Recently Greg Kot has been trashing U2’s career moves and apparently Bono felt the time was right to set the record straight and sat down to an unusually in-depth and in-your-face interview when they played Chicago a few weeks ago. The resulting text goes a long way towards explaining U2’s motivations and current philosophy in regards to how music should be presented and it’s place is in today’s larger culture.
KOT: You told me the other day that U2 had “Kid A’d” itself to death [a reference to Radiohead’s 2000 progressive-rock album “Kid A”]. It was a funny line, but I’m disappointed to hear that.
BONO: I want to hear Radiohead, extraordinary band that they are, on MTV. I want them setting fire to the imaginations of 16-, 15-, 14-year-old kids. I was 14 when John Lennon set fire to my imagination. At that age, you’re just [angry], and your moods swing, and it’s an incredible time to be hit with something like that. Our last two albums are essentially about the combo. We used the limitations of the combo. We had 10 years of experimentation. We decided to rope it in, and tie ourselves to only one thing. And that’s the only discipline. Is it a great song? Is it fresh? Experimenting in rock is at its best when you dream from the perimeters and bring it back to the center. All my favorite innovators disappear into the woods and bring something back, and you get to hear the songs distilled from those experiments. I used “Kid A” as an example, because I love the album. We did our “Zooropa,” we did our “Passengers,” even our “Pop” experiment. There were great ideas on that album, but we didn’t have the discipline to screw the thing down and turn them into magic pop songs. We’d become progressive rock! Ahhh! (full story)
Sometimes I think Kot can be a bit too much of a cheerleader but this is one time when I think his criticism elicited what might be one of the most forthright and surprising responses ever from a band as big as U2. Required reading.