What Are You Listening To Now?

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Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights

Haven't listened to it for a while...
 
pds said:
I heard the U2 album is shite, just a money making exercise for Bono as it misses off a lot of good songs, and puts on quite a few shit ones.

Might not be the case though.
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Bono gets too close to the edge


Bono's reputation as the Mother Teresa of rock is in jeopardy following a pair of business deals tying him to one of the most conservative businessmen in America and the creators of violent video-games with an anti-socialist bent. He's also been criticised for a plan to avoid U2 paying tax in Ireland.

The deals were struck by Elevation Partners, a $1.9bn (£1bn) Silicon Valley-based investment firm, of which Bono is a founding partner. On Monday, Elevation announced an investment of $250m (£130m) in Forbes Media, a publishing company managed by Steve Forbes. Forbes ran twice for the US presidency - in 1996 and 2000 - arguing for a flat income tax, prayer in schools and a ban on abortion.

Bono, a champion of Third World debt relief and AIDS treatment, thus becomes part-owner of Forbes magazine and a number of other business titles serving America's financial elite. U2 has also joined many business high-fliers in moving part of its multi-million-dollar operation from Ireland to Amsterdam, to take advantage of a lighter tax regime.

Meanwhile, another of Elevation's portfolio companies, Pandemic Studios, a video-game developer, has incurred the wrath of American liberals for creating a game in which players take the role of mercenaries sent to Venezuela to depose a Hugo Chavez-like figure. Players of Mercenary 2: World in Flames are told "if you can see it, you can buy it, steal it or blow the living crap out of it". Pandemic has also done work creating computerized war simulations with the Institute for Creative Technologies, a southern Californian research centre funded by the US Army.

isa Featherstone, a columnist for The Nation, a liberal magazine based in New York, yesterday challenged Bono to choose between his investments and his declared commitment to improving the lot of the world's poor: "If Bono is serious in his commitment, and not, as one frequently suspects, a vapid celebrity poser, he should immediately use his financial muscle to deep-six this horrible video game (right)."

Elevation was founded in 2004 by Bono and five prominent Silicon Valley investors and executives, led by Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist and former business adviser to the Grateful Dead. Their goal is to invest in media and entertainment businesses. U2 is known as one of the most financially astute bands in the world, having retained all rights to their music. Bono's name helped Elevation raise its first fund, but he rarely attends the firm's meetings in California. He may care to drop by before Pandemic's next major release, Destroy All Humans 2, in which players "have total freedom to destroy anything and manipulate everything in the world"
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From thefirstpost.co.uk
 
I like the Joshua Tree album.

I remember back in the 80's when I used to be able to listen to music without the wranglings of politics and profound world statements.

A charity single was just that, everything else was just music
 
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