Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune music critic, has conducted an interview with U2’s Bono that touches on the subjects of Apple, iPod, and Steve Jobs:
Kot: Why is the idea of associating a song with a product a good idea?
Bono: I accept that that is alarming. I really do. Our being on TV, I don’t have a problem with that — we should be on TV. But OK, associating our music with a product. You’ve got to deal with the devil. Let’s have a look. The devil here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful object art in music culture since the electric guitar. That’s the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away. Everywhere we look we see ugly cars, ugly buildings… you see ugly objects in the work place. Everywhere. And these people are making beautiful objects… Selling out is doing something you don’t really want to do for money. That’s what selling out is. We asked to be in the ad.
Kot: “Vertigo” is an iPod commercial, not a single on an album.
Bono: Sometimes I’ve seen a great song ruined by a bad video. Rarely. It doesn’t bother me. If I love the song, I love the song. We looked at the iPod commercial as a rock video. We chose the director. We thought how are we going to get our single off in the days when rock music is niche? When it’s unlikely to get a three-minute punk-rock song on top of the radio? So we piggy-backed this phenomenon to get ourselves to a new younger audience, and we succeeded. And it’s exciting. I’m proud of the commercial, I’m proud of the association… “Vertigo,” which you didn’t like, is deceptively simple. That riff, you can think, “Aw yeah, another rock song.” It doesn’t become great the first time you hear it. It becomes great the thousandth time you hear it. And that’s true of a lot of rock riffs. So we have to get the density of exposure for that to be a hit. And we knew that.
Full article with much more here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bono’s right. “Vertigo” gets better each time you hear it and U2 did the iPod ad right.
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