It would be gatekeeping if it was some flashy new upstart band of twenty-somethings. U2 has been around for about 900 years now. This is "old guy lamenting what the other old guys have done" which is something we need more of in general.
> This is "old guy lamenting what the other old guys have done" which is something we need more of in general.
Why do we need more of this? There's literally no shortage of it -- an eternal firehose of this sort of content in all actuality. We could do one of those listicles where someone takes a headline like "no one wants to work anymore" and posts examples of it going back to the invention of the printing press.
Cool. Glad you're more tuned into that cohort's capacity for reflection. I don't seek it out, so what I see is usually more of the "old guy lamenting what younger people do" variety. But that's great. Sorry you read too much of it. Maybe take a break?
I don't think they broke up, just that Dave Brockie / Oderus Urungus kicked the bucket.
I remember really missing the cultural impact of GWAR in 2016.
Edit to add: they're currently on tour! There are no more members left from the original lineup, but the original Jizmak da Gusha, the current Balsac the Jaws of Death, and the current Beefcake the Mighty have held such considerable tenure that they establish a strong persistent core.
The whole concept of music as a visual medium is rather limiting. MTV was fucking awesome for little while, then it became entirely routine with maybe one cool new video every couple of months, then it became pretty boring, then it simply stopped showing videos because nobody cared anymore.
There’s an interesting case study here. Most Indian pop music comes from movies so nearly every popular song comes with a music video at no cost. It would be interesting to see what the breakdown of people who watch the music videos vs only listen to audio is.
Is that really down to the medium? I thought rights issues of music videos meant they preferred cheap content they totally owned. I.e. Beavis and Butthead couldn't release complete DVDs with videos implying MTV was excluded from revenue streams until they made non-music video shows.
What could be cheaper than broadcasting content that other people produced, at zero cost to you? Problem is, just showing videos back to back like a radio station doesn't equal ratings, and no ratings means no advertising revenue.
They were addicted to the big budget videos and glorifying production costs at a time when special effects were still very expensive, but the benefit to doing that was inherently dropping since any artist that could expect millions more in increasingly cheaper CD sales had alternatives to an expensive Ad/giveaway.
That doesn't answer any question for me of whether the video medium was good or bad, clearly MTV's monopoly meant the only way to release videos was an economical disaster.
Are there many 10000+ person shows where you don't wind up watching the screen rather than the band? I'd rather everyone just accept the draw for a show of that size is a combo of the set and the potential mass hysteria of a load of fans packed into the one space than anything else.
At most professional sports games or concerts, at least in North America, most of the audience is staring at the Jumbotron or their phone anyways.
If there’s a half second break in play or downtime some wacky in-game entertainment like keep your eye on the shell under the hat or guess as many items that do X in 15 seconds to win 0.50$ off 45$ concessions.
I was hugely skeptical of the sphere after its whopping 2+ billion dollar cost but it looks like an incredible, unique experience.
These venues will probably only ever be in destination locations, and this is really already what the modern venue experience is, just on what a couple billion dollars gets you.
If people hate it there is probably a million run down theaters or grass fields patrons can go enjoy instead.
> Sadly, photorealistic avatars will be the future of music too. Did you know ABBA is on a (virtual) tour called Voyage? Since launching in May 2022, the show has sold 99% of seats and makes $2M a week. And unlike pesky musicians, virtual avatars never age and can play anywhere/anytime without requiring amphetamines or someone removing the brown M&Ms from a bowl backstage. So get ready for more Metaverse-chorus-verse performances moving forward.
No, not at all; this is about real performers, still performing "live" (i.e. doing a performance each night that people hear as it is performed, with live sound engineering, unscripted elements, etc) — but without the performers and crew having to live together in a tour bus 22 hours a day for months in order to do a tour.
When you think about it, it's pretty weird that there is this expectation of musicians going "on tour" for nearly an entire year at a time, hitting every major city on a continent during each tour, and then doing it all again one or two years later. We don't expect e.g. musical theatre troupes to tour like that. Theatre troupes might sometimes visit select places, sure — but if you live in most parts of the world, if you want to see a stage production, you are going to be the one getting on a flight to go to where that production "lives" (and serves, most of the time, as an attraction for the city the actors live and work in!)
I said that we don't make them tour. They can do so if they want, but they don't have to do so to run a profitable show, and so they don't have to run themselves ragged doing it. They can just tour for short bursts when they're all feeling up to it, visiting only large cities where it makes sense, staying long enough at each city to treat the place as a short vacation, and taking a long break after the tour before the next one.
The issue is that if a Broadway show loses a cast member for whatever reason they cast another one. A band can't exactly do that. If the criteria were 'play the songs written by X by the most talented people available' then I am sure that (barring IP issues) you could set that up in a major city for a weekly seasonal show, but since people want to see the original band members, that isn't what we get.
I agree with the author but he forgot to mention that being forced to endure U2 in order to enjoy a cool piece of technology is both the nightmare past and future of music.
Everyone rags on nickleback, but at least they never changed their sound really, and still sound like a 5 cent Creed cover band, U2 was amazing until they weren't, and they'll probably never get back to their roots where they can actually make real music.
