Charting the rise and fall of U2
From disastrous documentaries to a polarising frontman, I explore why one of the biggest bands of the 1980s just simply aren't cool anymore.
Once upon a time, there was a four-piece rock band from Ireland called The Hype. They may not have been the most technically proficient group in the world, but they were driven by the do-it-yourself ethos of punk and the unflagging charisma of their frontman, Paul Hewson. Yet nobody called him Paul; after going through a series of nicknames in his childhood, it was ‘Bono’ that stuck. Short for ‘Bono Vox’, the name of an Irish hearing aid store, bonovox in Latin also means ‘good voice’.
The Hype was a name that wouldn’t last for long, either. In 1978, a year after they’d settled on The Hype, the group changed their name to U2. It was a name that, for better or for worse, would become known all around the world when the band cemented themselves as giants in the leagues of rock music.
U2 were one of the biggest bands of the 1980s, and still yet one of the biggest bands in history. Once a cool left-of-centre act championed by the likes of local Irish newspapers and ‘the bible of alternative rock’, Trouser Press magazine, U2’s prominence only escalated with their historic set at Live Aid in 1985. The performance saw the group deliver a mesmerising performance of ‘Bad’, which extended far beyond its typical length when Bono pulled some fans out of a 72,000 person crowd to dance with him. Listed as one The Guardian’s 50 key events in the history of rock music and the moment when U2 became ‘stars’, there was still more to come.
In 1987, the band released The Joshua Tree, their best selling album to date and one of the best selling albums in the world. Having sold over 25 million copies, it’s also included in countless ‘Greatest Albums’ lists from the likes of Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. The singles ‘With or Without You’ and ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ became the group’s only number ones in the USA.
Today, U2 have released 14 studio albums and sold roughly 150-170 million records worldwide. Their songs are staples of classic rock radio and instantly recognisable from the Edge’s distinct shimmery guitar sound. They are synonymous with campaigning for numerous social justice causes. And yet, it’s almost embarrassing to admit that you like them. So what went wrong?
I once read somewhere that U2 were the Coldplay of the eighties. And even though it wasn’t meant in a complimentary way, I could definitely see the parallels. Both had major hits that helped to define the musical landscape of their respective time. Both wrote crowd-pleasing stadium anthems. And both bands had once been considered cool, yet now many just viewed them as insufferable.
It’s this gap in between the ‘cool’ and ‘uncool’ period that intrigues me. How did U2 pull such a complete 180 in the eyes of the public? When did they stop being a band to champion and instead a band to roll your eyes at? My knowledge of U2’s music is a bit hazy beyond the singles, but I liked them enough when I saw them on their Joshua Tree anniversary tour in 2019. I thought their songs were enjoyable and Bono lived up to his reputation as a charismatic entertainer. I didn’t even know that U2 had this whole stigma attached to them at that point.
So it’s from this vantage point as a casual listener that I attempt to deconstruct what happened to U2. I’ve done a bit of digging around, including consulting my father, who, when asked where he would rank himself on the scale of U2 enthusiasm from 1-10 (1 being unable to stand them and 10 being a complete fanboy), would put himself at a 5 or 6. Here’s what I’ve found.
Part One: Rattle and Hum
Following the enormous success of The Joshua Tree, U2 released Rattle and Hum in 1988, a cross between a studio recording and a live album. (The name is derived from the lyric ‘in the locust wind comes a rattle and hum’, from The Joshua Tree song ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’.) An accompanying rockumentary film directed by Phil Joanou was also released that same month.
When I brought up U2’s rise and fall from coolness with my dad, he immediately cited the Rattle and Hum film as one of the reasons they got knocked down a peg.
“I saw it when it came out at the Cremorne Orpheum,” he said. “Parts of it made me cringe.”
Put simply, Rattle and Hum was a failure. The band came across as self-important and pretentious, dripping with overconfidence as they attempted to place themselves within the pantheon of legendary American artists. Perhaps that’s not what they intended, but it’s how it came across.
