Benjamin St. Pierre
Connector Staff
I’ve never been much of a U2 fan. I’ve never ventured back in time to listen their albums. I’ve never been overly intrigued with their music nor the antics of Bono. No, they’ve never really caught my eye, regardless of their musical innovations and sustained success and 150 million albums sold worldwide.
Their most recent release, “Songs of Innocence,” is the culmination of years of scrapped projects and an ingenious idea to maintain their notoriety: teaming with Apple to put their album in the iCloud, and thus on your phone and any Apple device if it’s connected to it. Every Apple customer noticed it. Some complained, some were intrigued, but all of us were confused. How does this happen? Corporations, that’s how.
Yeah sure, the album was alright. I listened to it in its entirety and it was what I expected, and like I said, I never really listened to U2 besides vague memories of me being a little kid and watching the “Vertigo” music video on MTV. But still, this was an average U2 album. I listened to it and wasn’t pleasantly surprised nor disappointed. Reading the sentiments of other (more established) music critics, I see that I’m not too far off with my conclusion. It was pretty slow, Bono’s vocals aren’t getting any better with age, and overall, it was almost sullen, in a way. It’s not especially worth listening to; before this, I avoided even listening to a second of it to stick it to the man. Now I’m a part of it.
The whole iCloud scenario sets an interesting precedent for the industry. A release this large has never happened before; by being in the Cloud, as Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “Songs of Innocence” marked the “largest album release of all time.” And apparently, 26 million people downloaded the record during its first month, last month.
What can we make of this? Will this just be a tactic for already mega-rich bands to maintain a following? Will it be used for fledgling bands of rich record labels to gain a following? Will it never be used again? Will I ever stop asking questions? Who knows? The Cloud is a weird thing. All our data is in it and anything can be put into it, and thus automatically on our devices; it is our “choice” to download it or not, but its presence is ominously still apparent. It haunts me and every one of us. U2 did this. U2 did too much for me, this time. But not enough good music this time. The album was okay.
