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"Some people expect U2 to come on like a political band. . . . Other people see us as prophets. Some see us as pop stars. . . . And we're not any of those things. We're probably all of them. I don't know what we are."

-- Bono

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Pop of Ages

Entertainment Weekly, February 08, 2008
By: By Owen Gleiberman

 

The side-by-side release of U2 3D and Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert invites you to line up the pop past and pop future in fascinating tandem.

It's routine wisdom to say that U2 is the greatest rock & roll band of the past 25 years (depending on the day, I'd go with R.E.M., but who's quibbling?), yet this raises a question: Will the next 25 years produce a band with the passion and power, the transporting sweep, of U2? The rise of the tween-fashionista mechano-pop juggernaut Hannah Montana doesn't bode well.

I can't, offhand, think of an entertainer who could dignify the prospect of a 3-D movie more than Bono. If he says 3-D is a noble cause, that's good enough for me. I wasn't sure what to expect from U2 3D -- the Edge tossing guitar picks into our faces -- but the film, shot in South America during the band's Vertigo tour, comes at us in images that are nearly sculptural. The 3D visuals envelop you, majestically, and that effect fuses with the band's surround-sound rapture to create a full-scale sensory high. U2 3D makes you feel stoned on movies.

On this tour, U2 had cleaned away a lot of their stage bric-a-brac, and what we're left with is great songs ("Pride," "One," the incomparable "With or Without You"), plus a few duds ("Bullet the Blue Sky"), as Bono, with his soaring message of global love, rules the crowd like a hippie cult leader. The Edge doesn't just create walls of sound -- he creates cathedrals of sound. It's hard to imagine, in the digital era, downloading a band as monumental as this one.

Rating: A-



© Entertainment Weekly, 2008.

    



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