U2 can't even give it away

Ah, Bono. 

Ah, the other lads in the band. 

What have ye done now?

Like many men, I have a relationship with U2.  As a young man, I bought ‘Rattle and Hum’.  You had to, it was the law, like belonging to the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany but slightly less regrettable.  Achtung Baby was an important album.  It must have been, as I don’t think I bothered to remove it from my CD player for about two years.

Then came the later albums and, even though I am partial to Flood as a producer, the band’s move to megalither status was never quite ironic enough to convince me that U2 had not sold out. 

Then they went so far up their own arse that it needed a prospecting proctologist to locate them, aided by the light that Bono by now thought shone from there, or so we were led to believe.

The sound became less edgy which, given the moniker of their lead guitarist, was ironic.

Then came this.

In an act of stunning philanthropy (unless that’s the one to do with stamp collecting) or, alternatively, the greatest act of piracy since Cap’n ‘Beardless Nancy’ Coot captured an entire Spanish silver fleet at the mouth of the Amazon single-handedly (literally, the left one had been eaten by a shark, instead of the traditional hook, he sported the much more practical, and piratical, corkscrew), U2 gifted their latest album ‘Songs of innocence’, to the nation, or at least that portion of the nation that has iTunes.

I downloaded and listened and it’s not bad.

Some people, however, are not happy.

Presumably some are unhappy because they take the same view of a free U2 album that I took of getting a free ‘Times’ delivered with my groceries whether I wanted it or not; at free, it’s overpriced.

But more were unhappy because this was an affront to their personal space and an assault on their taste and was clogging up their new iPhone with unwanted music.

Finding an album already installed for free on your new iPhone and thinking ‘meh’ rather than ‘woo-hoo’ is, I would contest, one of those ‘first world problems’ that are supposed to exist.  If there is a problem here, it’s twofold.

The first is that anyone who doesn’t like what is essentially a free gift must have a sense of entitlement so vast it has its own gravitational pull.

The second is, if you have just bought a ‘phone that has something installed on it by the manufacturer that you don’t like…then maybe you made a mistake buying an Apple product.

Really.

Because I don’t know if you did any research before you spunked what I’m pretty sure was more than a fiver on your new ‘phone, but Apple, who make the lovely, desirable and apparently bendy iPhone, do have something of a reputation for installing shit on their devices that you need the cyber equivalent of penicillin to shift.

For years, we had Google maps on our iPhones.  Now we have Apple’s own mapping system.  This is because either:

a)    the data that Apple can collect about our roaming habits has to be worth something to somebody; or

b)    Apple have been paid eighty galizzion dollars by the people who make maps to make paper maps relevant again by making a mapping app so unreliable, you’d be better off packing a sextant and a compass than an iPhone if considering a trip.

All in all, U2 did a good thing in a cruel world.  The album is good (the best for a whole actually, maybe because it was free, maybe not, but what the hell) and the intention was too.

As for those who complained..the Department of Homeland Security thanks you for your feedback on what happens when you overtly install benign compulsory technology on a device that can track your movements and monitor your calls, txt messages and e mails.  And that, Congressmen, is why we install monitoring software, in all ‘phones, covertly.

Oh come on, why else do you think your brand new ‘phone comes out of the box with 0.4GB memory already used?

I look for forward to songs of experience.