The Million-Selling Mistake

Bono’s admission to the Associated Press over the weekend that U2’s ‘No Line On The Horizon’ has been a disappointment sales-wise – it’s shifted a million copies since its release in March, less than a third of ‘04’s ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’ – might be mistaken as the Great Ego showing some modesty and accepting it wasn’t very good, but then you realise he’s actually blaming it on us for being pop-fed simpletons instead. “We felt that the ‘album’ is almost an extinct species – I suppose we’ve made a work that is a bit challenging for people who have grown up on a diet of pop stars,” said the massive chieftain, inserting one of his trademark dunstable cliches into a sentence that finishes with him sounding like a losing contestant on Are You Smarter Than A Ten-Year Old?

It’s been a mixed year for Bono, The Edge and the other two with normal names; in the context of record sales in 2009 (i.e no-one’s buying any), shifting a million of a very average album can’t be sniffed it. Unless you put it against their back catalogue, of course, where sales of ‘No Line…’ start to look decidedly wayward. Especially when you consider that their previous million-selling misstep was ‘Pop’ – their experimental mid-nineties album that was only experimental because it tried to make a whole record out of two good songs – and ‘No Line…’, try as Bono might to paint it as what he’d probably call “a deep sea theatre-play of the album as an artform”, is not. It’s U2 doing what U2 used to do best; straight-ahead, clumsy-chorused stadium-rock. ‘Passengers’ it ain’t. And that’s probably why it’s perturbing Sir Nobhead so much – this was meant to be a relatively easy, more-of-the-same comeback – do his comments have something to do with a cottoning onto the fact that, fucking finally, the public have had enough of him? That would certainly make sense – and be backed up with coupling ‘No Line…’’s sales with the U2-fronted Q cover that was apparently Q’s worst-ever selling issue earlier this year. Sobering stuff, especially when you consider it came out the month after the one with Johnny Borrell on the cover.

Course, no matter how much I’d love to pretend in this blog that U2 are on their way down, despite all this they’re still monstrously massive, their 360 thingy world tour taking in the likes of Wembley Stadium rather than The Dog & Bollock. Perhaps, though, rather than being the prefab pop-loving munchkins Bono’s presenting them as, the record-buying public are recognising that, if all the U2s, R.E.Ms and – it’s still amazing to think they belong in this sentence – Snow Patrols of this world are gonna do is keep releasing the same old shit, a verse swapped here, a chorus there, a lyric there, then they wanna go and find something new for themselves. And, hey, if it is something new they’re after, I can recommend just the magazine. YARP.