This week’s song is Prawn’s First As Tragedy, Second As Farce.
I don’t like people playing on my phone.
That’s an allusion to an old Dave Chappelle skit. It’s really dumb, but in all honesty – I don’t like people playing on my phone.
When I woke up to a brand new, awful U2 album ambitiously squatting on my iPhone (I took these photos after the fact. Don’t worry about the timestamp,) I did my damndest to remove the nuisance. It wouldn’t go anywhere.
Swiped left… nothing. Swiped left… nothing.
Remembering albums won’t delete in full on iOS7, I tapped the artist name, tapped the album, and navigated to individual songs.
Swiped left… nothing. Wait, what the hell? A little cloud with an arrow on it? I tapped it. Oops. Incoming U2. The most overrated band in the history of the world was downloading with supreme gusto, invading my phone storage and hurting my moral sensibilities. I panicked and hit every neon cloud I could see to stop the download. I succeeded and promptly vented my rage to Twitter.
I spent the next hour Googling possible solutions to the problem and eventually found that toggling off the “show all music” option in my music settings made the offensive album go away, however superficially.
Apple pushed that album to our phones – it bought us a gift. I despaired at seeing it, and now I make fun of it at every opportunity. (First as tragedy, second as farce. This is why I picked the song above, by the way.)
So what went wrong?
Well, I hate U2. I don’t care for a single song. The Edge is boring. Bono makes my stomach turn, leather pants and all.
I have an image to uphold. I can’t have a U2 album in my damned hip-ass music library. It sticks out like a pair of dad jeans in my dresser or old New Balances on my shoe rack. Apple did me a favour in the way an out-of-touch grandparent would, giving me a size XL Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt “just because”. You appreciate it because hey, they’re family, but man that gift sucks.
I’m not the only one who was irritated by this whole thing. Within days Apple had released an app or a tool or something that allowed people to completely nuke the album from their system. Scorched Bono earth. Luckily for them the backlash from the invasion was drowned out in people gushing over the iPhone 6 and its behemoth cousin the iPhone 6 Plus. (Speaking of which, I had a chance to see the thing in real life this weekend – it’s way too big. Huge.)
I’m 100 per cent sure Bono thought he was doing the world a favour, so I don’t blame him. He probably convinced the marketing execs at Apple, too, with all the enthusiasm and skill of a young Harvey Specter.
From a marketing perspective, though, I wonder if Apple just missed that it could be seen as downright creepy and offensive that they’d reach the long branch of the tree into our phones and presumptively plant a proverbial apple seed. Apple helping themselves to our libraries, however *ahem* altruistic, really shocked us into realizing that we don’t actually own these devices as much as we think we do.
It’s also a huge mistake to think anyone younger than 30 will like U2.
Anyway, the lessons here, as far as I can tell:
- Apple – know your audience before spending millions of dollars on something nobody asked for. You made an ASS out of U and ME. At least Bono’s happy… oh wait. No he’s not. And we’re all “haters”.
- Apple users – Try as you might, you can never fully eradicate U2. You can, however, hide them behind a curtain or wait for Apple to gently escort them out of the room.
jacob's tea 
