meaningless is a good thing
Again: I am young, and I don't know a damn thing. I'm good with objects—I can tell you all about objects—but I still don't understand the first thing about people.
I liked the Replacements cover idea, but I ended up recording this: Elvis Presley and America (mp3, 5.1 mB). So far as I know, they wrote this song on the spot. Usually the results of such improvised "compositions" from rock bands are insufferable, but 1984 was one of the years in which U2 could do no wrong. They possessed such a capacity for spinning emotional color out of two chords (occasionally adding a third for spice) that Bono didn't need to have any idea what he was singing about. It just turned the song into something more abstract—a piece that seems narrative, and has the sort of soaring climaxes that one would expect from narrative, but doesn't actually do anything with its semantic content. It's language poetry with a delay pedal.
