Day 3- Original Of The Species

This week is going to have a mini-theme, namely excellent songwriters/bands that are prolific, and therefore have a ton of good songs and, thankfully for this blog, a ton of crap.  I'm going to try to only highlight songs that were hits for the band, since random b-sides aren't really worthy of mockery, since they wouldn't be known by most people and weren't exactly intended for major release.

All right, with all that said, we begin with one of my favorite bands, U2.  At one point in my life, U2 were my favorite band ever, and I still think their output from War through even Pop is pretty outstanding (I'm a firm believer that Pop is one of the most underrated albums of all time).  I love The Joshua Tree in particular, which is simply one of the great rock albums ever released, no questions asked. However, their output this decade has been remarkably spotty, and it seems increasingly clear that Bono is just running out of ideas.  The danger of being a poetic lyricist is that your lyrics can soar and they can crash into the ground, and Bono has had both things happen a lot. 

The lyric I'm going to highlight today is from their album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which starts off really well (Miracle Drug, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, City of Blinding Lights), but then like much of their output this decade, spirals down quickly in quality in the second half.  The song Original Of The Species, the penultimate song on the album, has a number of idiotic lyrics, and yes, was a single.  The worst is this refrain, which is repeated and serves as kind of the beginning of the chorus:

I'll give you everything you want
Except the thing that you want
You are the first one of your kind

And in case you think I'm quoting this out of context and therefore being unfair, I'm not.  This is the entire thing.  If anyone has any idea what this is supposed to mean, please.  I'm all eyes on the comment page.  The first two lines in particular are just eye-rollers; it's a classic example of something that is supposed to sound deep, but means absolutely nothing.  This song also has an utterly random "bridge" that features the made-up word "didit" repeated about twenty times.  Yes, it's a truly bizarre song, even though the melody is nice, if not generic U2 anthem music.  I may well update this entry periodically, by the by.