Some artists are there just to play some great music, and some of them are there to put on a show. There are some artists that I don't really listen to day to day, but that I would love to see live because they are known for their live acts. In fact, there are some musical acts that simply don't translate to recordings, check out Itchy-O for another example.
While this was entertaining to read, it is obviously clickbait and full of contradictions.
If it were for author, electronic guitar should not exist. It is a gimmick, and allows too big concerts. Also, how a concert with couple hundred people is even intimate? Also, all concerts need to be intimate, bot possible to have different ones?
Mostly though, article reads like eternal complaints of old people about young people and their tastes.
Btw, people film concerts on phones because they want to have something to remember. I very rarely film short videos myself, and I value it when I check my Instagram stories archive.
I like Tool's concert aesthetic. They have visuals. The vocalist is often in the back with the instrumentalists. They have sort of an anti-LA vibe while being definitely a very Californian band.
Faith No More seems like another anti-rock-cliches rock band (or: alternative).
As for U2: they just seem like the least interesting rock band to me. Like a Foo Fighters with boring syncopation.
I get the angst. There's nostalgia and the evolution of art and culture may seem like a threat or violation towards that nostalgia.
Yet, whenever I read about someone wanting to halt that evolution and freeze culture, it seems indicative of a failure to grasp what culture is. Culture is the evolution, not one state. The concept applies to any kind of culture, not just art.
If we didn't have the capacity to take a step beyond rock concerts, we would've never had the capacity to take a step towards rock concerts in the first place.
Supposedly the sound quality at the Sphere is state of the art too. (Of course, not to mention physically being there which is an intangible that you can't really replicate.)
I had to translate a text for school long time ago. It was in Latin, written thousands of years ago.
It was about an old guy lamenting how young people was crazy and losing the important things in life that his generation enjoyed.
The important genres of music like Jazz or Rock n Roll generated this rejection reaction from older generations, but it looks like Rock n Roll people today have become the elders.
This is just an attempt to polish the gigantic steaming turd that is U2.
Also fuck the sphere things. They’re building one in London. Its a hellscape of light pollution made to take more money off people to fill the pockets of greedy bastards like U2.
Go watch the videos, The Sphere looks incredible. What’s the problem? Go see the band in Brooklyn and get one experience. Go see them in Vegas and get another. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked.
I've seen many clips on social media from the U2 shows, however no instances where the visuals matched, or had any connection to the music. It mostly looked like a giant screensaver. Maybe I missed some highlights?
What's with people (boomers?) obsession with "Rock'n'Roll"?
It seems like there's been a constant conversation over the last 30? years about what is and isn't rock'n'roll. I simply don't understand why people are so focused on some ultra-specific definition of what music is.
Can you just choose to listen to the music you want and choose to go or not go to specific shows?
I don't know if OP is intentionally trying to ragebait readers here or not, but it certainly feels that way.
I get it, you're an old man who is angry that the world isn't the same as when you were 18 and happy.
I read an interview with some aging rock star a few years ago, and the interviewer asked him if he thought that Rock and Roll was dead, and he said yes, because it no longer pisses off your parents when you listen to it.
His response framed rock and roll not as a form of music but as a cultural phenomenon.
(I wish I could remember what youth culture thing kids do to piss off their parents these days but I can’t remember.)
How much edgier can you get than Korn, Limp biscuit, Linkin Park, Metallica, etc... we took heavy and hard to the top of the arc - we left our children with just choosing which music styles of the past they like the best because their parents bested them on edgy music, hehe... in a way its kinda sad. I mean there really isn't anything that can offend xennial parents (millennial/x-gen), we're oblivious to just about everything at this point.
We've grew up watching shows like Growing Pains, Saved By The Bell, and grew to watch things like Shameless, Spartacus, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad. We love shock factor so much, when something should shock us, we're often oblivious to it.
I wonder if parents always hated the music of their kids, even before modern eras. 1920s? 1800s? 1700s?
The other factor is that a lot of the hate for music was religion based and many now aren't religious anymore, so that's a non-factor. Take the case of Twisted Sister vs Tipper Gore for example lol.
It's not that you can't possibly get any more edgy than that, there's just no demand for it anymore due the rise of safe space / political correctness movements. Though you could still anger your parents by listening to LGBT themed music if they're on the conservative side.
I read the same article and connected with it, not anti tech, but pro human! Rock and Roll was a revolution, a break from the conservative norms, a rebellion of sexual expressive energy that came with a musical style! Let’s not loose that spirit for digital drab which I feel is what the author was addressing.
I'm not sure that we boomers are crazier than anyone else, but there are enough of us that our voices carry. Musical snobbery has a long history, I think. As for rock-and-roll, it was a force, but it was far from the only thing going in popular music during the boomers' adolescence. This may have created anxieties for those who knew they were supposed to like the Stones (and did), but who also knew they were not supposed to like the Carpenters (but did). And there were the journalists who seemed to want to rule anything but rock out of the popular music world, so helping to feed the anxiety.
