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According to Spin magazine's January issue, they are.
For my brothers and sisters in U2 fandom, I pulled this.
Here's Spin's interview with the entire band.
excerpts:
quote:The Elevationair jet cruises through the October Canadian sky. Just minutes ago, U2 were onstage in Montreal's Molson Centre, driving home the second show of the third leg of their monumental Elevation tour. Now, 29,000 feet up, in the front row of the band's 44-seat private 727 on the hour-long flight to Toronto, Bono slouches, shoes off, and in a voice barely above a whisper, reflects on a year marked by triumph (the stunning success of U2's tenth album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, and the accompanying tour) and painful loss (including the death of his father in August and of one of his musical idols, Joey Ramone, who spent his last minutes listening to a U2 song).
"I think if we hadn't been on tour, if we'd been at home, this would have been a very hard year for me," says the singer, who just this morning sneaked in a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Jean ChrŽtien and a visit to the Montreal International Film Festival with director Wim Wenders and still made it to soundcheck in time. "I'm grateful to this band and grateful to our audience, but more so to the God that's in the music -- whatever piece of God you find."
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**Is it frustrating that there are really no young bands that have taken up your sense of mission for rock'n'roll?**
Bono: One of my favorite groups is the Beasties, and their journey is really one to watch, from just having fun with their own middle-classness to a growing awareness of the way the world is. I mean, we were freaks. Somebody once said, comparing us with Van Morrison, that most people start off writing songs about girls and get to writing songs about God. We did it totally backwards!
Clayton: American music is kind of odd because there are certain times when it seems to be political, and then suddenly it doesn't seem to recognize politics at all. But maybe that just represents typical culture.
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**How do you think the four of you have been able to stay intact as a band for over 20 years? **
The Edge: Maybe because we were friends before we were a band. We're not like so many groups you hear about where the members don't ever talk offstage or out of the studio. It's not like that with us -- quite the opposite. If we end up at a party, at the end of the night you'll probably find the four of us off in a corner hanging out.
More on the site.
I simultaneously found myself loving the band reading this interview, and thinking they're a tad full of themselves. But what band doing as well as they have done this year wouldn't be?
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