U2: "Window in the Skies"
(1 comment)
Is it just me, or is U2's new video (see below) downright offensive?
It's one thing to use footage of artists such as Jay-Z, the White Stripes, Elvis Costello, Flavor Flav, Morrissey, et al. They're all alive and can consent to such a use of their images. But the use of dead icons smacks of exploitation, and the assumption that the likes of Kurt Cobain, Frank Zappa, Joe Strummer, Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra would agree to appear in a U2 video... well, that's just hubris. Maybe they'd agree to it, and maybe they wouldn't, but they obviously had no choice in the matter.
Well, I guess Bono himself sums it up best in the song's lyrics: "I've got no shame."
On Jan 29, 2007, Jerri Koestner made the following comment:
Wow! I don’t even know where you are coming from! I think the video is amazing as well as the song. He has chosen to immortalize the greatest of the great, those whom I would have hand picked myself. I feel very confident that every last one of them would have been honored to have been chosen by Bono. And I also believe that u2 would have had to have obtained consent from the estates of these people. There is nobody in the world alive today who campaigns as fiercely for other people's rights as Bono and I do not believe that he would in any way exploit these people. I find it to be a gift to them all, chosen and remembered eternally for the greatness that they were.
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