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The next time someone tells me there's too much irony in the world, I'm going to throw them in a river. Grantland's Brian Phillips:

After "Beautiful Day," U2 played "MLK" and "Where the Streets Have No Name" while a giant screen behind them showed the names of all the victims of September 11. Bono screamed "America!" and ran around the heart-shaped track while the crowd went insane and the names of the dead scrolled up into the sky. U2, as a band, was essentially born for this moment. Nobody's lip-syncing here. "Where the Streets Have No Name" is another song about escape, but it has a bigger canvas and a more equivocal story. It doesn't mean anything; it's a vehicle for producing chills. I'm guessing more than a billion people felt chills at the same time during this performance. It's not really even fair to compare it to any other Super Bowl halftime show. It took place on a different plane. When I watched this live I thought I was going to pass out. The moment when the screen comes tumbling down and Bono holds open his jacket to reveal an American-flag lining is probably the high point in the history of rock music's work in the service of public healing. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it may be the moment that most encapsulates what America was like after September 11 — the intensity of raw emotion, the need for mass spectacle, the sense that something genuine and vulnerable was coexisting uneasily with cell-phone commercials and an air of vague corporatization. (As I said: U2 was born for this.) And yet it made you feel like the top of your head had been taken off. 

I need some Negativland to cleanse myself of this pomposity.