It is true that part of U2’s early appeal was their relatively exotic Irish identity in the eyes of the Americans and the British, but over time Bono and his band mates inevitably lost their meaningful, island-nation character in exchange for commercial, global pop appeal. First, to understand the process by which this loss of culture occurs, it is necessary to understand pop music, or at least the process by which a band moves from the periphery and into the pop bubble. According to Middleton and Manuel, there are three distinct stages of pop music development based on abstract spatial metaphors. The first stage consists of the various types of music occupying their own separate social spaces, but unconscious interaction naturally occurs between the types of music independent of the social groups. In the second stage, the social spaces become “connected to a ladder, which can be climbed through techniques of social mobility and moral self-improvement.” The third and final stage takes place when the ranking of music forms on “unitary virtual space,” and in Europe the third stage coincided with the large-scale incursion of American styles (Middleton and Manuel 2008). Therefore, though U2 may have existed on the periphery of Irish popular music compared to traditional styles, they learned early on in their career that, in order to climb that ladder, it would be necessary to increase the appeal of their identity to the global market, especially to the U.S. For example, three years before they produced War, the band allowed Warner Brothers to change the cover of their debut album Boy in the U.S. for fear that it would not be accepted by the American public (it originally contained a close-up photo of a young Irish boy). Though the album cover might not have anything in common with the band’s Irish-ness—or its music—, let this serve as a small example of how selling records was often of primary importance to the seemingly authentic Irish rock band.