[4] The song turned around after the Edge purchased a DigiTech Whammy pitch shifter pedal, which created a "double octave sweep" on the guitar riff.

[7] Lead vocalist Bono explained the song's lyrics, as well as why the title was lengthened to "Even Better Than the Real Thing": "It was reflective of the times [the band] were living in, when people were no longer looking for the truth, [they] were all looking for instant gratification.

"[4] Richard Branson requested to use the song in advertisements for his "Virgin Cola" to compete with Coca-Cola (who had been using the tagline "the real thing" for years), but the band declined.

[6] When the covers to "Even Better Than the Real Thing", "The Fly", "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses", and "Mysterious Ways" are arranged, a picture of the band members driving a Trabant is formed.

[19] Roger Morton from New Musical Express explained, "The 'Perfect Mix' is a kind of compromise where for a splendid 60 seconds you don't know it's a U2 record, thanks to the stomp rhythm and clap beats.

It's more than a novelty but less than a stroke of genius, with a whiff of old rock'n'roller condescension about it, and the nightmare spectre of Bono dancing his way back to God, hanging in the air.

Performances were accompanied by the video piece "King Size" by Marco Brambilla scrolling from ceiling to floor on the venue's interior LED screen, making the audience feel the false sensation of the stage moving upward.

[24] Brambilla spent three-and-a-half months creating the sequence, which featured a kaleidoscopic collage of 1,000 looped video clips depicting Elvis Presley and various Las Vegas iconography.

[25][26] Brambilla was asked to produce visuals that would instill sensory overload in the audience, and from conversations with Bono, he developed the themes of representing the death of Elvis, the birth of Las Vegas, and their parallels with the American Dream.

[27] Brambilla trained the artificial intelligence model Stable Diffusion to categorise his personal library of over 12,000 film clips, many of them from Elvis's filmography.