Many cite the first two seconds of the film as one of its worst moments. Introducing the Beatles song ‘Helter Skelter’ to a live audience, Bono claims: “This song, Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We're stealing it back.”
It’s moments like these - from ‘Helter Skelter’ to the image of Martin Luther King Jr being superimposed over Bono’s face during a performance of ‘MLK’ - that makes the band appear ridiculously arrogant. Do you really think your band is good enough to ‘steal’ a Beatles song from them? Is it even fair to imply that Manson stole the song in the first place? What message does comparing your frontman indirectly to one of the greatest civil rights activists of the 20th century send?
Moreover, their fascination with America doesn’t make much sense either. Here they are, playing with the American greats and covering American classics like ‘All Along The Watchtower’, yet U2 are literally Irish. I consulted the U2 subreddit and found a great explanation from user donsanedrin:
“They're Irish guys. From Ireland. Combined with Sinead O'Connor, they are viewed as quiet, serious types.
And then they start talking about the blues, and singing about the Mississippi Delta, and talking about Elvis and Johnny Cash, and Black Gospel music. It felt like they were putting on an act, like as if they just discovered this stuff a few months ago and are now trying to mimic it.”
During the film when Larry Mullen Jr visits Graceland and talks about his favourite Elvis flicks, it feels less artistic rockumentary and more Spinal Tap. So much of this feels forced and as a result, U2 don’t appear cool. They appear cringeworthy.
This self-indulgence isn’t helped by the fact that the movie attempts to make the band look like rock gods.
“Every shot in this film is so worshipful and reverent, you'd think [Joanou] was trying to film the second coming of Jesus,” says YouTube pop culture reviewer Todd in the Shadows. “...it gets to a point [where] you can't even look at Bono's face without either giggling or wanting to puke.”
To complement the already bombastic levels of reverence that the band received in Rattle and Hum, the film was also treated to enormous Hollywood-scale promotion and production. Everywhere you looked, there was U2. You couldn’t get away.
“All across America for a couple of weeks, you couldn’t turn on your TV without getting U2 in your face,” said the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, in a 1992 Los Angeles Times interview. “That’s not the way records are marketed. It’s much more subtle and I think a lot of the band’s old fans found it distasteful. The aftermath I think, quite honestly, was that no one wanted to hear about U2 for a while.”
One such fan, Marc Porter, who was also interviewed for the same article, puts it succinctly: “It was like they were more interested in being stars than in making music.”
The disaster that was Rattle and Hum forced the band to step back and reassess where they were headed as a group. U2 had lost touch with their audience, who had initially felt drawn to the band because they felt like there was a mutual understanding between musician and listener.
Later, U2 would make an incredible comeback with their 1991 album Achtung Baby. A darker, more introspective affair, it proved that the band were capable of reinventing themselves and their sound. They would similarly win back the affections of their fanbase again in 2000 with their tenth studio release, All That You Can’t Leave Behind. But for many, Rattle and Hum signalled that U2 weren’t the perfect alternative band after all. They were capable of getting too big for their boots, and they had flaws - many of which the film amplified on the big screen.
Part Two: The iTunes Album Debacle
We’re jumping nearly three decades into the future now to 2014, when U2 released their thirteenth studio album Songs of Innocence. The album, described by Bono as “the most personal album we’ve ever written”, is a reflection on the members’ childhoods and adolescence in Ireland. At the time, it was their first studio release in five years.
That same year, Apple had been working on some new products: the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch. After these had been revealed to audiences at a launch event, it was immediately announced that U2’s latest album, Songs of Innocence, was being digitally released to all iTunes customers for free. Subsequently, the album was automatically added to every iTunes user’s library, reaching 33 million people in its first week of release.
