So what’s the problem? Well, it’s how they go about showing that influence. I believe Bono and the band when they say they were only showing how much these people influenced them. And if I had become famous in that time I would have wanted to play BB King every damn day, so I don’t see any problem. Where critics of the time had a problem with that conceptually, I was born after this movie came out, when U2 can legitimately claim to be both one of the most popular and most influential bands to ever live, so I had no problem. Dylan, BB King, Hendrix, Presley, Van Morrison, The Rolling Stones and the aforementioned Beatles can all be accounted for in some way. The biggest complaint of the time was that U2’s ingratiation of both great American music and famous artists was deemed. We’re stealing it back.” Quite apart from any beliefs that Manson somehow owned the song after the Helter Skelter killings, this sentence will become the template for the overreaching quality of U2 for the entire record/movie by claiming that somehow they own it now. In an effort to organise my thoughts, this page will contain my thoughts on the music/ album, and I’ll sort another page for the movie review.īut the first few seconds of both elements help to exemplify people’s problem, with Bono introducing a cover of “Helter Skelter” thusly: “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. Just a shame there’s a lot to slog through as well.Īs you can see there’s a lot to get through. Almost everything after the black and white sections are a great concert movie, and have one of the most powerful moments of the band’s entire career. When people talk about Rattle and Hum the movie and how much they dislike it, they mainly talk about the first half. And whilst the next U2 album would be a deliberate departure, the seeds of it sonically can be felt on some of these album’s deeper cuts. Not just the live renditions of classic songs – all sung in a prime period for the band – but in songs recorded specifically from the album. When people talk about Rattle and Hum people can forget that a lot of great music is there. And that Spinal Tap reference is no undeserved dig, as will be explained.īut is the toxic reputation of Rattle and Hum – both the album and the movie – completely warranted? As I’ll attempt to go over in as sprawling a way as possible (like a U2 movie project!): Yes and no. Essentially a tracking of all of U2’s antics in America after The Joshua Tree, what began as a natural successor to the band’s big live breakthrough Under the Blood Red Sky kept expanding, and what The Edge called “a scrapbook” of Americana eventually became a large blockbuster undertaking, and turned into the documentary the, if you will, rockumentary, that people went to see. That distancing might also be because he did not envision himself directing, throwing out more experienced names like Martin Scorcese, Johnathan Demme and 2015’s MVP George Miller. This is also true of the director Phil Joanou, who came up with the concept for Rattle and Hum and would later dismiss the film as “pretentious”. That is how unsatisfied they were with both the film and, even more likely, reactions to the film. U2 spent the next decade of their careers trying not to come across in any way like they did here. Or appropriately a growth, and like any unhealthy growth the band took to cutting it off as soon as it could. Because Rattle and Hum has become less a U2 music project and more a monument to the band’s hubris. One cannot get to the subject of Rattle and Hum and then only talk about the music.
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