I've spent a lot of couch hours with U2 without ever really calling myself a superfan, and I suspect that's the most common relationship a person can have with this band. They're just... there. In every movie trailer that needed gravitas between 1987 and 2004, in every set of headphones on a plane, in every arena you ever walked past. MSN put together a full timeline retrospective for the anniversary, and it got me digging through my own memory of them.

So, the shape of it. The band formed in Dublin in 1976 when Larry Mullen Jr. put a note on a school bulletin board looking for musicians, and four teenagers who could barely play answered. That part is band-lore gospel at this point. They went by Feedback, then The Hype, then finally U2, and by 1980's Boy they had a sound nobody else had: Bono's voice that couldn't decide between singing and pleading, and The Edge building whole songs out of a delay pedal and about four chords.

The run that follows is one of the great ones in rock history. War in 1983. The Joshua Tree in 1987, which turned them from a big band into the biggest band on the planet. Then Achtung Baby in 1991, where they tore their own sound down and rebuilt it as something darker and stranger in Berlin, and I'll say it: the guts it took to follow The Joshua Tree with that record still impresses me more than either album on its own.

Then come the messier decades, which I'd argue are the more interesting ones. Zooropa and Pop found them chasing electronics and sometimes falling on their faces, and the 2000s brought the All That You Can't Leave Behind comeback and the infamous 2014 iTunes auto-download that put Songs of Innocence in everyone's library whether they asked or not. You can argue forever about whether that was a mistake. People still do.

And then the last act, which nobody scripted: the Sphere in Las Vegas. Forty nights in a giant eyeball of a venue, playing to people who came as much for the screen as the songs, and it worked. Jess Wingo caught one of those shows and texted me from inside the building, and the message was just the eyeball emoji. Which I think is the correct review.

Fifty years, same four guys. No lineup changes, no breakups, no reunion-tour cash grab because they never went anywhere. That's rarer than it sounds. Go read the full timeline, put on Achtung Baby, and ask yourself which decade you'd keep if you could only have one. I keep landing on the messy one.