I was watching Friday Night Videos when they first aired Jump. My conversion into a lifelong Van Halen fan took a mere 4 minutes and 4 seconds. The unadulterated energy of the video and the unbridled joy of the song were irresistable. They were the first band to truly be 'my favourite band.' I bought all their albums within a few short months. Actually I think I might have shop-lifted Fair Warning - time has wiped my memory of the details, but for some reason I have a recollection of my aquisition of that album being somehow... shady. I'll assume I shop-lifted it, although that is a bit out of character. I was basically a good kid.
Then Dave blah blah Sammy blah blah - the tale is old and boring by now.
The first Sam Halen album, 5150, was still pretty cool. While it certainly lacked the outrageous party-animal hysteria of the first six albums it made up for it in a new advanced musicality. But it wasn't enough to maintain my love, the band in my number 3 position below would soon push the Van Halen brothers aside.
Twenty years on now I recently rediscovered those first Van Halen albums. My perhaps overzealous scorn for their later work had somehow diminished the value of the DLR years. I had never replaced the vinyl versions with CDs. But one day I was in a second hand CD store and there was Van Halen and Van Halen II on sale for a song. I figureed 'what the hell' and bought them. Man oh man. What great albums they are. Over the next few weeks I relived my teener VH buying spree - except that this time I actually paid for Fair Warning. And in the 18 months since then, I've gone so far as to P2P (technically, right back to stealing...sigh) my catalogue of Van Hagar tracks up to a near complete level - and ya'know... it ain't so bad. There really is no comparison, they are two different bands with the same name - I could probably justify not including the post David Lee Roth Van Halen tracks in my True Believer list, but that would require additional programming of Media Player and it would rob me of the truly excellent tracks on 5150 and scattered through the later VH discography.

19) Queen
Queen holds a special place in my personal music biography. Never quite attaining the level of "favourite band" - at the time of Freddie Mercury's death they were the band with the most immense catalogue that had been subjected to my completeist tendencies. What I had for Queen was respect. The scope of their musical prowress was awe inspiring.
While their earlier albums tended generally to be more dense sonically than I was interested in - more along the lines of early Genesis and practically any Yes - where they went from there was (ahem) a kind of magic.
Thanks to Wayne's World, I never need to hear Bohemian Rhapsody ever again and my least favourite part of the Stanley Cup final is that they always, ALWAYS play We are the Champions. And there are other Queen songs that have become obvious and hackneyed cliches - Bicycle Race, Fat Bottomed Girls, Another One Bites the Dust & We Will Rock You all spring to mind - but they wouldn't have become such if they were not great songs to begin with.
My Queen collection has yet to recover from the switch from analogue to digital, but I have total faith that in time I will have a complete Queen collection again, for the time being I have all the indispensible tracks and that I can live with.

18) The Who
While, like Queen, The Who were never quite a favourite band - and I never did quite complete my Who collection, and doubt I ever will - they were always close. I discovered Queen on my own; The Who were knit into the fabric of my being.
The day the Who broke up - or rather the night it was on the news - my Mother got me out of bed to watch the Pete Townshend press conference. (It still kind of boggles me that they were big enough to be news.) I didn't really appreciate who they were at the time. I didn't really understand or equate the man on the television to the music I'd been hearing all my (at that point, short) life.
I don't really know what happened. I guess The Who was played enough around my home that I was familiar with it as a kid, but not so much that I knew every song by heart - like I did with The Smothers Brothers or Buddy Holly (Yeah, an odd combination to be certain.)
When they reunited for their 25th Anniversary Reunion Tour in 1989, I was the right age to experience a full-scale Who re-discovery.
At the time I was getting into performing and writing music with a band myself. There was music in my head that I was trying to get out, 'cause I knew it was interesting music, but it was sitting back there just below the conscious. I just had to release it.
And then I found The Who... I was generally familiar with a few tracks already - My Generation of course.
I began to listen to Tommy and Who's Next and a greatest hits package and discovered that I knew it all already... that the music that was itching to come out was in fact already written by Pete Townshend back in the 70's.
I had somehow, in the blue-collar city of Prince George, become a latent punk. I can't explain (Sorry.) But I expect that it must have had to do with my exposure to The Who - the best example of punk's predecessors - at a young age, an exposure that was not maintained and thus left a gap that needed filling... I guess.
I still have a great visceral love for The Who and I doubt that any CSI rooted over-exposure will ever ruin the majesty of Won't Get Fooled Again for me. I actually found that Summer of Sam was a palatable movie largely on the strength of the two sequences that were scored by that same track and Baba O'Reilly.
The Who are the only band originating in the 60's that makes this list. They are the only band on this list whose heyday was over before 1979.
I was very happy to have a chance to see them live when they re-grouped again to tour Quadrophenia. It was a sad and beautiful thing all at the same time, but that's fodder for another entry.

