There was a time I was a HUGE U2 fan. Loved, loved, loved their albums and thought they were one of the best bands out there.
Yeah, they stumbled a bit with the album Rattle and Hum (too long, too meandering) but, overall, they released some exceptional works. War. The Unforgettable Fire. The lovely ep Wide Awake in America. The Joshua Tree.
After Rattle and Hum, one could understandably be worried they were spent. Then came the wonderful Achtung Baby and, suddenly, they were again on top of the world, IMHO.
While touring on that album and with creativity to burn, they released the album Zooropa in 1993. The album was met with… confusion, perhaps, by audiences in general. The album was very experimental and, compared to some of the previous U2 albums, perhaps a little too radical to some.
I personally loved every second of its wonky bizarreness, including the way it ends with a song sung by, of all people Johnny Cash!
Over at vox.com, Dylan Scott offers his positive opinion on…
Mr. Scott seems to share similar opinions to mine. I loved U2 up to Zooropa but, sadly, from that point on the band seemed to drift off into directions that no longer interested me. Their follow up album, Pop, I could barely listen to. Their subsequent albums had songs here and there I liked but, overall, nothing that stood out like everything that came before.
And, to me, its a really sad thing to see.
Mr. Scott notes that U2 themselves seem to hold Zooropa in low esteem, barely singing any of the songs from that album in their shows.
Again, that’s too bad.
Still, reading the article is fascinating and, if you’re a fan at all of U2 -or even a lapsed fan as I am of late- its an interesting read.
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…
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.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. (Proverbs 16:18, King James Bible)
So its been a few days since Apple’s “big” event and the unveiling of the Samsung sized iPhones and the iWatch…er… Apple Watch and the thing that had me most interested, the free U2 album Songs of Innocence.
It is that latter part of the event that has many people -for the most part very amusingly- up in arms. Witness, for example, the fact that the “uproar” from the free album’s release and auto-download to iTunes now has Apple offering instructions on how to remove it from your iTunes que:
According to Heather Kelly, the author of the above article, the lesson Apple learned was that not everyone likes U2 or wants their album, even if it is given away to them free.
The second point she makes, though, is the more salient one: even those who do (like U2) really don’t like it when you put music in their libraries without asking.
The Biblical quote offered at the beginning of this entry is somewhat appropriate to this situation, though I’ll be the first to say Apple’s “sin” is far from biblical in its importance.
A week or two ago one of the biggest tech issues involved the hacking of many very famous actress/models’ phones (iPhones all, it would appear) and the subsequent releases of their private, nude pictures. Apple’s security took a big hit with this invasion of privacy, yet only days later the company decides it’s a good idea to release a free U2 album (I agree with them there) and an equally great idea to have it automatically download onto everyone’s iTunes (here comes trouble!).
For in “automatically” downloading this particular album to your computer, it feels like Apple, this time on its own and without the aid of a hacker, decided to intrude into your computer and give you a piece of entertainment, whether you wanted it or not. In effect, they went one extra step too far and have suffered considerable derision for it.
It is astonishing that Apple took what should have been a huge positive (look, kids, we’re giving away a free album from a very big and popular band!) and made it a negative by delivering that content without your consent.
One of the biggest surprises, at least to me, of this year’s “Let’s bedazzle everyone with our new stuff” Apple event was the announcement that U2’s latest album, Songs of Innocence, would be automatically downloaded to everyone’s iTunes for free (minus, btw, as many as four bonus songs, three of which will likely be on the actual paid download/Cd and one more to be included on the vinyl release).
While I feel that U2 hit their pinnacle with the dual releases of 1991’s Achtung Baby and 1993’s Zooropa, to me they crashed down hard with the release of 1997’s Pop (an album that totally did not work for me) and have never fully recovered from it. Though they’ve had some good songs and even decent full albums since that time (they’ve released 4 albums since Pop, including Songs of Innocence), the proverbial “something” was missing from their work.
Though its hard to put my finger on what that “something” is, it seemed they were perhaps trying to hard to create “hits” while simultaneously playing it far too safe. Instead of a rock band, they became a corporation and were no longer willing to make waves or issue political proclamations or create songs that cut deep. In sum, they got rather…boring.
Still, I loved most of their stuff up to Zooropa so naturally I’m interested in hearing anything they choose to release. When I learned Songs of Innocence was being given away, I immediately jumped onto my iTunes and, not finding it there, manually downloaded the album and, to this point, have listened to the first three songs. I really enjoyed the second song, “Every Breaking Wave”, but until I hear the whole thing a few times, I’m going to withhold any other critical comments.
That didn’t stop others from doing the same, though.
I was particularly intrigued with Lindsay Zoladz’s review of the album for Slate magazine, which you can find here:
The review was fascinating in its ambivalence, noting the positives and the negatives of this, the 2014 edition of U2.
Over at Salon, I found an even more startling article by Prachi Gupta which, rather than review the album itself, goes into people’s reactions to suddenly finding a new U2 album in their iTunes que. Most of the comments presented aren’t positive at all, and point to a fact that until I read the article didn’t realize but probably should have: To young music listeners, U2 is very much a band from the past. To them, having this album “forced” upon them when they didn’t ask for it is impolite at best and somewhat creepy at worse (which Lindsay Zoladz points to as well!).
Regardless, this makes for interesting reading, even if Ms. Gupta shows her ignorance of the band by referring in the very first sentence of the article that U2 is a “90s rock band”. I suppose their initial rise to prominence in 1980-81 and subsequent great albums from the 1980’s doesn’t count!?
