Acrobat to Zooropa…Listening to Every U2 Song In One Day

♦ July 19, 2011

First of all, to be alphabetically correct, the title should be “A Celebration to Zooropa”, or if you are being alphanumeric, it would be “11 O Clock Tick Tock to Zooropa”.

However, “Acrobat'”is song title more recognizable to U2.  If I hear that word “acrobat” I think Kerri Strug, and then U2.  The term ” A celebration” leads to many, many other thoughts.  Plus, I really like the song “Acrobat”.

With that out of the way, I am presently 59 songs into this 232 song adventure.  I am not going strictly alphabetically throught, especially not since I am pulling the music from 3 different sources…however the iTunes portion (156 songs) is in alphabetical order.  I was able to get 50 songs lined up in a playlist on Rdio (which I subscribe to), and I created a playlist on YouTube for 26 of the harder to find songs (such as Mercy, Soon, Fast Cars, Maggie’s Farm, etc).

I had a tough time determining which songs to include, there were a lot of obvious choices…but then should I include Passengers?  What about Million Dollar Hotel?  Mission Impossible?  SpiderMan?  What about cover songs?  Or medleys?  What about songs that became other songs?  And lastly what about songs that suck?  As much as I love the music of u2, and even if you love their music more, in 200+ songs you can’t deny that they’ve laid an egg or two.

I decided that U2 songs are those played by Bono, Edge, Larry and Adam…so SpiderMan and Mission Impossible (and similar ventures) are out.

Passengers is somewhat in.  Songs by the ‘Million Dollar Hotel Band’ are out.  The specific U2 contributions to that album are in.

Cover songs are available.  However the songs that have snippets that are occasionally included as medleys (such as “Ruby Tuesday” in BAD, etc) aren’t included.

Songs that were performed as a complete song that then become something else entirely, such as Native Son becoming Vertigo are both included…however I did not do exhaustive research into this.  Actually, I primarily used the Wikipedia list, and made a few modifications (such as deleting the instrumental Passengers songs), and adding few (Cry).

Remixes were deemed to be unnecessary.

Songs that I don’t like…I feel I don’t need to listen to in their entirety…at least the verse and chorus though.  Even “Unknown Caller”…but hearing ‘force quit, move to trash’ does force me to quit listening to that song…and “Maggie’s Farm” was crap when Dylan did, no one should have to listen that again.

My intent here is just a goofy little challenge to myself and a tribute to my favorite band…so I won’t dwell anymore on the negative.

The highlights…the other 220+ songs, make for 17 hours of great music today.

So this all clocks in at over 16 and a half hours worth of music.  I started listen at 6:40AM.

I did finish with 24 hours, but due to a few issues (such as “real life”, a “job”, and family) I got an hour or so behind, and this carried over until the following calendar day, but 24 hours makes a day…and there is no way that I would try this again.

Mission Complete.

The highlight: at about song 145 I was getting really tired of this, but then Sunday Bloody Sunday came on an I rallied.

The lowpoint: the iTunes section of this was done alphabetically.  The “M” section seems to have a lot of  less good U2 songs (A Man and A Woman, Miami, Moment of Surrender).  Evidently, “A Man and a Woman” is alphabetically in the “M’s” according to iTunes.   Who knew?

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