17) Juluka
If there is a band on this list you haven't heard of, chances are this is it. It's also the band that most exemplifies the statement "one of these things is not like the others" when applied to this list.
If you are a fan of Paul Simon's Graceland album and haven't heard of Juluka, you are a bad bad person. While Ladysmith Black Mambazo got the glory, Juluka was truly the inspiriation of the sound. They are the original purveyors of the Rock/Mbaqanga sound. To his credit, Simon recognizes this in his liner notes.
I was introduced to them in University. I had to buy their only two North American releases on vinyl shortly before it quit being a relevant medium. That was also about the time they quit recording together. Front man Johnny Clegg went on to make music with the very similar Savuka - including covering a few Juluka songs, (Scatterlings of Africa appeared on the Rainman soundtrack.) but it was never quite the same.
I managed to find bits and pieces of Juluka on CDs over the years, but it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that an old friend - the same one who introduced me to the band in the first place - gave me copies of every Juluka and Savuka track, giving me a complete collection for the first time.

16) Green Day
Like I said before, I was a latent punk in a redneck world. I suspect I know a bit of what it must have been like to grow up gay in a homophobic society. I have no doubt that "growing up gay" was a situation more traumatic than mine, but parallels still exist. I was tangentially in touch with the music I really loved, but I didn't fully understand until I moved away to a bigger city where my preferences were accepted for what they were.
Generally speaking I was forced to live with the existing first-wave punk and post-punk bands to sate my musical tastes. Hardcore was never quite what I wanted to hear... although Black Flag was certainly deserving of notice in my world. Not that I didn't like what I was hearing, but little of it felt like it was relevant to me.
But then a disaffected, emotionally fragile and brilliant punk-rock kid from Aberdeen, but for that last detail, much like myself, broke it wide open. In the wave of popular punk - the second wave - that followed, there were a host of bands that seemed to be doing exactly what I needed. Green Day may not have been the best, but they've arguably been the most endurable. I can't imagine a band could possibly get as much out of three and four chords as Green Day. Billie Joe is a genius in his own right.
Their songs are remarkable in their consistency and their outrageous spareness.
Both Dookie and Warning are amongst the most listenable albums in my entire collection and when you add a seminal classic like Good Riddance (Time of Your Life for those who aren't familiar with the sarcastic actual title of the song.) to the oeuvre they rise to a level where I feel I can personally equate them to the Rolling Stones (who I personally despise, but their own canon has similar qualities of simplicity and indisputable popular appeal.)

15) Our Lady Peace
The first of just two Canadian entries (there would be around five if I extended the list to about 30, but that would mean redefining the parameters.)
One of a number of bands that I discovered on tour. (Others include Live, NIN, Crash Test Dummies, Alanis Morrissette - the latter of which I discovered concurrently with OLP, literally the length of one music video apart.) While only one other of those bands mentioned makes this list, they all hold a special place in my heart. There is something very special about driving across this great nation with the stereo up to eleven, the windows down and speedometer at least 20 klicks over the limit. Anthemic music pounding away - it's a freedom-like flight. OLP's first album in 1995 fulfilled that need for me and when I returned home after four months on the road, I discovered that my bosom-buddy roommates had been discovering the same music while surfing the porch. (I'll define that at another time.)
Since then their stock has been bolstered by generally solid song-writing on album after album plus a number of perfect examples of songs that spoke to me the right way at the right time, such as Waited and Innocent.

