Remember that one album that got onto your iPhone without your permission?

It turns ten today! So let's talk about it.

This is Ottavia Paluch and you, too, are reading Things You Otter Know. When I think of the guy from U2, the first thing I think of is this:

That’s Bono kneeling at the end of a legendary performance of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” U2’s first hit. And what makes it so legendary is it comes from one of the band’s most legendary performances in their close-to-50 year career: June 5, 1983, at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.

Red Rocks became the storied venue that it is today quite literally because of this show. I gotta set the scene for you. It’s pouring rain, and so U2’s openers skip out on their sets, and so half the people who bought tickets don’t even show up,. But U2 decides to go on anyway out of sheer badassery. And also because they themselves (along with a little help from Island Records, their label) had paid for it to be filmed.

Of course, they ended up kicking total ass, completely on their A game (their ‘U’ game?) showing the world why they were and continue to be one of the premiere live acts in rock or any genre altogether.

Bono is especially magnetic in that clip of “Sunday”. He has the audience in the palm of his hand. He desperately wants them to know how he feels about the state of the world and the power of music. He’s bouncing around, despite the weather, waving a giant white flag during the breakdown, making big grand Bono gestures. Also shouting into his mic because he still hadn’t truly figured out how to truly sing yet. But no matter! He is gonna give this song his all. He knows this is the part of the show people are going to see the most.

That image of him on one knee, completely spent, has always felt incredibly iconic to me. And also unique—it’s not the kind of photo you think of when you think of him. No glasses, no peace signs, just totally surrendering himself to the crowd and to the music and the message of it. That surrender turned millions of people into U2 fans, myself included. At their best they were all the things that that photo exemplifies: raw, real, pretension-free. Unfortunately, this version of U2 could and did not last forever.

Ten years ago today, U2 popped into an Apple keynote to perform a song called “The Miracle of Joey Ramone”. It’s ok. It’s no “I Will Follow,” though.

Then Bono walked over to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the two of them did that incredibly strange handshake gesture thing you see above, and then Cook announced that U2 was releasing a new album, and it would be added to everyone’s iTunes libraries for free.

At the time, 500 million people had iTunes accounts. Were there really 500 million U2 fans out there? Bono sure seemed to think so!

Do you remember seeing Songs of Innocence in your iTunes account for the first time?

Were you pissed?

I remember ages ago my dad was showing me some of the old tech stuff collecting dust in a drawer. A camcorder or two. Couple Blackberrys. And an iPhone 5, which he said was a great device, “except they gave me that U2 album no one wanted.”

I can’t seem to recall if I had an iTunes account in 2014. I wouldn’t be using Spotify for another year. But I remember when this happened. It wasn’t my first interaction with the band—I knew half of the Joshua Tree by heart since my dad was also a big 80s music geek—but I remember the news being plastered on every news site known to humankind. I was already big on Twitter, and I remember seeing it there, too, along with an incredibly large amount of hate tweets towards the band.

People. Were. Pissed.

Many called it spam, junk mail, an invasion of privacy, and many other words that I cannot say publicly. They were trying to get rid of the album from their libraries but Apple made it basically impossible? And then the backlash got SO loud and SO widespread that Apple had to create a dedicated page on their website to show them how to get rid of it???

The whole thing is kinda hysterical when you think about it. It was the worst music-PR move in a decade, and yet at the same time U2 got the last laugh for two reasons:

1. We live in the streaming era of music—an era in which albums appear on your phone ALL THE TIME. You think the stuff in your music library is

2. It was the worst music PR disaster of the decade, and yet you probably forgot it even happened, and U2 is still fat and happy doing fancy schamncy Sphere residencies in Vegas.

And you know what’s even funnier? If I held a gun to your head, would you be able to hum one chorus from even one song on Songs of Innocence? Hell no!!

Like, I’m not gonna bore you with a thousand-word retrospective on the album itself, because neither of us care about the actual songs on Songs of Innocence. I had a massive U2 phase in grades 9 and 10, and even I don’t care about those songs. I can tolerate “Song for Someone” and “Every Breaking Wave” but that’s about it.

I can go further! Songs of Innocence doesn’t sound like U2. There is more Edge-like guitar on friggin 1989 than there is on Songs of Innocence. This band hasn’t released a good album in almost 25 years. TWENTY. FIVE. If you’re going to put an album on everyone’s phones, don’t make it a godawful one.

Anyways. The whole thing was stupid and Bono was stupid. He was the brains behind this operation and admitted as much in the memoir he released last year. (He also apologized for the whole debacle in that memoir, but it came nine years too late.) His ego has grown so large, his glasses so blinding, that he to this day continues to be completely oblivious of the fact that it’s not 2000 anymore, and it’s most def not 1987 anymore, and moves like this are total proof of that. That desire to connect that he had at Red Rocks in 1983 is gone. Long gone. And when he dies—not too far away, eh, the guy’s already in his 60s—that’s the Bono I’m gonna eulogize. The guy that got me through high school, the guy who could sing his face off about how he can’t find what he’s looking for. Not the money-hungry, blood-sucking weasel he is now. Screw that guy.