Bono has said that music has “gotten very girly”. Interviewed for Rolling Stone magazine, the U2 singer added, “there are some good things about that, but hip-hop is the only place for young male anger at the moment – and that’s not good”.
He went on to explain: “When I was 16, I had a lot of anger in me. You need to find a place for it and for guitars.”
Bemoaning a dearth of rock’n’roll in the charts, he said: “The moment something becomes preserved, it is fucking over. You might as well put it in formaldehyde. In the end, what is rock’n’roll? Rage is at the heart of it. Some great rock’n’roll tends to have that, which is why the Who were such a great band. Or Pearl Jam. Eddie has that rage.”
U2’s latest album, Songs of Experience, recently topped the US charts, meaning the band have had a No 1 album in the US in every decade since the 1980s.
Bono cited streaming as a factor in the supposed feminisation of music. “Right now, streaming is on the ad-based model,” he told Rolling Stone. “And that is very, very young, and it’s very, very pop. It’s dominated by frequency of plays, but that is not actually a measure of the weight of an artist ... If you are a teenager and you are listening to whatever the pop act is, you’re probably listening to them 100 times a day. It’s a teenage crush, but in a year’s time you won’t care about that.”
The singer predicted that ultimately it was the artists that could get people to sign up to subscription services that would benefit. “When you move from an ad-based model to a subscription model, a funny thing happens. Then, the artist who will make you sign up is actually more valuable ... artists that have a connection with you and your life, you pay for the subscription service.”
The singer also suggested that the more widespread adoption of streaming had changed the band’s approach to music: “We’re back to the 50s now, where the focus is on songs rather than albums. U2 make albums, so how do we survive? By making the songs better.”
At least one social media user, though, had a suggestion for how Bono could put the anger back into music, referencing U2’s controversial promotional automatic album download campaign with Apple in 2014:
If Bono thinks there isn't enough anger in music, he should just get Apple to automatically add a new U2 album to all our iPhones without anyone asking for it again.
— Vicarious Dave (@GoldenVision90) December 28, 2017