14) Live
The other on tour discovery. In 1992, one of my tour mates, Brian, bought Mental Jewelry early in the tour. We listened to it daily - often multiple times - all tour, and when the tour was done we all went out and bought a copy.
Two tours later we were all listening to Throwing Copper - months before Lightning Crashes broke Live to the masses.
I've ALWAYS hated their name. Anytime I mention them it seems I need to explain myself as to what band I am referring to. But they have always risen above that small token of distaste. Their third and fourth albums generally failed to make an impression upon the world and their fifth only made waves as being the album that the song that accompainied most of the initial tributes (I.E. the first 72 hours or so) to the dead in the 9/11 disaster... Overcome.
But as a true believer, I have always loved their music, even when the rest of the world didn't care - both before they were huge and after. I think a lot of it has to do with the thought that if I were to have continued to make music, Live is the closest to what I think I would have made.

13) Offspring
Of all the punk-revival bands, Offspring has the best combination of relevance and humour. Blah blah - sold-out - blah blah. Yeah, well they're laughing all the way to the bank. I respect that they were the first punk band I knew to just relax into who they were. No posing. Just being comfortable with who they were. They were the first to be cool with being un-cool - which was pretty fucking cool.
On top of all that, through the past decade they have exhibited an excellent ability to play with various ethnic styles in the context of their music - Arabic, Calypso, Hawaiian.
It's hard for me not to relate to Dexter Holland - from Self-Esteem onwards - it seems that we've had the misfortune to date all the same women. I just hope he's been fortunate enough to find one as awesome as the one I finally lucked into... or maybe it would be better for their music if he didn't.
If there is one thing I have to fault them for... the pop-punk that has followed in their footsteps has a filthy-bad tendency to be cloyingly dumb.

12) R.E.M.
Here's an entry that most certainly would have ranked higher had they broken up a decade ago. Document, Green, Out of Time and Automatic for the People represent some of the best music from my University years.
R.E.M. as a whole represents a significant point in the evolution of music in the dying years of the 20th century. R.E.M. was the band that took 'alternative rock' into the mainstream... or if you prefer, that marked the beginning of the era where 'alternative' became a meaningless phrase.
Their earlier albums all stand up with the four more popular ones above; and the later ones each have a track or two which demonstrate the same musical acumen (a word I learned listening to them [Exhuming McCarthy]) but generally they each remind me of the musical habits of Prince and Lenny Kravitz - a single track of brilliance and the rest being absolute filler. But as they are in the rarified air of the 'True Believers' I'll listen to the drivel as an (ahem) alternative to wearing out the welcome of the genius tracks of their middle years.
In my days playing music, R.E.M. was one of the bands we most often covered. A fact that is a testament to how much we revered them as artists. They were popular but they had integrity. I believe they still have integrity - they have to in order to stay the course when their sound is losing it's relevance by degrees.

11) Midnight Oil
A band that bears much in common with R.E.M. in it's place in my musical world. A bunch of albums before they hit it big. A handful (Diesel and Dust, Blue Sky Mining, Earth and Sun and Moon) of pure brilliance. Like R.E.M., my compatriots and I played a lot of Midnight Oil. (Oil songs are much harder to cover than R.E.M.) The biggest difference lies in that Midnight Oil pretty much closed up shop for the Clinton Years. They had less to rail against then.
They lost a lot of momentum in doing so and when they did come out with new music it was largely ignored.
I had the pleasure of seeing them on the tour before Peter Garrett left the band. They were amazing. One of the best live concerts I've ever seen - and most of that was that crazy bald-surfer himself. But now he's gone... or is he? They played a benefit concert with him as frontman for Tsunami relief. I guess the answer there is that Peter Garrett would not be Peter Garrett if he weren't doing something to help the cause. It's not like he left the band 'cause he hated them - it was about doing something new, so a reunion after short order isn't such an odd thing, and under the circumstances it's in character; a measure of that character even.
That is certainly the most indelible feature of Midnight Oils' character as a band - the activism. Not to diminish the music - the music is the vehicle for the activism - but no other band on this list was as consistenly attached to the politics behind their music - and with bands such as R.E.M., U2, The Clash, Pearl Jam, Live and Juluka in the mix that is saying something. And that is something that meant a lot to me when I first started listening to them, and it is something I still respect to this day.

