Musical tastes…

There are plenty of things out there that fascinate me (I worry sometimes that I waaaay overuse that word!) and, to add to the list, is this: What makes music popular?  What makes it stick with one generation, then get ignored -or worse- by another?

Yesterday and over at themuse.com, Ellie Shechet offered this article…

A Playlist of Bands We Pretended To Like As Teenagers

As a Proverbial-Old-Fart™, I’m amused that most of the artists listed came after my own personal music hey-day, though there are bands listed I do like, even to this day (For example, I still think Hole’s Live Through This is a terrific album even though I’ve not gotten into any of the other albums Courtney Love has done nor am I terribly interested in her…celebrity or not).

Now if you scroll past the article itself, someone with the handle GinAndTonic, Potential Grizzly (some of these poster’s names can be quite… interesting) wrote:

U2 makes me want to blow my brains out.

The post has a large number of “likes” and was a response to another poster who noted (but didn’t necessarily put down) U2.

What fascinates (see, I’m using that word again!) me about the post is the venom many seem to have today, especially the younger generation, toward U2.

In part I suspect this was due to the ill-advised 2014 give away of their latest album, Songs of Innocence, via iTunes… whether the iPhone/iPad/iWhatever user wanted it or not.

I wrote about this here and here, noting that while there was absolutely nothing wrong with releasing an album by a big band like U2 free for anyone with an iPhone/iTunes/iWhatever to get free, it was not a good idea to automatically have it download to everyone’s device whether they asked for it or didn’t.

It was a way to take something good (the giveaway) and make it bad.

And I can’t help but think that this poisoned the well for U2 with today’s youth.

I grew up with U2’s rise and, personally, love almost every one of their albums -from start to finish- from The Unforgettable Fire to Zooropa.  Don’t get me wrong: I like many songs in the albums previous to The Unforgettable Fire, including this song, found on the album War, which proved my first big awareness of them back in the early 1980’s (boy, we were young back then)…

I felt, roughly until Rattle and Hum, that U2 could do no wrong.  That album felt bloated and, though it had a few good songs here and there, seemed to be a band moving without much direction.  Then came Achtung Baby, their best later stage album, IMHO, and the “throwaway” experimental album Zooropa, a wild one-two punch that I loved.  That album concluded with this interesting collaboration between U2 and -of all people!- Johnny Cash:

But their follow-up album to Zooropa, Pop, was absolutely dreadful, IMHO, and I could only listen to it once and haven’t given it another try since.  Their subsequent albums have featured decent enough songs here and there but, sadly, I feel the band simply lost itself and the magic it had.

This is, by the way, something that seems to happen to almost all acts, especially those that constantly try to do something new and interesting.  Sometimes, new and interesting takes you into areas that lose fans.  While I can certainly appreciate that they’re still trying, most of the stuff that’s come post-Zooropa just hasn’t been my cup of tea.

Which is a shame but goes a long way from declaring hatred toward them and their music!

My eldest daughter, a big music fan, can’t handle U2 and will not listen to them either and, I feel, that’s a shame.  They created some great music but, as I mentioned way back at the start of this posting, music tastes change and what can work for one generation may not work at all for another.

Was the Apple download fiasco a big part of the reason some of today’s youth hate U2?  I suppose.  But I also suppose that today’s youth seek their own music and they simply cannot look at what are now middle aged -and older!- musicians strutting their stuff and accept them as cutting edge music they’re interested in pursuing.