Hear Me Out: ‘Songs of Innocence’ is the most pretentious album ever made
There has always been a little bit of pretentiousness throughout every single U2 album ever made.
Bono might claim that he wants to change the world with his music, but when you look at everything that he has said about his band and himself over the years, you would think that he could fit his head through any doorway that he walked through.
But even for all of the face-palming moments that happened throughout a record like Rattle and Hum, it wasn’t until the 2000s that the Irish legends started to get called into question a lot more often.
Then again, that decade didn’t get off to a bad start for them, either. All That You Can’t Leave Behind was enough to get them another major hit on the charts, and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was proof that they hadn’t lost their penchant for hooks. But right around the turn of the decade, something strange started happening when they began using their music in conjunction with iTunes for the first time.
There’s nothing wrong with a band hopping on the latest digital trends, and Bono was really thinking ahead when looking at how music was going to be bought going forward, but right around the 2010s, he got an awful idea in his head when releasing Songs of Innocence.
The album was one of the first records in a while that saw the band getting back to basics, and it even had a few songs that seemed to call back to their earlier sound, but the hype would be dead the minute that they announced it.
The idea of the band giving away the album for free made a lot of sense, but the idea of force-feeding it to every Apple user was enough to piss off everyone before they even heard a note of music. But before everyone started to complain about having an album they didn’t want, there’s a universe where I could almost see this working.
After all, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails had been giving away albums for free over the past few years, and U2 seemed to be the kind of band that would try something like that. The only difference here is that Bono didn’t ask us if we wanted to hear it or not; we had to log on that morning and accept the album just like the good little sheep that we were, and be grateful that U2 blessed us with another album.
Which is a shame because when you break it down, Songs of Innocence is actually pretty good. Coming off songs like ‘Get On Your Boots’ in the late 2000s, this was the first time that the band started to actually talk about their feelings and pull from personal experiences to get a lot of their songs out. It sounded like a breath of fresh air, but something must have fucked up the formula the minute that everyone started complaining.
Bono was at least brave enough to take ownership of the whole debacle, but that wasn’t enough to save the next few records. Songs of Experience felt like they had taken all the charm from this record and sucked it dry, and even when they closed out everything with Songs of Surrender, they started to sound like a husk of what they once were when they started making the coffee shop versions of their old tunes.
There was nothing wrong with them trying out new technologies, but Songs of Innocence had the kind of rollout that is only reserved for bands that think they are too big to fail. And while U2 did walk away from the record with a hefty payday from Apple, the fact that they could never establish the momentum for the next ten years made everyone realise that they were in way over their heads.