10) Everclear
Art Alexakis has one of the more one-track minds in rock, it seems. Art Alexakis can't stop singing about his lousy upbringing... and his daughter... and his failed marriage... and how he doesn't want to repeat history in terms of the above three susbjects. That pretty much sums up the content of at least 75% of Everclear's music. I had a pretty good childhood. I am not a parent. I've never been married - engaged, not married. But somehow I manage to relate to SO much of what he says. I think that his naked honesty must have an element of universality to it that appeals to me on a level I don't quite fully understand. Of all things, it was their Gap commercial that first interested me in Everclear, but in short order I found myself relating to Father of Mine. (For the record, my father is great. I love him. I always have. But somewhere under all the goodwill there are indeterminate father issues - they've come up time and again in my writing.) And then singing along to One Hit Wonder... and then So Much for the Afterglow. After I bought the album it barely left the CD player for the next year... by which point the first volume of Songs from an American Movie was coming out. Volvo Driving Soccer Mom reminded me of the woman who gave me a severe cougaring during that first year of my Everclear phase. But generally I felt they were losing my attention. So Much for the Afterglow bought Everclear a lot of leeway. They expended none of it on the first half of the American Movie series, or when I started on the back-catalogue with Sparkle and Fade. I didn't hold it against them that I was less interested in earlier works like World of Noise and White Trash Hell, but if the new album (and essentially new band, as only Art A. remains) doesn't improve on Slow Motion Day-dream, they may find themsleves falling off this list. One GREAT album does not a great band make... not unless the remaining work is at least journeyman level.

9) Nirvana
What hasn't already been said about Kurt Cobain's soul-baring? The painful honesty of the music - more obscurely poeticized than Art Alexakis's - was all the more heart-shearing thanks to the viscerally urgent voice behind it. The moment I heard of his death, I knew that he would be the mythic lost-voice for my generation. Our Jim Morrison or John Lennon.
The first day I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit I was living on a friend's couch before going on tour. I heard it in the afternoon on Much Music and was immediately affected by the song although I expected that I would never hear it again. It was too different. Too unique. That seems so strange now as I've heard it a million times since - either directly or in the innumerable songs that have taken their cues from it. That night I went to a dance club. I had only ever heard mainstream pop and hair metal there before. They played Smells Like Teen Spirit. The dance floor was packed... and it stayed packed. That was a moment of change. I could sense it on some level, but I would be a liar if I claimed I could tell the degree. I chalked SLTS up to a novelty and was glad to know that I could expect that that song that had intrigued me earlier was apparently going to be around for a bit. Two weeks later we were on tour and one of the pieces in the show was a parody of SLTS. That song... it hit the world like a wrecking ball.
A lot of Nirvana's lingering appeal is nostalgic. It still speaks to me, but more, it speaks to my past. I expect it always will.

8) Pearl Jam
Shortly after Nirvana turned everything I understood about music upside down, Pearl Jam came along, carrying the same banner. But never were two similar bands less alike. The musical prowress of Pearl Jam put them in a category so much apart from Nirvana's raw-elements that it seemed unfair to classify them under the same geographically rooted connection of the 'Seattle Sound.'
Ten was a revelation in it's own right. Vs. proved that they were capable of a repeat performance. Certainly most will have to declare that starting with Vitalogy that they became increasingly more experimental - and while 'increasingly' is misleading in it's implication of progression, that is essentially true. For me, Pearl Jam's eternal earnestness and commitment to the music made even the more loguey tracks worthy of respect. Certainly Yield and No Code each only offered up a few tracks that were 'vintage' Pearl Jam, but that's much of what I appreciated about them. Songs like Who You Are demonstrated their ability to continue pleasing their core fan base, while the remainder of the album explored increasingly diverse edges of their canon. What's the difference between that and R.E.M's filler? I can't say I can answer that concisely. I suspect that the difference lay in the work to follow. Binaural floored me. It will never be one of my favourite albums, but it presented a uniform vision that married the old Pearl Jam with the more experimental Pearl Jam. Riot Act managed to serve as a reasonable follow up.
But what really makes Pearl Jam special is their live material. The fifty plus 'live bootlegs' that they personally released, while being one of the supporting pillars of the band's demonstration of it's integrity - their battle with TicketMaster being another - showcase a band that gives the most when they're performing live. While I enjoy their studio albums - particularly the first three and Binaural - if I had to pick three Pearl Jam albums to listen to for the rest of my life, they'd all be live.


