Miami New Times: Millenials Don't Give a Shit About U2

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Millennials Don't Give a Shit About U2 | Miami New Times

U2 Just Wasn't Made for These Times


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When it comes to the tastes and inclinations of millennials, a few axioms are unimpeachably true. They love avocados and the dog Snapchat filter. They reject the concept of napkins and are reluctant to buy homes, possibly because their budgets are only big enough to account for avocados. They love sharing about politics on social media, whether it be expressing their profound distaste for the commander-in-chief or posting poorly drawn frogs.

Musically, it's harder to ascribe a firm identity to millennials. With the rise of the internet and the popularization of discussion forums, musical identity markers have become blurry. Unlike their parents and grandparents, whose limited budgets and geographic distance fostered narrow musical tastes, millennials have the totality of music history at their fingertips, ready to be streamed and devoured for next to nothing. It's not at all uncommon for a young person who loves house music to admit to an equal fondness for punk.

But there is one truth that binds millennials. It does so silently, widely understood but rarely discussed, implied by its very absence from conversations about great music:

Most millennials don't give a shit about U2.

As Bono and company make their way around the world in support of The Joshua Tree's 30th anniversary, there's been some hand-wringing over what it means to be U2 in the time of Trump. For good or for ill, U2 became one of the most public faces of the post-Cold War, pre-9/11 optimism that pervaded the late '80s and '90s. Between the bandmates' well-documented charity, world-unifying anthems, and bombastic live shows, they managed to convince a significant portion of their audience — and possibly themselves — that war really was over if we wanted it. Even when they forced audiences to confront horrors like the Bosnian genocide during their 1992-93 Zoo TV Tour, the implacable optimism at the heart of U2's ethos shone through. They told us that rock 'n' roll could, and no doubt would, change the world.

It Didn't.

Decades removed from the height of the band's popularity, U2's music now rings as nostalgic rather than progressive. It's aspirational music from an aspirational time. For those who came of age in the '80s and '90s, the Edge's soaring guitar work and Bono's plaintive vocals come across as, to crib the title of their most recent record, songs of innocence.

For the baby boomers and Gen X'ers who haven't allowed the unkept promises of the new millennium to retroactively spoil their youth, U2, both live and on record, remains a thrilling proposition. But for the millennials who grew up in the shadow between the idea and the reality, it's difficult to separate the band's saccharinely sincere vision of a better tomorrow — and the disappointment that ensued — from any merits the music might otherwise possess.

It's not hard to see why. Ignoring the perpetual warfare, breakdown of effective governance, and economic contractions that have characterized the 2000s, American millennials grew up with popular music that eschewed the globally conscious ambitions of U2. Music of the '00s was more personal, and some would argue more honest, material. Millennials were reared on the introspective angst of grunge's tail end, the carefree abandon of Britpop, the excess and social indignation of rap, and the communal hedonism of electronic music.

And it's tough to reconcile U2's vaguely socialist sentiments with Bono mugging it up with the likes of eternal war criminal George W. Bush. Bono's assertion that "commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid" is unlikely to play well with the Bernie Sanders crowd. It's tough to endear people to your fight when you embrace the very thing you're fighting against. Besides, the prospect of relating to an Irishman singing about the plight of Martin Luther King Jr. today qualifies as problematic.

Also not helping matters: the 2014 incident in which U2's Songs of Innocence was automatically downloaded to all iTunes users' accounts. Many millennials never forgave U2 for violating their carefully curated music libraries; the incident, for many, marks the beginning and end of their familiarity with the group. That might have been the last straw for young people who, in their rejection of the status quo, had already begun to prefer more iconoclastic figures of rock and pop, artists such as David Bowie, Ian Curtis, and Prince. Nothing screams "establishment" quite as loudly as teaming up with the real-world equivalent of Skynet for an album release.

But beneath the decades' worth of baggage and occasionally questionable musical and aesthetic choices, there's a lot worth loving about U2. Before it became a contrived and forced liability, U2's earnestness was its greatest asset, and there are stretches of Boy and War that still sound as riveting in their convictions as they did in the '80s. When the band sticks to subject matter close to its members' hearts — "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and the entirety of Boy come to mind — instead of vague, generalized platitudes about love, the music thrives and resonates. Zooropa, release in 1993 and once regarded as a confused, middling effort, has aged well precisely because it makes a genuine attempt at grappling with the propagation of consumer culture and media saturation. And although it's rhetorically risky to use "cool" and "U2" in the same sentence, there's something undeniably ballsy about a stadium-rock outfit releasing a pleasant Kraftwerk cover alongside a track as big and vacuous as "Vertigo."

Even with a co-sign from rap wunderkind Kendrick Lamar and producer Mike Will Made-It, the possibility of a U2 millennial revival remains a distant possibility, contingent upon a generation collectively deciding to dismount from its musical high horse and embrace the band's unironic sincerity and pomp. Or humanity could just get its act together and become the global utopia the band has been working toward for the better part of four decades, whichever one comes first. How long must they sing this song?

U2: The Joshua Tree Tour 2017
7 p.m. Sunday, June 11, at Hard Rock Stadium, 347 Don Shula Dr., Miami Gardens; 888-346-7849; livenation.com. Resale tickets cost $112 to $2,286 via ticketmaster.com.
 
Oh good, I hadn't seen an article about millennials and avocados for the last five minutes.
 
LOL. Millenials hate U2. This old rock band is so out of touch, no one wants to listen to them spew on about hope and big ideas when they know Bernie Sanders is the only one that can do that.
And getting a free album from Apple was a major trigger that had them running for their safe spaces for months. So NO ONE is interested BONO!

In conclusion, U2 will be playing a sold out show to 70,000 people on Sunday.
 