The free download for Songs of Innocence was “a gift”, according to Bono. U2 guitarist David ‘Edge’ Evans also commented on the launch, saying it was “actually incredibly subversive. It’s really punk rock, it’s really disruptive.”
But if punk rock is all about sticking it to the man and homegrown authenticity, then U2 were probably about as far away from punk rock as you can get.
The band had reportedly been paid a lump sum by Apple in order to receive a five week window where they could distribute Songs of Innocence. It’s unclear how much, but estimates have put the number somewhere well into the millions. Additionally, the album launch wasn’t U2’s first time working with Apple. Their song ‘Vertigo’, from 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, was used in one of the first iPod advertisements (you know, the ones with the dancing silhouettes). There’s nothing wrong with letting companies use your song, but it’s hard to shake off the ‘corporate sell out’ image that comes along with it. Punk rock indeed.
U2 received an astronomical amount of backlash following the launch for Songs of Innocence. There were many people angry for many different reasons, but the main one was simple: it was incredibly difficult to delete the album from your library if you didn’t want it. Apple received so many complaints that just a week after it had announced its joint ‘gift’ with U2, they were providing instructions on how to give it back.
“We wanted to deliver a pint of milk to people's front porches, but in a few cases it ended up in their fridge, on their cereal,” said Bono in an interview with NPR. “People were like, 'I'm dairy-free.’”
My dad also agrees, albeit having incorrectly remembered the Bono quote: “it was like opening up your fridge to see Bono inside.”
In an article for Wired a week after the launch, Alex Washburn writes:
“"People don't know what they want until you show it to them," Steve Jobs famously said. So, Apple, is the inverse also true? Songs of Innocence is not a well-intentioned gift from a dorky uncle with poor taste, it is another example of how Big Brother can intrude on our lives. It demonstrates the need for transparency in software even to those who are not zealously devoted to the ideals of open source.
…U2′s public image is heavily tied to an aspirational idealism; if any of that were actually true, they'd be appalled by the idea of forcing art down half a billion gullets, would cautiously view it as an omen of an alarming future, perhaps even write a song lamenting it. Then again, maybe chronicling our increasingly concurrent dystopian futures is a job better left to Radiohead.”
Washburn makes a key point: U2’s image is marked by ‘an aspirational idealism’; however, the iTunes debacle just made them look arrogant instead. For many, here was a multi-millionaire, corporate-adjacent (or straight up corporate, depending on who you ask) band generously deigning to give us peasants a free sample of their work. Of course we want U2 in our iTunes library. They are utterly fabulous, after all. Who doesn’t love a bit of U2?
Again, like with Rattle and Hum, the band probably hadn’t intended to come off this way. But the reality was that U2 were seen by most as past their use-by date. They hadn’t put out anything that had come close to capturing the magic of 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind in over a decade. Much of the music-consuming public viewed U2 as irrelevant, and the iTunes album launch as a publicity stunt to get them back in the headlines.
As a result, the almost immediate failure of the album launch made the band easy targets for mockery and criticism. On top of complaints about lack of online privacy or just general derisive sneers towards U2’s arrogance, musicians like Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason argued that the free download ‘devalued’ the music. Similarly, Keith Nelson, the guitarist of rock band Buckcherry commented that U2 had “sent a message to everyone that music is free, and that's disturbing. It's easy to do that when you're a multi-millionaire-billionaire and money isn't really something that you worry about, but when you're a working rock 'n' roll band and you count on every dollar, it's disappointing to see someone do that."
If they were looking for publicity, U2 got it. Bono has since apologised for the iTunes album launch, both in interviews and in his recent memoir Surrender, but this whole affair has undoubtedly had a negative impact on the group’s image. Now they had not only cemented themselves as uncool among generations who were old enough to remember when U2 had been in their prime, but also a new generation of listeners who were growing up on iPods and iPhones and had never heard of the band before. Thanks to this blunder, in their eyes U2 weren’t the band who delivered classic rock hits or gave a breathtaking Live Aid performance. They were the band who had tried to force an album onto the whole world.
