The bit that distracted me from the triumphant performance was the moment the band began to play “City of Blinding Lights,” from “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” The crowd went berserk, as it had been doing fairly consistently all night. (Many big arena shows hit a perceptible longueur somewhere around Hour 2, but U2’s don’t.) The audience was going perceptibly more berserk for this particular song. I realized that I was hearing, for the third or fourth time, the evening’s loudest applause for a recent single. When the band played the first U2 song I ever encountered, 1980’s “I Will Follow,” the crowd seemed fairly happy, though in a slightly polite way. (This is the inverse of the “Satisfaction” effect, easily witnessed at any Stones show.) What other band, three decades into the game, gets its most intense audience reaction with new songs? There is no need to stage a legend Olympics between U2 and AC/DC and the Eagles and the Allman Brothers and the Stones—plenty of bands are holding up well into their rock-and-roll winter. But the only band of this vintage consistently generating new hits that bring in a younger crop of fans every five years is U2.
- Sasha Frere-Jones, reviewing U2's new album in this week's New Yorker
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