7) The Pixies
I have an admission to make. One which I regularly make when speaking of the Pixies.
Back in the late 80s I was writing record reviews for a college newspapaer - the CNC Free Press. A local music store would give me copies of albums to preview and I'd write the reviews. The Pixies first non-indie release, Surfer Rosa, was one of those albums. I listened to it (grudgingly) three times, and then gave it one of the two worst reviews I ever gave an album. (The other went to The Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Sessions - another album I eventually came to love. I quit writing reviews before that year was over.) I can't recall what I said exactly - and by now the paper it was written on has turned to acidy dust. But it was not complimentary.
About three years - maybe four - passed.
I was on tour for the first time. I was watching another company's show. Actually it was pre-show, and they had music playing before the show started. I was totally enjoying it. Every song was obviously by the same band. ...and then... on came a song I recognized - the same band, again... and I realized all at once that I was listening to the Pixies album that I had run down so completely in the Free Press.
I owned all available Pixies albums within the next three months. I bought the new - and last - one as soon as it came out.
I went to see them open for U2 on the opening leg of the ZooTV tour. They were awful. Which was a bit of a let down. The next night, they broke up... although they didn't tell the world for another few months. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that their terrible live performance was a result of the fact that as a band they were hardly speaking to each other.
Over the years I picked up the bits and scraps of releases that have come out - the Purple album being the most significant. I diligently listened to The Breeders and Frank Black and Frank Black and The Catholics. I even went to see Frank Black and the Catholics with every guy I know named 'Ray'. (For those who aren't on the 'in' - Frank Black's third solo album was called Cult of Ray.) That was kind of funny. That concert was excellent. Too bad he didn't play any old Pixies songs... but can you blame him?
When they reformed last year, at first I was excited. But then... I kind of felt like hell had frozen over, Christmas came too soon and I lost my virginity all in one day and every single part was disappointing. It was the thing that wasn't supposed to happen at all... and the fact that it had seemed wrong - as exciting as it was. A myth had been destroyed.
I didn't go see them either time they went through town. I don't know how I could.


6) Soul Coughing
Okay. I was late on this bandwagon. Really late. They'd already broken up. They also only ever had three albums and a handful of one-off releases (significantly on both the X-Files soundtracks.) Really. Soul Coughing has the combined distinction of being the first band that I really discovered due to P2P sharing; and being the last band that I ever went out and bought all their back-catalogue of. I doubt I'll ever do that again... unless the world of copyright makes a sudden and unexpected shift back in favour of the music companies, but as I mentioned in a previous posting, I don't think that's likely.)
I have no idea what Mike Doughty is going on about in any of their songs. None. This band is simply very cool and very listenable. I find that anytime I play them for virtually anyone who has modern music tastes, they like Soul Coughing. Why they were never bigger than Jesus, I don't know.
If you aren't familar - for god's sake, become familiar. Chances are you'll thank yourself for it.


5) Cake
I've already spent an entire posting talking about Cake at length. I'm not going to rehash here.


4) The Clash
At the end of the 80's, Rolling Stone named London Calling the best album of the 80's. Now, considering the large amount of shear audio-pap that came from that decade that may not seem like a particularly tough position to hold. But if you look at the cream of the crop of the 80s (Including such masterworks as Synchronicity, The Joshua Tree, and Graceland [Which despite being mentioned twice in this post is not really a favourite of mine - I've never owned it, but it IS a widely recognized excellent album. My point being that 'masterwork' extends past my own tastes.] to name but a few.) it IS quite an accomplishment.
If the Rolling Stone declared that London Calling was the greatest album of all time I wouldn't personally feel the need to scoff - but instead they proved how un-hip they have been for the past 20 years by naming Sgt. Pepper's blah blah easy choice Club Band as their number one. Ya-fucking-awn.
London Calling is one of those albums that is SO good that had The Clash never released another decent album in their career (like say the SexPistols did with Never Mind the Bullocks and... nothing) they would still be recognized as music pioneers. Their subsequent albums would have sold well anyways. Hey, it worked for the Crash Test Dummies for two or three albums.
The Clash was the epitome of what was right about the original punk ethic, and they still had two excellent albums - Sandanista! and Combat Rock - and one okay one - Cut the Crap - left in them.


