“This song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles, now were steeling it back”.

Bono “singing” Helter-Skelter sounds incredibly unprofessional, he can’t seem to get the timing or the lyrics right. Check it out if you get a chance it is ridiculous!

In my opinion remaking a Beatles song is a sin!

The pompous moron who calls himself Bono is the last person who should be remaking Beatles songs. Bono has always compared his inept, politically motivated band, U2 to the Beatles. If U2 were going to be the next Beatles they missed their window back in the Eighties! The Beatles did it in 7 Years; U2 has had 28 years to do it! Compare the two bands total Number 1 singles. U2, 4 UK and 2 US Billboard Hot 100. Yet the Beatles have released a 79 minute album called Beatles 1. This album contains 27 Number One Hits from a band that released their first studio album in 1963, Please Please Me, and their last studio album in 1970, Let it be. The Beatles had 7 years total time releasing original studio recorded music!

What would you call a video about a band travelling through America without a single sensible thread holding it together? A sucker!

One thing you can count on in a movie about U2 is good music. I saw them play at Largo, MD’s now-demolished Cap Center (the one in “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”) in early ’85. While not at their musical peak, their passion and generosity were astounding. They turned around and sang to those of us unlucky enough to be seated behind the stage, and when bouncers tried to clear kids from the pit, Bono angrily confronted them. This got them banned from the venue, but to do anything else would not have been U2. They weren’t chart-toppers then, but my college was full of their fans: earnest, clean-cut boys with a taste for social causes and a cultlike fervor for the band. And no wonder; their songs were bursts of rapt sincerity in an age of jaded techno-pop. The guitar may have sounded a bit like PiL on uppers, but such lyricism and raw emotion were almost unheard of in pop music.

I loved what I saw and heard. But there’s an adage that every man is really three men: the one that others see, the one in the mirror, and the one inside. With “Rattle and Hum” U2 try to show us version two, and unintentionally give us a load of version three…to our lasting dismay.

Scene by scene, reel by reel, we watch their illusory greatness crumble. Phil Joanou’s pompous camerawork, complete with artsy slo-mo and affected graininess, plays off their Olympian gestures to ludicrous effect. I’m sorry, but weren’t we first drawn to U2 by their *lack* of murk and dour pretension? Their down-to-earth idealism is precisely what made them stand out. By ramming Ambience down our faces, Joanou buries the band’s chief virtue.

And that’s before we hear from U2 themselves. In the interview scenes the band does nothing but giggle and snort between mumbled cliches like “It’s a musical journey.” Commentary that could have been telling is instead coy, smug, and inscrutable. Weirder still is a scene where Bono leads a young Gospel choir in a version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, maybe his most narcissistic song. The power disparity is unnerving: Bono comes off almost as a plantation-era taskmaster, waving a ferule, and you can’t help but wonder what these Harlem kids are thinking. Do any of them actually like this music? Have they bonded in any way with the band, and how do they relate to this tycoon’s self-satisfied angst? There seems no point to the scene beyond flogging the band’s playskool liberalism.

But the worst clip, where their insular idealism chafes hardest with reality, is the version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. This was filmed one day after an IRA bomb killed eleven people, and Bono sounds justifiably furious. But context makes this version ghastly: during a swelling guitar solo he lectures us about the uprising in Northern Ireland: “(This is) a revolution that the majority of my countrymen do not support…(Screw) the Revolution.”

Sincere words no doubt, but U2 are also using the emotional clout of real tragedy to add extra oomph to a musical bridge. You can totally hear it: they’re too slick a bunch of showmen to keep from pumping Bono’s sermon into an arena-rock crescendo. (Couldn’t he have given this speech between songs?) I know art and politics are inseparable, but when torn flesh and pop are woven together so blatantly and glibly you just get squalor. Almost like an Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway fantasia about My Lai.

Even stripped of their pompous score, Bono’s words are a misstep. His “countrymen” are Irish, so why should they decide the fate of Northern Ireland? The two are completely different countries, and Dublin has as much to do with Belfast as Timbuktu. Also, he seems oblivious of the connotations of telling Americans to “(Screw) the Revolution”. Screwing revolutions isn’t something we take lightly; for decades we’ve tried to crush every popular uprising that ran afoul of our plans for global finance, whether in Chile, Colombia, East Timor or Vietnam. Honestly, Bono, we need no encouragement.

The songs are mostly good, though the band’s view of themselves as Protean Oracles from the Celtic Mists kills a lot of the pleasure. One exception is the abysmal cover of “Helter Skelter”, introduced thusly by the ever-humble Bono: “Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles, and now we’re stealing it back!”

The grim fact is that Goths will still be creepy-crawling to the original at their Manson-themed raves long after U2′s albums have landed in the cut-out bins. What Revolution was that?