Part Three: Bono
Now we come to the Irishman shaped elephant in the room. When I initially considered the topic of why U2 are so uncool and disliked nowadays, the two things that immediately came to mind were the iTunes album launch and the band’s frontman, Bono.
Bono is a controversial public figure. Not because he’s a racist or sexist or anything like that - actually, it’s rather the opposite. The U2 frontman is synonymous with campaigning for social justice causes. He’s incredibly opinionated and has spoken out about everything from world hunger to AIDS awareness. In fact, his endless philanthropic endeavours have given him the nickname ‘Saint Bono’.
Having not grown up in the eighties or nineties, I thought the most egregious crime Bono had committed was a series of questionable hair decisions that all served to reinforce the fact that mullets aren’t for everyone. Other than that, I thought he was a commendable musician with a great deal of charisma. Sure, maybe he overdoes it every now and then, but he knows how to work a crowd.
Truth be told, sometimes I think that when people say they hate U2, what they actually mean is that they hate Bono. To me, he suffers from what I call ‘Phil Collins syndrome’: Bono’s continued omnipresence makes everyone sick of him. No matter where you look, they can’t get away from Saint Bono trying to save the world or giving a speech about the less fortunate - something that Robin Williams himself has poked fun at.
And Bono doesn’t want to disappear, either. He’s everywhere because doesn’t want to shut up - he has ambitions and things to say. That may be fair enough, but it’s then understandable that his constant campaigning and philanthropy makes him insufferable to some. For many, Bono’s crusade comes in two flavours: a wide-eyed naive belief that he himself can change the world, or a pompous, preachy arrogance that comes from being on his soapbox for too long.
While I think that these points are valid, the one I don’t agree with is that Bono is a hypocrite for talking about such issues and then bathing in his millions of dollars of wealth as if someone can no longer speak up about the disadvantaged once they enter a certain tax bracket. Can getting rich make you lose touch with the common man? Absolutely. Should we be trying to amplify the voices of the suffering rather than speaking over them? Definitely. But just because Bono is a multimillionaire doesn’t mean he can’t stop talking about social justice issues - by that logic, all political musicians should be giving up their day job once they get their first paycheck. Bono may be obnoxious sometimes, but it doesn’t mean he’s lost the ability to feel sympathy or empathy for others.
I have seen some of Bono’s speeches though, and although they appear to be coming from a good place, it does sometimes feel a bit cringeworthy (especially some of the ones from Rattle and Hum). Maybe U2 actually consists of five members: the Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr, Bono, and Bono’s ego.
Part Four: Is their music even that good?
When I was fifteen or sixteen, I distinctly remember sitting in my high school library, looking at the autobiography U2 by U2. At the time, I had a mild interest in the band and was curious to learn more. But what sticks out to me within this memory is talking to my history teacher about the book and U2. I can’t remember what I’d said, but I distinctly remember his reply (and I’m quoting directly here): “Well, it’s because they’re shit, aren’t they?”
A lot of people seem to share my history teacher’s sentiment. Many think U2 are a terrible band and that’s why people dislike them. So in writing this analysis, I had to ask myself a very important question - is U2’s music even that good?
This question is flawed for a couple of reasons. One of the sacred pillars of journalism is to never ask closed questions, and technically, this one can be answered with a single yes or no answer. But that brings its second flaw into play: music taste is subjective, and so whether or not you think U2 makes good music is up to you and what you define as ‘good music’.
What can’t be denied, however, is the figures. U2 are one of the best selling artists in the world, have won more Grammy Awards than any other band, and have been featured on countless ‘best of’ lists. Surely they can’t be crap if they’re selling hundreds of millions of records. (That being said, I am immediately then reminded of Rush’s Time Machine sketch where Neil Peart’s character says “what a bunch of crap!” and Geddy Lee’s character replies, “yes, but sometimes, people love crap!”)