3) The Police
I don't think it's possible to have grown up in the Neo-Western world in the 80s and not be a fan of The Police. They were punk, post-punk, pop, reggae, rock, and even jazz all in one tight package. And the real magic was that they didn't let all those influences muddy their style - which by all right is exactly what should have happened.
If I were to make a list of my top albums of all time, Synchronicity would be in the top ten. Actually, I'm pretty confident it would be in the top five. Probably top THREE, I'm just holding out on committing to that in case I'm having a brian fart and missing a seminal work that changed my life.
A few years back I had an epiphanic exchange with the friend who, when we were teens, I discovered the Police with. I had just watched some old concert film of them - probably the widely distributed Atlanta concert - and had noted that the percieved talent balance in the band, was not as I had seen it as a teenager.
Sting naturally got most of the attention. He wrote the lion's share of the music and he sang almost all of the songs. His bass-lines ranged from admirable to excellent and he was a good-looking guy who women wanted to be with and guys wanted to be. But post-Police his output has become more and more turgid. Thankfully, it appears that there was a limit to how dull it could get and every now and then he writes a song that recalls that he was practically an autistic-savant-genius in his song-writing. Dream of the Blue Turtles his only solo album that was ever uniformly excellent, although I kept hoping, right through the Soul Cages. (All this Time from that album does rank as one of his best ever.) It makes one wonder just how much of his talent was his and how much was buoyed up by the fact that he was with two other brilliant musicians.
Andy Summers was an amazing guitarist. He was also significantly older than the other two - to the degree that they virtually idolized him and when he agreed to be in their band, it was a watershed moment for them. Haven't really heard much from Andy since the Police split, have we? Brilliant as he was, his musicianship was of the sort best not showcased. His embellishements on pre-existing structure were his true strength. Supporting and building upon and enriching someone else's work. I don't think anyone ever really had any illusions about that - his place in the band.
But then there was Stewart Copeland. Not only was the sonic conception of the group his, but his percussion work served as the anchor throughout the group's career. I don't know why I never noticed until I was watching that concert, but the Police wouldn't have been half the band without Stewart Copeland. Unfortunately I don't have the vocabulary to sufficiently express my feelings and observations on the subject of Stewart's percussion - I don't want to call it 'drumming,' that would be too limiting a term. When I mentioned the thought to Demetri - a more accomplished musician than I (not that either of us would call ourselves musicians before anything else) - he agreed whole heartedly. Sting was both the face and the structure, Andy was the flourish and decor, but Stewart was the backbone and the blueprint.
Of all the bands on this list that were making music back when I was first discovering it, the Police are the one I've neither ever have to remind myself about how great they were, and that I never find myself thinking 'oh, THAT has become quaint.'


2) The Tragically Hip
A good friend of mine once said "I used to think of the Hip as one of my favoruite Canadian bands, now I don't use the national qualifier." I don't know when I quit using the qualifier.
I do recall the first time I ever heard them. They had an immediate impact on me. I was driving in my car, on my way to a friend's house. I was about a block away when the DJ announced that he was going to play the first single from a new band from Kingston Ontario. This sort of thing of course happens all the time. The song was Small Town Bringdown and I was intrigued by it enough that even though I was parked before the chorus was over, I listened through until the end before getting out of my car. I didn't buy the album... then. I heard the song a few more times on the radio, and same with their second single, Last American Exit.
That was it, for quite a long time - practically three years. By this time I was playing in a band. The bassist (Incidentally the same fellow who I quoted in the first sentence of this section.) arrived at rehearsal with a cassette one day - Up to Here - and played it for us, demanding that we had to learn one of their songs (he had a few suggestions as to which). When we asked what the band was, he said "they're new - the Tragically Hip." I got to say "they're not as new as you think."
We did eventually learn Blow at High Dough, and in the years since I've learned dozens of Hip songs.
Why the Hip have never broken south of the border will always be a mystery, but it has been written about many times before.
One thing that seems to NOT have been written about is Gord Downie's fascination with shipwrecks. I may go in depth about it at a later time, but off the top of my head... New Orleans is Sinking; Fiddler's Green; Nautical Disaster; Scared; Titanic Terrarium; The Dire Wolf, as well as Pascal's Submarine from his second solo album all are either about shipwrecks or have imagry and/or references to them. (Not to mention any number of arguably similar themes - planes crashing, going over Niagra in a barrel.) What's that about, Gord?
Of the five best concerts I've ever been to, two of them would be the Hip - they're good on disc, but live is the real ticket. If I extended the list to ten, then probably all five Hip concerts I've been to would make the cut. They are THAT good.
Since Road Apples, I've bought (or had bought for me) every Hip album the day it was first available - except for Between Evolution which somehow slipped through the cracks for me until it was already released. The fact that I bought Between Evolution, when I have spiritually committed myself to P2P piracy, is testament to how much I respect the Hip.
Day for Night (which ranks with Synchronicity in my top 5, probable top 3) went into my CD player the night I bought it and didn't just not come out, but didn't quit playing for over a month. Honestly. I put it in and hit play and while I adjusted the volume a bit, it never stopped. I was living in an attic at the time and sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities on the floor below. I would get up in the morning and listen to it while getting dressed and as I went down stairs. I'd leave the door open and listen to it as I did my morning routine. Then when I headed off to class, I would simply close the door, rather than climb the stairs again. When I'd come home, it would welcome me in the door and back upstairs. Part of that was the time of my life, but if the album didn't resonate with me that well, it would not have happened.


