Take the World's Hardest U2 Quiz

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16-05-2025

It's not hard to spot the hardcore fans at U2 shows. They're the ones wearing vintage Lovetown Tour T-shirts who scream louder for 'Acrobat' than 'Pride (In the Name of Love),' call out guitar tech Dallas Schoo by name when he brings the Edge a new instrument, and leap into the air on the rare occasions when Bono adds his 'shine like stars' coda to the final verse of 'With or Without You.' (If you have any idea what that even means, you're one of the people we're talking about here.) But U2 are a stadium band, and the vast majority of their audience largely just know the hits. A smaller subset owned The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby on cassette or CD back in the day, and have vague memories of the deeper cuts. To figure out where you fall on the spectrum of U2 fans, check out this quiz.
0 to 30 percent correct: Don't be discouraged. Just head to your favorite streaming service, load up the U2 catalog, and spend the next few hours soaking it all in. To start off, we'd recommend War, The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, Pop, All That You Can't Leave Behind, and No Line on the Horizon. Once you're done, check out the book U2 at the End of the World, by Bill Flanagan, and the group's own official oral history, U2 by U2. That's a lot of music and history to absorb, but this is a band on the verge of celebrating its 50th anniversary.
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31 to 60 percent correct: Nice job. You are clearly someone who has spent some time with the catalog. If you wish to learn more, Rolling Stone has been covering U2 since the very beginning. The late James Henke called them 'the next big thing' in a pivotal 1981 article before most people in America knew they even existed. Four years later, we called them the 'Band of the 80s' when the decade was just halfway over. (It's also one of the worst cover photos we've ever run. For some reason, they're buried in shadows in front of a haunted staircase.) Pore through all of these articles and you're likely to emerge an expert.
61 to 100 percent correct: Congrats! You're a true U2 aficionado. You probably know every word to 'Womanfish' and 'Pete the Chop,' watched the original Year in Pop ABC broadcast in 1997, and even the raw Rattle and Hum footage that leaked out decades back. There's not much more we can teach you at this point. But if you're looking for great bootlegs, we recommend May 6, 1983, in Boston; Jan. 10, 1990, in Rotterdam, Netherlands; June 11, 1992, in Stockholm; and May 6, 2001, in Pittsburgh. Hopefully they'll start their own official Bootleg Series. But then again, you surely have all of this stuff anyway.
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