Word: musicians
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Your cover story on hip-hop musician Kanye West [Aug. 29] was a brave and smart choice. You gave insights into who he is and, more important, why we should care. West does everything a true musical artist should do: write, produce and perform. He not only employs the traditional hip-hop technique of sampling but also uses samples of influential artists like Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey, Marvin Gaye and Luther Vandross. West's songs pay homage to the origins of hip-hop and give today's generation a chance to hear legendary musicians...
...with a bass instead of a bomb, remains U2's most sulfurous presence, lending a slight but leveling tension to the stage show. Still, the band's fervor comes from deep springs, not simply from sheer showmanship. "Great songs and all that great heart," says Lou Reed, a formidable musician whose influence can be heard on Running to Stand Still. "U2's not a pop group. They are in this for real...
...boys who became U2 -- the name, suggested by a local musician pal, refers ironically to the high-altitude spy plane -- all knew of one another, vaguely, from school. The Clayton and Evans families were friendly. The Edge, whose family is Welsh, and Bono (still generally called Paul Hewson back then) had briefly gone to the same guitar teacher. For his part, Bono had a distant but still vivid impression of Clayton, who was raised outside London and in Kenya, and had moved to Dublin with his mother and airline-pilot father at the ( age of eight. He had come...
...became clear after a little time, however, that there were certain limitations to style. The Claytons were dubious when the band started to talk about turning pro. "Quite sensibly," the Edge remembers, "they realized this business is very hard and that Adam is not the world's most gifted musician and what possible chance has he got of making it. My folks probably made the same calculation." "Adam's amazing," says Bono flatly. "He just pretended he could play the bass, when in fact he couldn't. And at the age of 16, he pretended he knew the music business...
...heard by record companies and earn a little living money, there were third-party suggestions that one member or another be dropped in the interest of strengthening the band's musicianship. All such notions were rejected out of hand. "We never, ever felt that being a great musician was a necessary qualification for being in U2," says McGuinness. "The individuals were much more important than whether you could play...