1) U2
I'm almost ashamed to have such an obvious choice at number one. But I can claim to be a fan from WAY back. Pre-Joshua Tree. By now, being someone who jumped on the band-wagon at the Joshua Tree means you are practically a fan from the beginning, and most fans from pre-Joshua Tree long since gave up on the band. My type is truly rare.
I wasn't a big U2 fan until the Joshua Tree, but they were on the radar. War was a kick-ass post-punk album on my planet.
God knows there have been lows - almost all of Pop and in retrospect most of Rattle and Ho-Hum, but when they manage to put out an album like All that You Can't Leave Behind and follow it up with the solid How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, twenty five years into their career and still with the original line-up. I start to scoff at anyone who tries to claim that the Rolling Stones are the best, most long-lived rock act in the world. Give me a fucking break.
The Stones quit being relevant back when I was in high-school. By the time they were doing their 25-year Steel Wheelchairs tour, had they evolved? Nope, they were still playing the same pentatonic blues rip-off that they'd played when they first released Satisfaction in 1965. Snoozers for losers. Not that my complete lack of respect for their musical style makes them a bad band. Their lack of development makes them a bad band.
Meanwhile U2 took the chance and went off the rails a few times, but they also took chances and found themselves on entirely new tracks that led to new and interesting places. And when they made new albums that were 'returning to their roots' they found that instead they were actually melding all that had come before in familiar, yet new ways.
Live they had it all. Joshua Tree was like a religious gathering. Easily the best concert of my life. Simple yet spectaular. And when it was all done, we - the audience - sang 40 for at least that many minutes... not uncommon at U2 shows in those days. ZooTV was completely in the other direction - 100% high-tech extravaganza. That phase got out of hand two albums later.  But in it's earliest portion - and it was the very earliest portion, I saw them when the ZooTV tour was still the Achtung Baby tour - it was a treat of amazing sensory overload.
And through it all they've stuck to their guns. Bono as head of the world bank, while silly, made more sense than Paul Wolfowitz. The tip of the hat that he would even be considered it testament to the sort of person he has been.
I feel proud that a band I liked before they were huge lived up to my faith in them. Not just once, but over and over again. For that reason, I doubt that they will ever be dethroned from the top place. I won't be ashamed for having such a huge pop-success as my favourite band. I thought they were good, and in time so did many many others.

Marshall McLuhan and the Fine Art of Peer to Peer Sharing

"As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes." - M. McLuhan

I know I'm not the first person to have thought about this... but I can't beleive how little about it there is on the vast Inter-Web. Of all places... it's the perfect place for such an idea to germinate...

McLuhan is almost absurdly hailed across the information landscape for his ideas. He was totally brilliant, it's too bad he missed out on this development. (He died in 1980.) He would have been having SO much fun. I only say 'absurd' because of the nigh pop-cult figure that he has become... he has, practically speaking, had his legend fall victim to the very ideas he explored. Which is something he would be fascinated to explore, I have no doubt.
Peer to Peer is one of the most publicly discussed sub-aspects of the internet (now that the web itself has become so big that it has deflated from techno-cultural phenom, to everyday tool.) We even ignore that much of the literature about P2P (including this musing) is disseminated via the internet... which is somehow ironic. We take the internet THAT much for granted that we have practically divorced the idea that P2P is a direct descendant of the original idea.

