I had some problems with my web hotel during July and August (2009), if you sent a contribution during that time using the contact forms, then I probably have not received it and would like to recommend you to try to send it again.
This was out of my control, but I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused. It took some time before I realised there was a problem but it as corrected as soon I notified the web hotel.
I am sorry, but I have a backlog of contributions to U2MoL that I haven’t gotten around to process. The reason for this is threefold; I am disappointed with U2, as explained in an earlier post, and this affects U2MoL off cause. Secondly, I’ve had quite a lot to do during the summer; I was planning a scout camp for 1500 participants, jointly responsible for Info and PR, and thirdly; when the backlog was piling up my bad conscience was nagging me and kind of solved it by ignoring it.
You are not forgotten and I plan to take care about the backlog during October, my calender finally allows me to spend the many hours I need to go through the posts and mull them over. It takes more time then one would think…
Once again, sorry about this. I am much more unhappy about this then you are…
It is a bit hard, but at the same time easy, to state that I am disappointed with U2. I am disappointed with their last three albums and the last 360° tour.
Their last album, No Line on the Horizon, contained energy and some quite rocky tunes, but where were the spark that made you want to change to world after listening? I’m sorry, but No Line on the Horizon will be the last U2 album I buy and I doubt that I will listen to it any more then the twenty-odd times I’ve listened to it so far. The same goes for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, but not as much for All that you can’t leave behind as the latter has grown since it was released. But it takes months between each listening.
As for the tour, lets just say that everything was against a good experience. I attended the 31st August concert in Gothenburg and the high wind prevented quite a bit of the party it could become, but that is no excuse because I also attended the 1993 Zooropa concert in Stockholm and then it was raining without anyone really noticing. I’ve read a review that stated that the second concert in Gothenburg where pure magic, and I don’t doubt it, but I wasn’t there and I doubt that my impressions would have changed. I was standing in the inner circle, the one inside the cat walk, slightly to the right of The Edge, and something that struck me was that people around me was standing most of the time. There where very little singing and jumping.
There where a group of younger fans that really enjoyed With or Without You and some of the other songs but it felt like I was the only one of about 30 that stood closest to me that actually sang during Ultra Violet (Light my Way). I can understand if most haven’t listened to more then the last three albums and the Best of, but Achtung Baby is one of their more iconic albums and more then that should know about Ultra Violet, IMHO. Especially in the inner circle!
Or am I just being old?
When it came to U2′s performance it was without the igniting spark more or less throughout. The first three songs, all from No Line on the Horizon, all proved that the new tracks are not arena rock, they cannot ignite tens of thousands of people.
I know that one bad concert shouldn’t make me shun the band, but it was the last drop. I am, as I said above, disappointed with the last three albums and this didn’t help. If nothing changes very soon, then this concert will be the last concert with U2 and I won’t buy the next album.
But what makes this of U2MoL? Well, U2MoL is simply too famous to kill off – I get about 800 page visits per day, this is not the same as unique visitors as one single visitor might theoretically read one page 800 times, and it has been around for far too long time. It will turn fifteen years this autumn! So I will continue to maintain it for the foreseeable future…
`No Line on the Horizon’ is now open for contributions, I’ve just added the first comments I’ve found about the new album, please feel free to send the information you’ve found about the songs! (Don’t forget to read the rules first!)
I’ve added Moment of Surrender, White As Snow and Cedars of Lebanon so far.
Ever since U2MoL went live during the autumn of ’94 has the main and only way of contributing to the U2MoL been through email.
This has now changed.
I have had a plan to add a contribution form for quite some years but it was not until I moved the website from my ISP to a web hotel that I had the option of using PHP and when I moved to my own domain in 2007 the planning could take off. I’ve had quite some difficulties to decide how to set it up, I am, among other things, paranoid when it comes to spam bots and contact forms.
After having wrestled these issues for about a year and learned some PHP I can now announce that the contact form has now gone live! You can either go to the form and enter name, email (please note that there are two fields for email, one for each side of the @-sign — I hope this will confuse a spam bot or two but not put up a hassle for human contributors), song and the contribution. You can also use the links to the right on each song’s page and the song field will be filled in for you.
Did I mention I am paranoid when it comes to spam bots? I’ve added a question you have to answer correctly to make sure the contribution is sent to me — it is still sent as an email to me but some of the rules that people historically gets wrong are taken care of automatically (i.e. subject and credit line). I hope the question is not hard to answer, anyone that knows a bit about U2 should be able to answer the questions without having to look them up. I hope new fans that doesn’t know much about U2 isn’t put off, but I’ve supplied my email address as well in case something goes wrong. If you have some issues or comments with the new contact form, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!
Neither the song’s title nor the answer to the question needs to be written literally, the song’s name is not parsed by the form and case is not important in the answer, so if the answer is New York then ”new york”, ”New York” and ” neW yoRK ” will all be accepted — but not ”London” or ”newyork”.
Maybe it is so that Stephen Thomas Erlewine put his finger on what I found wanting in U2′s latter albums, quoted from his review of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in All Music Guide:
(…) a strange fact about the album: it was a conservative affair. After grandly taking risks for the better part of a decade, U2 curbed their sense of adventure, consciously stripping away the irony that marked every one of their albums since 1991′s Achtung Baby, and returning to the big, earnest sound and sensibility of their classic ’80s work. (…)
(…) but U2 are so concerned with recreating their past that they don’t know where to stop peeling away the layers. They’ve overcorrected for their perceived sins, scaling back their sound so far that they have shed the murky sense of mystery that gave The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree an otherworldly allure. That atmospheric cloud has been replaced with a clean, sharp production, gilded in guitars and anchored with straight-ahead, unhurried rhythms that never quite push the songs forward. This crisp production lacks the small sonic shadings that gave ATYCLB some depth, and leaves How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb showcasing U2 at their simplest, playing direct, straight-ahead rock with little subtlety and shading in the production, performance, or lyrics.(…)
I miss those small sonic shadings…
It is a rare event indeed, I don’t think it ever happened before, but it happened on the 31st of March this year. Out of the blue a mail arrived from a fellow U2 fan called Chris Taguchi, with some comments for U2MoL and the following ending:
Back in the early ’90s, I had a site called ”U2:SitB” or Salvation in the Blues which was based on the backstories, meanings of U2′s songs. … I can zip my folders and send the *.txt files to you.
How not to respond to that then a ”Yes please!”?
A few days later the archive arrived and it has taken me the better part of the year to go through the material and sort out what is within the context of U2MoL and what is not and then adding the material. The latter part started at the beginning of December and will take at least through January to complete (I simply has too many projects, as everyone else, at the moment), you may follow the RSS-feed for updates as they come in bursts. The credit line will be From Salvation in the Blues, compiled by Chris Taguchi for all the entries, in case you want to look for them later on.
A great ”Thank you!” to Chris for compiling this and sending it to me, and an equal big one to all of you who have patience with me.
I made an error when I configured the web server, which made the blog inaccessible, and to make things worse it took me some time before I noticed it. Sorry about that. The only ones that might bother are the spammers as they are the only ones that seems to have found the blog, but I fixed it anyway…
I sometimes get flamed for the guidelines I use for contributions, something that is quite rare, much rarer then the flames for the very existence of U2MoL, but all the same; are they guidelines hard to understand or too harsh? The guidelines are an attempt to increase the quality of the contributions I receive (I reject about half of the contributions I get, usually because the contributor hasn’t researched the topic and/or it is a private opinion and has nothing to do with U2′s intention, as far as they are known) and will only serve their purpose if they are easily understood.
I could need a bit of help, how can I increase the quality of the guidelines?