I did preface this all by mentioning that I do casually listen to U2. I won’t deny that some of their songs are really enjoyable to listen to, especially ‘Bad’, which I genuinely think is a beautiful song and my favourite U2 track. I also believe there is a reason The Joshua Tree is so lauded. They are a solid rock n’ roll band with well-written lyrics (not counting the “your eyes make a circle” lyric from ‘I Will Follow’ of course, because what the hell, Bono).
On the other hand, while U2 aren’t one-dimensional, I don’t think they’re that far off either. It’s true that during their prime, the Edge’s guitar sound was like no other. It was unusual and distinct. Yet I can’t help but feel that this also gives many U2 songs this sense of ‘sameness’ to them. Recently, I saw a taping of a Bill Bailey show where he joked that U2 were nothing without that guitar sound. “They basically got that one sound, don’t they?” he said. “Some old Celtic bollocks!” It’s quite funny, especially when he does a demonstration of a ‘disastrous technical failure’ at a U2 gig. Yet I don’t think he’s wrong - do U2 really stand up on their own without the Edge’s rig?
Perhaps, perhaps not. There are many factors as to why somebody thinks U2 are a bad band musically. Maybe the music simply isn’t for them. Maybe they do think all their songs sound the same, or maybe they loved U2 in their prime when they were a teenager and can only enjoy U2’s older music because they view it through that lens of teenage nostalgia. But none of these reasons really warrant the level of mockery or embarrassment at someone admitting that they like U2 these days.
It’s generally accepted that U2 had two major comebacks: 1991’s Achtung Baby and 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Post Achtung Baby, the band continued to experiment with their sound and image until they had practically alienated their audience, playing to half-empty stadiums in the US by the late nineties. As such, All That You Can’t Leave Behind was celebrated as a ‘back to basics’ album that returned to the U2 sound people were familiar with.
And since then? Well, since then… there hasn’t really been a U2 album that’s been viewed as particularly groundbreaking, unless you’re a hardcore fan. The Songs of Innocence iTunes debacle only made it worse, because for many, it felt like a bunch of has-beens’ attempt at trying to become relevant again.
How do they stay relevant then, you ask? For all their flaws, U2 are a brilliant live band. Despite being a casual listener I was captivated the entire time I saw them on their Joshua Tree anniversary tour in 2019. They know how to entertain and hold your attention. Most people, myself included, would cite their Live Aid performance as a perfect example of their showmanship. I spoke to my dad the other day about the part where Bono pulls fans out of the crowd:
“It’s mesmerising to watch,” I said. “But a part of me also feels a bit cynical of this whole notion that Bono is ‘connecting with the audience’. It seems a bit, well, I don’t know - inauthentic?”
“Maybe,” he replied. “But the thing is, at that time nothing like that had ever really been done before. It was incredible. If anything, it made me more of a fan. I went out and bought The Unforgettable Fire after I saw that on TV.”
There’s many discussions to be had here that extend beyond the scope of ‘why are U2 uncool now?’. Namely, what happens after a musical artist has peaked? Is it necessarily a bad thing if all your songs sound the same? What actually constitutes good music, or the ability to ‘have’ music cred? Because U2 could be cited in all of these debates. They’re a band that supposedly makes one type of music and haven’t been able to recapture their past successes. Yet I also believe that there are other bands who fit this mould who don’t receive half the vitriol that U2 do. Perhaps that’s where the group’s other offences - Rattle and Hum, the Songs of Innocence iTunes release, the polarising frontman that is Bono - all come in. At least they’re a good live band.
When my dad talked about the notion that U2 are one-dimensional, he said, “U2 are kind of like chocolate or cheese. It’s nice, but you can only eat so much before you feel sick of it and need to have something else.” Maybe that’s what has happened to the global attitude towards U2: we’ve been fed too much chocolate and we want something else. Something new. Or at the very least, something different.