But I digress from my take off point to tangential thoughts. Back to ones... Googleing (McLuhan would also be all over that!) the Phrases "Marshall McLuhan" and "Peer to Peer" garners less than 800 hits - and while I haven't sifted through them all I expect there's a significant number of duplicate hits and a certain percentage of garbage hits. Of the genuine ones - yoiks! - is there ever a lot of intractible verbiage. You don't have to be a media-philosopher to grasp it all, but I have no doubt that if I were more versed in such thought I'd have less trouble untangling it.

(A McLuhan primer.)

Extending McLuhan-esque thought to the internet is close to a no-brainer... the caveat being that having even a moderately functional handle on McLuhan's philosphy (which is no less than I claim to have) does require a certain level of brain power. Why has there been no great insight into how it applies to Peer to Peer sharing? It ought to be decisive in my mind.

This past week Garry Trudeau has finally been exploring the same thoughts I've had (albeit tongue in cheek) in his daily Doonesbury cartoon.
Yay, Garry. That pretty much says it all.

"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. " - M. McLuhan

Artists are going to lose the battle if they adhere to the increasingly antiquated idea that they are going to make money through the sale of their work. Let me rephrase that. The battle is over - for some reason they are still wasting effort in fighting it. I suppose there is still money to be made in the old ways, but the reality is that a new way must be found.

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." - M. McLuhan

Musicians are coming off looking pretty bad. I was told by a musician that I was "going to go to Hell" for file sharing. This was a musician who's career amounts to... diddly squat. He has released nothing on any label - independently or otherwise. He is personally losing NOTHING by having files shared. Which by extension means that he has the most to gain by embracing a new way ahead of the pack. The obtuseness fucking boggles my mind.

"The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch." - M. McLuhan

I myself work in an industry that is impacted by P2P - currently less than music, but the slide has long since begun - the film industry. I, akin to my cranky musician friend, have made very little money in this field. But my first two movies are in various stages of production (my first is currently being edited; the second goes to camera in two weeks (which begs the question what am I doing wasting my time blogging)). I haven't found the answer as to how to best capitalize on film-making in a world where films are made more and more easily by anyone (myself included) and distributed basically for free by the viewers.

Now, there is a significant thought - "distributed free by the viewers." Distribution costs... next to nothing. Income, sadly, next to nothing. Gawd... does that mean having to rely on product placment for income? Yes. It most likely does. I hate that. Sorry Naomi Klein, I probably have to do a bad thing...

So, what about the musicians... product placement in a song? Obviously not. (Please tell me I'm not speaking too soon.)

"Art is anything you can get away with." - M. McLuhan

Doonesbury has it right. It's a reversal of the paradigm.

Once upon a time, music was all about the live performance. Then the recording industry came along and essentially changed all that. Touring and concerts became promotional tools for selling records (those are those big black CDs with two sides). (Yeah, yeah there were exceptions like the Rolling Stones retirement fund tour #3, but you need to be the Rolling Stones in order to have that work in your favour.) But P2P changes that. With sales going in the toilet, the focus changes again. The concert becomes the special thing. It becomes where the musician makes their money. It also most likely reduces their sphere of influence. More and more people will be downloading the music of the artists that they are most able to go and see at local venues. That doesn't mean that U2 will now only play in Dublin - there will always be international acts. But the focus will shift to those that get out to the 'people' and the 'people' will generally shift their focus to who they are most able to see.

Speaking of U2... they know it. The entire "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" was stolen thing... I've been a U2 fan for long enough that I come off sounding like one of those "I was there first" boasting assholes. I didn't try particularly hard, but I couldn't find a copy of Vertigo to save my life. The best I could do was get a copy of a Bono sound alike doing a passable job and getting a bit of mis-managed self-promotion in. Mis-managed? You bet. I haven't got a clue who it was. I'm betting that that song (which was reasonably good) was downloaded a lot. It could have sparked a career if it had been better planned out.

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century." - M. McLuhan

Have you seen the price of a U2 concert ticket this year? The price for THE CHEAPEST TICKETS IN THE GM PLACE are close to THREE TIMES what I paid for SCALPERS TICKETS in 1992. And in 1992 the scalpers tickets were going for what we then considered outrageous prices. Tell me now where U2 is making their money? The obvious answer is "ticket sales." The correct answer is "P2P."

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say. " - M. McLuhan... although I wish I'd said it myself.

In celebration of these thoughts, go and download "The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan" by "The Vestibules" and have a laugh at the irony, if not the song.