WVPK - Radio Danbury 2

[V. Kmetz]

Hello All Three of Our Listeners.... Welcome to another "fabu" YouTube list of the happiest and most unexpected.


Today's subject theme : The UnReleased, UnAppreciated, UnRemembered... u2.


What? How can that be?  How can any work of the biggest, most global recognized band of the last 40 years with honors, awards and press clippings enough to fill a castle, comprise such a topical list?


Easy, while the world had long stopped reporting on their steak, and only the pr sizzle, they kept grilling all along:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP5Cii_dHiU
Perhaps the most fundamental UnReleased u2 song in their canon.  If this Achtung Baby outtake sounds familiar...well that's because it has parts, sketches, lilt and sequences from 4 songs that DID make that memorable 1991 album... "Ultra Violet (Light My Way)" "The Fly," "Until the End of the World" and "Mysterious Ways"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7JQ3KWD9Q
Buried somewhat deep in the track-listing on the e-release of Songs of Innocence in 2014.  With eerily cogent lyrics (for a song released six years ago) that fits the CoVid spiritual death of Old Ugly America and the anthemic call to arms for our Blue Renaissance, it's still easy to see Bono waving the white flag at Red Rocks 37 years ago.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1htoqWPVus
By the time u2 put out their most experimental album Pop in 1997, they could flux into and out of any style of popular music they chose..ethnic hymns, rave techno, wrought ballad, call to arms, piano etudes, and a style they tried (and failed) to perfect  with Rattle and Hum in 1988...the sage and dirty acid blues.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDkXO3Q1amo
I can't imagine one genre-taste of music fandom (save for Death Metal and Pure Punk) that wouldn't appreciate this tune... it's folk and country ambiance is unobstrusive, it's camp-fire stylings are infectious, it's temper is full of breath and easy on the mind...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vVZ0z6yV8
Used as the "lights down" music pre-concert as u2 took the stage in 2009's 360/Elevation Tour.   A haunting, spectral thing; that Sunshine Pop central chorus/bridge starting at 45 seconds is just like from another time...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1K0t0OhdT0
OK, OK... even for a big time band, this song may have been in too many people's mug a decade ago... But wait; this isn't "Vertigo"... this is its studio forerunner.... "Native Son"...Could this have launched the I-phone?  Dunno, but hearsay indicates Mr. Hewson felt he couldn't perform this lyric for an entire tour...so....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbI_qVTixPs
Another cut from Songs of Innocence that breezed by the compartmentalized, Balkanized milieu of modern popular music.  This one has such the youthful vocal energy, the piano grace notes and the fiery spirit of 1983's War.  Don't think so...?  Then check out the next forgotten track from that album...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V13Ry2kWt3E
All these years later, I'm constantly delighted to find new things in their music... these days, its my sharper hearing of the Edge's plaintive backing vocals; they somehow yield a ethereal depth that is equal parts chorus and a young man's loneliness in unmasking the world as he grows.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5xlCvWOPj0
With the exception of the featured tracks, "Pride" and "Bad," 1984's The Unforgettable Fire is a brooding and murky tone poem that captures the group as their spiritual eye turns from native Ireland to America. Also marking what would be a career-long engagement with Eno-Lanois production, this particular cut is the nuclear engine of that album, filled with the glowing rushes and ambient undercurrent of an album that sounds like no other in their canon.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF0rKW1DEMo
I'm nearly certain most of you have heard this once or twice, maybe even three times...but have you ever actually heard it? Regardless, there is little more impressive than 75,000 people in Giants Stadium singing the vocal chorus.... "Oh-oh-ohh-whoah-OH-oh-wee-a-ohh"


u2 - they are the original thing; blowing hair back for 43 years, every time, all the time.

[Ronald Montesano]

It occurs to me that the day the music died, for me, was the day that I decided to stay with one person (who later became five) for the rest of my life. Music (the listening and appreciation, not the performing) defined my life as a single, untethered young man. Any music that I gathered from that point on, was a rebound from our children. I read and here mid-50s guys like me, talking about threads like this, and I understand what I gave up. Such is life.

This song warbles post-single life for me. I became a romantic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOA697hoop8