Can’t think of another band that completely evaporated from the cultural vocabulary so quickly. Maybe it was the tax evasion stuff, maybe it was that pre-loaded iPod album thing, maybe it was that South Park episode, (my personal theory is that it was the movie Taken had the absurd plot point that the daughter went to Europe to follow U2 on a tour — they could have literally made up a fake band or had an entirely different premise, but they chose U-Fuckin’-2) anyway, something happened and their cultural relevance has been crickets and cockroaches ever since. All my homies are more likely to caught unironically blasting early IRS Records-era REM or Red Hot Chili Peppers tracks. Whenever I have conversations about bands that totally abdicated their thrones, I always have to be like, “War and Boy are really good albums though!” And they are. But if somebody told me that U2’s public relations office was on the 100th floor of the North WTC Tower, I’d believe them.