Thursday, November 05, 2009

Berliners call for wall to be rebuilt; West begs to be let into the East

The collapse of the Berlin Wall was a fantastic example of people. Ordinary, brave, pissed-off people taking the law into their own hands.

There is no nothing less appropriate to mark this than several millionaires with no obvious links to the city playing a self-aggrandising gig:

U2 and Jay-Z have played a show at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin this evening (November 5).

Taking to the stage on the eastern side of the old divide, the band played a short set to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the flashpoint that kick-started Germany's reunification.

Why does Bono singing a Bob Marley song "mark the anniversary"? You might as well fill a milkfloat full of bison poo and drive up it in circles round the Reichstag and say that's marking the occasion.


2 comments:

Paul Wells said...

To be fair to U2 (and I'm not quite sure why I feel I need to be), they did record their last good album (Achtung Baby) in Berlin soon after the wall came down. And that had a picture of a Trabant on it and everything. So I guess they've as much right to be there as anyone else.
If it was to be a gig themed on German division and re-unification then who would they have playing? It would be Hasslehoff headlining with support slots from Nena and, um, the Scorpions?
To be honest, U2 don't sound too bad any more...

Olive said...

You forgot Udo Lindenberg, Paul: "In Berlin they have a wall, for playing tennis it's too tall".

How about Propaganda, or Nena Hagen*? Granted, they're German, but don't have anything to do with the fall of the wall, but a) they probably don't have anything better to do, and b) they've got to be better than U2.


*And Xmal Deutschland. I haven't thought of them for years, but 'Matador' just popped up on my jukebox.

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