The ego has landed

Everyone likes free music, right? I mean, if they didn’t, then why would people bang on about illegal downloads killing the record industry? Yeah, everyone loves a freebie.

Except, it would seem, when that freebie in question is the new U2 album and people are effectively forced to own it, whether they like it or not.

To recap, 500 million iTunes users woke up one morning to find ‘Songs of Innocence’ lingering in their computers, phones and other devices, like a cat turd that’s been festering in the litter tray during a long, sweaty night.

Thoughtful gesture by a band so stupidly rich that they can genuinely afford not to earn any more money? Apparently not.

The thing is, if it was pretty much any other band (and I don’t think that’s too great an exaggeration) then people would either be pretty pleased with this unexpected aural generosity or quietly ignore/delete it with a knowing smile: oh, those guys!

But this is U2. And U2 are fronted by leather-clad uber-twat Bono, a man so self-absorbed that he probably has a life-size sex doll of himself flown out by private jet while on tour.

As soon as Mr Bono Sir enters the equation, there’s suddenly this assumption that 500 million people are going to be grateful that His Royal Highness has deemed them worthy of his band’s latest output. Perhaps people will flock to the streets in a sort of confused euphoria, hugging each other and asking excitedly what this means for the future of mankind. Maybe they’ll erect statues or compose operas in his honour. In 30 years’ time, will people talk in hushed tones about where they were when they first realised they’d been gifted a U2 album?

In reality, it seems that many of those 500 million people took great exception to someone placing files on to their computers without their knowledge or permission. The fact it was a U2 album just served to rub salt into the wound: the musical equivalent of someone pissing through your letterbox. 

Yeah, cheers Bono.

Don’t get me wrong, U2 have produced some fine songs in their time, but let’s be honest, they’ve been artistically bankrupt and culturally redundant for the best part of the last 20 years, haven’t they?

Curiosity got the better of me when they headlined Glastonbury in 2011. It was telling that they barely played anything released after 1994 and, as performances go, it was about as phoned-in as you could get. There was no soul, no emotion, no real connection with the audience – even the extended platform which Sir Bono presumably had built so that he could, y’know, go out and mingle among his subjects went largely unused because the egotistical prick didn’t want to shrink his leather suit in the rain. An a cappella version of ‘Jerusalem’ was just embarrassing, like a drunken elderly relative breaking into song during a funeral, while the frankly bizarre (and most probably pre-recorded) ‘live satellite link-up’ with an astronaut on a space station just felt contrived (a 21^st century update on Bono’s habit of telephoning the likes of Bill Clinton and Salman Rushdie during the band’s 90s gigs?).

What’s perhaps most amusing about this whole sorry iTunes debacle is that Apple quickly released a tool enabling users to delete the offending music. The digital equivalent of a gift receipt, if you like.

So, has it been a complete disaster from a PR point of view? Well, on the one hand, U2 have just spammed 500 million people. On the other hand, if the aim was to get people talking about the band again then it’s worked, even if the words being used are bitter, angry and possibly a little violent.

If ‘Songs of Innocence’ (even the title is pretentious) had been given to me in a physical format, then I might have got some use out of it – for example, I could have melted a record into a fruit bowl, or used the reflective qualities of a CD to signal to people on opposite hillsides.

But, alas, it’s digital, so there’s only one useful thing I can do: delete, delete, DELETE.