VertigoGal said:
...it's more the people who are fans of indie bands that have a tendancy to start liking them less when they get big! (not the other way around)...I have a friend who doesn't like Green Day anymore because they got too big.
I don't think it's 'big'-ness itself that's a problem for folks like your friend, but rather the effect it has on the range of meanings an artist's work can be understood to have. Remember back during the Yugoslav war, when both pro- and anti- Milosevic demonstrations featured rock bands covering (among others) U2 songs? On the one hand, U2's music was a plea to end the rape, carnage and genocide and fight for peace; on the other, it was a stirring summons to commit all the above (except peace!) in the name of national glory. U2 heard about this and weren't happy, but what could they do? They had no control over how people interpreted their music, especially in a war zone.
That would never have happened to an 'underground' band.
It's an extreme example, of course. But I think it illustrates well how rock music(ians) get(s) bound up in young people's fantasies about 'changing the world'...and how hard it is to cast those fantasies aside and hear it as 'just music.' (In fact, it's impossible to do so--it's like asking what 'really' makes a great novel great, its story or its use of language.) And the larger the audience an artist's music 'speaks to,' the more diverse and contradictory the fantasies it's bound up in will be.
Bono often says that U2 aimed to be 'the biggest band in the world' from the outset, but their pre-JT output (I'm counting tours and public appearances here, as well as albums) really doesn't support that claim very well. A concept album about war with an overtly anti-nuclear, pacifist stance; headlining an Amnesty International tour with a frequently anti-US-government message; a singer who rushed around onstage waving a giant white flag, without the slightest hint of irony: these weren't the sort of things you did in the early '80s if your goal was to top the charts regularly, and not surprisingly, they didn't. U2 were cursed (or blessed, depending on your perspective) with being 'the biggest underground band in the world,' as Rolling Stone called them when reviewing JT.
But precisely
because they held that status, U2 had become a powerful symbol of hope--and resistance--for thousands of (primarily left-leaning) young people in the US and Europe. U2 were the 1980s version of 'the soundtrack for the Revolution'--a 1960s dream about the transformative potential of music that has (sadly) become increasingly untenable and vulnerable to ridicule with each passing decade.
It's no wonder that so many fans who came to love U2 during that period find their nostalgia for it to be a bit painful, laden as it is with the realization that that sense of limitless possiblities for a better world was nothing more than arrogant, youthful naivete. On the other hand, with the memory of
that kind of head rush as a basis for all future comparisons, it has to be said that the 'thrill' of
U2, the Multi-Million-Selling Hit Factory!!! falls rather flat.
Success on the world's terms is nice, but uncompromising rebellion was a lot sexier!
}
Godmother of Punk} Patti Smith {of} the Patti Smith Group-- who WANTED to Be Famous to spread thwey music/her's& their lyrics ..;.she/they were Thrilled when "Because The NIght " was played on WABC Radio {77 AM} which NOT ONLY could be heard in the NYC Tri-state area, but on good cleR NIGHTS COULD SPREAD IT'S SIGNAL ACROSS ABOUT A WHOLE tHRID OF THE USA!
We were all thrilled for them! And though they never 'broke through' again, I've follwed her & them through good times & bad. Probably have since her/them over 30 times since 76 - last year 
The PSG was one of {as most of you know} u2's main young influences.
