When the band played Glastonbury in , protesters turned up to criticise the four-piece moving some of their business affairs from Ireland to the Netherlands to take advantage of tax breaks. Sandro Olivo, who runs the U2 Australia fansite, says no one knows what the band may privately donate to charity. Still, U2 haters will grab any chance to have a pot-shot. It came on a global level in when the band did a deal with Apple that saw their album Songs Of Innocence drop, uninvited, into the iTunes library of million users worldwide.
The release fast became a PR disaster, especially in the age of social media, and led to the company inventing a function to delete the record. They should have given a free voucher people could redeem. It was a very bad PR move. People were getting something for free and they were so angry. The world had gone crazy! The U2 haters have been around for a long time. Unfortunately all the preaching probably overshadows one simple fact — Bono is such a great singer.
Or give Beautiful Day a spin. The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen never cop the same kind of flack. Reaching the pinnacle of any industry will always attract negativity from some quarters. Many people just want their bands to get up and entertain them. Bono would probably agree with those who label him smug, sanctimonious and pompous, according to Olivo.
My take on him is that he would be doing a lot behind the scenes but not wanting the publicity. After all, the fans vote at election time and can actually make a difference. That shift particularly affected the public perception of Bono. The difference is, though, that in , their careers had time to recover through albums that did the necessary damage control; Achtung Baby is so undeniably, earth-shatteringly great that even the biggest Bono haters had to admit that the man knew what he was doing onstage.
This is a struggle that all aging bands face, where what was once cool starts to lose its luster as those who used to play your favorite songs start to wither before you, as in the case of Aerosmith or REO Speedwagon, the latter relegated to state fairs. Bono has spent the last three and a half decades trying to get everyone to like him, but the greatest PR coup he could ever pull is to finally stop caring.
Times, Advocate, and the Huffington Post. Sticky Header Night Mode. Related Articles. After that I was on the U2 bandwagon for a while. The Joshua Tree carried me through a phase of endless introspection.
I thought Rattle And Hum was a great album and the movie even better. Achtung Baby came at me like a bolt out of the blue, with all its cross dressing and Berlin chic it was right up my alley.
After that, U2 began to wane for me. Bono began to come off like a bit of a twat with all of his fawning over politicians and believing that rock and roll really could change the world. So, what is it that makes U2, and Bono in particular, so on the nose? Plenty of rock stars have overstayed their welcome musically. Hell, most bands never produce anything good after their first record. Take The Strokes for example, they only ever produced one good album, but no one seems to hate them for consistently misfiring on a career that should have been nothing short of stellar.
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