Proust notes, somewhere, that photographs of the dead can bear a dignity & elegiac beauty lacking in the living. So with U2. Now the heart-on-sleevers have become fully-paid New World Order propagandists, their old material has a time-locked and bounded quality to it. Listening to old U2 now is like looking at photos of the young Brigitte Bardot
then remembering she doesn’t look like this anymore.
If normally one must wait until death closes accounts, to survey the books, with U2 I think it is fair to say they are creatively dead. Their music for the last few albums has been over-produced pap, with Bono’s voice a reedy whine, the lyrics computer-generated SJW pablum, the music itself emasculated, soy-pop.
With that in mind, we may turn to museum exhibitions of U2. Here is a good cover of ‘Bad’ by some guy with a funny name:
Remainders 