May 23 - Wake Up Dead Man

The first song I remember downloading was Discotheque by U2. The year was 1997, and I actually believe it was a legal download in low quality mp3 from u2.com. I might be wrong about where I got it from, but I am positive it was legal - and I remember sitting at the computer lab at NTNU at Dragvoll in Trondheim downloading it onto two or three floppy disks with 1.44 MB capacity using a file splitting program that allowed me to take huge files of over 3 MB home with me.

U2s album Pop was released about a month later, and I remember going with Jon Inge to the midnight launch. We were in line to be among the first to buy the album. Of course, a pit stop at Burger King at their original location was also necessary - but we each got the cd and a promo single of Discotheque with the song Holy Joe, not otherwise too easy to get a hold of. We were excited - and while some tracks took a little longer to get used to than others, we both really liked it.

It's become very popular to hate U2 and to see Bono as a self-indulgent superstar too busy playing Jesus to do anything worthwhile musically. I am proud to say that I haven't fallen into any of those traps. I love their music. My relationship to their albums following Pop has been shaky, but after seeing the HBO special Innocence & Experience in Paris, which is out on BluRay on June 10, I have to admit that it doesn't matter. Their show - and the way they perform their music live - is second to none. I was lucky enough to see them twice - and I had the perfect companion in Jon Inge both times. The Zooropa tour was probably still my favorite, but watching them get stuck in the disco ball during the Popmart concert at Valle Hovin in Oslo is still my absolute favorite Spinal Tap moment.

Today I am revisiting Pop, because I think it is their most maligned and underrated album. The closer from Pop is another frail song, much in the vein of Love Is Blindness from Achtung Baby. Wake Up Dead Man is as haunting as it is dark, and truly a beautiful song.