My daughter is a millennial. She loves the Joshua Tree.

I should write an article entitled "Millennials Love Joshua Tree" and use quotes from her.
 
I'm a millennial and I love U2. It makes sense that many of my generation wouldn't care about U2 - the long gap between Zooropa and Pop meant that their musical tastes were being formed in U2's absence. The first U2 they'd have known was Pop, but I knew older people who got me into them during Zoo TV, so I knew Peak U2. I also remember the JT/R&H hits from when I was a kid. So there's that. It's basically luck that would have led an older millennial to U2 though.

It's hard for me to understand people who only lived with U2 post-Pop, or even worse: ATYCLB era. They never knew U2 as a great band, only as a band that had supposedly been great in the past. I can't imagine why someone born in 1990 would think that U2 are anything but lame - they'd have been 14 when Vertigo came out and 19 when NLOTH came out. They saw the work for what it was, not through the forgiving lens of "Well they made Achtung Baby!"
 
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I'm also a millennial, but I agree that they don't care about U2. That's fine, it's good being different from the rest of the crowd!
 
In other news, who cares? My girlfriend is a millennial and doesn't know shit all about U2 (but doesn't mind learning more about them) and I'm practically a millennial and I'm a nutter about U2. She's all over The Joshua Tree at the moment. I'm looking forward to bringing her the 90s including OS1.

So......who gives a shit what someone else thinks about something entirely objective?
 
LOL. Millenials hate U2. This old rock band is so out of touch, no one wants to listen to them spew on about hope and big ideas when they know Bernie Sanders is the only one that can do that.
And getting a free album from Apple was a major trigger that had them running for their safe spaces for months. So NO ONE is interested BONO!

In conclusion, U2 will be playing a sold out show to 70,000 people on Sunday.

:lol:
 
I'm 22 and I love U2, at this point I could care less what other people think about them. That Kendrick collaboration did make them more relevant and improved peoples' opinions of them, that's for sure.
 
Did a quick Google search and none of the charts are really consistent; what is the age group that you all generally define 'millennial'?
 
Did a quick Google search and none of the charts are really consistent; what is the age group that you all generally define 'millennial'?

The guy that wrote this article, Zach Schlein, is 23, so born in 1994. The same age as Ariana Grande. So he has no memory of the 80s and very little memory of the 90s. He describes those times as being bright and full of hope without problems and U2 singing about "utopia"? I don't think many people would describe the state of the world as being some utopia in the 1980s. The world was much less developed with greater levels of poverty back then. Much of the world was locked in a cold war confrontation with multiple proxy hot wars breaking out from time to time. There were nearly 80,000 nuclear weapons just between the Soviet Union and the United States back in 1985. Europe, Germany itself were divided with large military alliances facing each other. I could go on, but the idea that today is a more dire situation and there for young people can't relate to U2 is absurd. U2 were not singing about utopia. They often sang about issues and struggles that people and the world were dealing with.

The guy that wrote this article was only 10 when Vertigo was released. I guess I should be glad this guy even knows U2 exist and cared enough to write a news article about them. From what I read though, he needs a few review lessons on U2's music and the history of the late 20th century.
 
Also a millennial, I stopped reading the article as soon as he mentioned avocados and snapchat because I'm so fucking sick of that stupid unfunny bullshit, but it's absolutely true, but that's hardly news, and not a revolutionary opinion to have. They're all nearly 60, have been going since 1980, of course millennials don't fucking care. :shrug:
 
The guy that wrote this article, Zach Schlein, is 23, so born in 1994. The same age as Ariana Grande. So he has no memory of the 80s and very little memory of the 90s. He describes those times as being bright and full of hope without problems and U2 singing about "utopia"? I don't think many people would describe the state of the world as being some utopia in the 1980s. The world was much less developed with greater levels of poverty back then. Much of the world was locked in a cold war confrontation with multiple proxy hot wars breaking out from time to time. There were nearly 80,000 nuclear weapons just between the Soviet Union and the United States back in 1985. Europe, Germany itself were divided with large military alliances facing each other. I could go on, but the idea that today is a more dire situation and there for young people can't relate to U2 is absurd. U2 were not singing about utopia. They often sang about issues and struggles that people and the world were dealing with.

The guy that wrote this article was only 10 when Vertigo was released. I guess I should be glad this guy even knows U2 exist and cared enough to write a news article about them. From what I read though, he needs a few review lessons on U2's music and the history of the late 20th century.



Bright and full of hope? :lol: Maybe this "author" is Izzy or Nick? Maybe that's why they can't understand the parallel between then and now?

Wow, just wow...
 
Also a millennial, I stopped reading the article as soon as he mentioned avocados and snapchat because I'm so fucking sick of that stupid unfunny bullshit, but it's absolutely true, but that's hardly news, and not a revolutionary opinion to have. They're all nearly 60, have been going since 1980, of course millennials don't fucking care. :shrug:

But the writer suggest its not because of the bands age, but because of their music and how millennials can't relate to it because of the much tougher world they live in compared to the late 20th century, allegedly.

He mentions that they do like Bowie, Prince and Ian Curtis, but I don't see any evidence that those artist are any more popular with millennials than U2 would be.
 
I'm sure millennials have some 80s U2 in their vinyl collection.

I do, honestly.

I've been trying to get some of my fans into U2 recently. You have to be kinda cautious about it, but I do believe with the proper recommendations you can make it happen for the right people. We'll see if it works.
 
When I'm at the packed Miami show -- the show that sold out in one day -- I'll keep this article in mind.
 


This conversation happens with every generation. I try not to get too involved with it, as I find myself sounding like my parents haha (I'm 37).

But this video, so full of smug haha. I'm actually cool with some of it, but for me the way it's presented just comes off like shit.
 
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