re: U2 is the worst big time band of all time

No way. Too many great albums early on (with favorite track in parenthesis):

The Joshua Tree (One Tree Hill)
Boy (Out of Control)
The Unforgettable Fire (The Unforgettable Fire)
War (Drowning Man)
Achtung Baby (Until the End of the World)
October (Electric Co.)

It went South -- really South after that though.

Off the top of my head, a few "big time bands" that I never liked:

KISS
Cat Stevens
Paul Simon
Iggy Pop / The Stooges
Dave Matthews Band
The Who
The Police
The Ramones
Aerosmith

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They are easily the greatest band of all time

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Holy shite. This sentenc. I don't know whether to laugh or puke

Every time U2 comes on I scramble to change it. Been like that since I was a kid. Annoying arse overly earnest cornballs

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Holy shite. This sentenc. I don't know whether to laugh or puke

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It doesn't matter because:

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They are easily the greatest band of all time

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Americans think Blink 182 is the greatest POPpunk band of all time.

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FIFY

The Ramones are who Americans think of when it comes to punk music.

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It's hard to find bands(their are some out there) that have had a long run(20+ years) whose albums didn't start to go downhill over time.

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I have a bit of a theory on this. Bands often work together for years before they release an album, and they’ve written lots of songs to choose from. If their first album or two is successful, they’re faced with a choice. Do you stick with your signature sound? That leads to being accused of making the same album over and over again. Do you reinvent your sound? That usually leads to losing much of your fan base and probably doing music that you’re not very good at. Do you find some happy medium? This seems ideal, but also seems to be the most difficult to pull off.

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I have a bit of a theory on this. Bands often work together for years before they release an album, and they’ve written lots of songs to choose from. If their first album or two is successful, they’re faced with a choice. Do you stick with your signature sound? That leads to being accused of making the same album over and over again. Do you reinvent your sound? That usually leads to losing much of your fan base and probably doing music that you’re not very good at. Do you find some happy medium? This seems ideal, but also seems to be the most difficult to pull off.

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That's definitely part of it, but I think the biggest factor is age. They start out young and hungry and energized and bursting with creativity and promose. They grow older and some get married(sometimes never, sometimes multiple times), have kids(or don't), start to view the world differently, maybe start to dislike other band members, some members quit/die....etc. It's just a natural progression.

I think the vast majority of anyone on here can agree that their life in their 40's or later is vastly different than their life in their 20's. It's no different for most any musician/band.

Again, there are exceptions, but for the most part, this is just how it is and bands that stay together for long periods of time typically get worse, especially with their studio output.

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It's a toss-up between U2 and Bruce Springsteen.

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Clearly your opinion carries more weight than the combined 300 million fans that have bought their records.

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There isn't a good song on it.

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Joshua Tree is a Top 5 album of all time.

Bands have their entire lives to write their first album, then a year or two to write the second.

Often times, bands collapse in creativity with the third album because the first has all the best stuff they wrote before getting signed, the second one might have a couple newly written songs but is mostly just the old songs that didn’t make the cut the first time. By the third album, nearly all of the material was written since the second album, so they’re scrambling to meet the deadline. Thus, they’re writing songs because they need a song not because there’s a song that comes to them naturally.

Oddly enough, I sorta did this backwards. When I formed a band in 2015, we recorded an EP in 2016 where 4 of the 5 songs were written in 2015, and only one pre-existed the band.

In 2019, I recorded a longer release with 7 songs. Of those, 2 preceded the band, 1 was written in 2015, and 4 were written between releases.

In 2022, I released another EP with a different band where 1 was a cover, 1 track was sorta new (I came up with a new bridge and chorus in 2022, but the verses had been written literally 13 years before), 1 was written in 2015, and the other 3 all were written well before 2015.

I’m planning out my next albums for those two bands right now and trying to decide if there’s any old material still worth dipping into.

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Joshua Tree is a Top 5 album of all time.

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Led Zeppelin II, IV and Physical Graffiti are better albums than Joshua Tree from just Led Zeppelin's catalog alone....

Heck, on the other end of the spectrum, I could make a solid argument that from a creativity point of view, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique is a better album that Joshua Tree....