U2 Play Surprise NYC Show

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U2 shot a video for "All Because of You," the second single from their new album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, playing the song live aboard a flatbed cruising from the Upper West Side down Broadway yesterday in New York. The traveling show culminated in an hour-long free concert in Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges in the late afternoon, packed with new songs and a few older hits. The performance was filmed for the December 8th MTV special mtvJAMMED: U2.

U2 spent the day playing the new single, beginning with their first morning pit stop in front of Columbia University uptown. Helicopters flew overhead, taking aerial shots of the band, and the truck stopped traffic wherever it went. By the time the group could be seen crossing the Manhattan Bridge -- announcing, "Here we come!" -- a crowd of thousands had gathered in the park, hearing of the free show by word of mouth or through fan sites.

The ecstatic audience was treated to new songs -- including the concert opener, the album's debut single "Vertigo" -- as well as older hits "Beautiful Day" and "I Will Follow." Frontman Bono added Brooklyn references to the lyrics, at one point asking, to loud cheers, "Why does this feel like a hometown concert?"

"Vertigo" is currently at Number Three on the charts and is available as streaming audio -- along with the other ten album tracks -- at both U2's and MTV's Web sites.

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Song Stories

“Jimbrowski”

Jungle Brothers | 1988

Jungle Brothers sampled, among other things, jazz, James Brown and house music. The New York crew's lyrics were equally diverse but never short on clever wordplay or a playful sense of humor, as exemplified by this song from 1988's Straight Out the Jungle. "The idea for that came at the end of a studio session, with Mike, me, Red Alert and a woman Red was dating at the time," says the group’s Afrika Baby Bam. "Red was flirting with her and kept saying 'Jimbrowski' the whole night. Mike and I wrote the rhymes on the way back from the subway."

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