U2’s Songs of Innocence best when it thinks small
Album’s free release doesn’t mean this rock band is turning its back on the music industry
Wiz Khalifa’s Blacc Hollywood debuted at the top of the American and Canadian album charts late last month with respective first-week sales in those territories of 90,000 and 5,300 copies, according to the official industry scorekeepers at SoundScan.
This is a vital piece of information to keep in mind while processing the “surprise” release of U2’s 13th studio album, Songs of Innocence, free via iTunes on Tuesday.
Outwardly, the Irish quartet’s abandonment of traditional “bricks-and-mortar” delivery methods for its new record — until Oct. 13, anyway, when physical CD and vinyl copies of Songs of Innocence puffed up with a few bonus tracks will land in stores — appears to signify that the self-proclaimed “biggest band in the world” no longer has faith in the tattered remnants of the historic music-industry system.
Look closer, however, and the instant depositing of Songs of Innocence into the iTunes libraries of more than 500 million subscribers yesterday looks more like U2 finding a way to cling to that “biggest band in the world” title by default without bothering with the ugly business of actual Billboard chart statistics.
“It’s the largest album release of all time,” crowed Apple CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday, after U2 had arrived onstage to perform the new tune “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” in Cupertino, Calif., to an unsuspecting techie audience that thought it was merely there for the unveiling of the new iPhone 6 and Apple Watch gadgets.
If the figures aren’t spectacular when paying customers finally have access to hard copies of Songs of Innocencea month from now, no biggie; half a freakin’ billion people already had a crack at it.
Meanwhile, U2 also gets to make some (or more) of the revenue it once might have made from album sales — which went from 25 million worldwide for1987’s The Joshua Tree to an ego-bruising (if hardly insubstantial) five million internationally for 2009’s No Line on the Horizon — in return for ensuring that the iPhone 6 and the iWatch get thou- sands of extra news hits beyond the tech and business press.
“We were paid,” frontman Bono told Time magazine. “I don’t believe in free music. Music is a sacrament.”
To its credit, the grand-gesture-prone U2 hasn’t portrayed Songs of Innocence as a subversive test of a new music-distribution model. It’s just business.
Big business, too; the very fact that Universal Music is allowing Apple to jump on a huge release like this a month ahead of time implies so much cash changing hands behind the scenes between gigantic, multinational corporations that one could easily be forgiven one’s suspicions that all that money eventually winds up in the same place.
But perhaps that’s something to ask Bono, longtime champion of the global underclass, the next time you see him.
In the meantime, what of Songs of Innocence? Is it worth paying for when the opportunity finally arises, or should it be viewed as tacit compensation for the copy of the limp No Line on the Horizon currently gathering dust on your shelves? Aforementioned opener “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” is so polished, forcibly stadium-boisterous in its “Ooh-oh-oh-oh-whoa”-isms and altogether remote from the work of the actual Ramones that it’s almost an insult to its titular hero and “Every Breaking Wave” rides an echo of the “With or Without You” bass line to anodyne nowhereness, but U2 aping Coldplay aping U2 cycles back around in U2’s favour three tunes in on the spryly tuneful “California (There Is No End to Love).” Incidentally, that track shares a quick Brian Wilson reference in the intro with Innocence’s next standout cut, “Iris (Hold Me Close),” a smooth, kinetic thing that weaves and darts towards a slip-sliding chorus beamed straight in from the War era. As it turns out, thinking a bit smaller again, or as small as U2 was capable of thinking during its pre-superstardom years, might be just what the band has needed to regain its postmillennial mojo. Someone second-guessed Danger Mouse’s presence on Songs of Inno- cence, however, and that was a mistake. The Gnarls Barkley/Broken Bells band member and general studio-whiz-for-hire put in a lot of time on this record, but it’s only on the second side where U2 and its handlers resisted the urge to tamper with his vision, and that’s where things get really interesting. A whole album in the mould of the gnawing, synth-slickened “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight” or the sinewy “This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now,” or the soulfully undulating closer “The Troubles” could have been revelatory. Whatever crisis of self-doubt prompted all the tinkering, it’s ultimately to Songs of Innocence’s disadvantage. Hire Danger Mouse back and go for it next time. To hell with gunning for the charts. They’re meaningless now and U2 clearly doesn’t need the money.