When Our Friends go Electronic

Everyone experiments in their lifetime. This can come in various forms dying your hair, changing your name by deed pole to Ulysses or even a sex change. It just depends on the person. Bizarrely musicians often chose to experiment with their music. It’s the best way to persuade everyone that you are not only versatile, but artistically capable of changing with the times. Obviously this has a habit of becoming tragically embarrassing, leading to decades of decline and ridicule before the band finally accepts defeat and gets back to basics. Lets have a look at much maligned electro efforts from U2, REM and David Bowie.

U2 - POP

U2 make great music but can never be cool. There has always been a bit of the ‘school teachers band’ about them. You can picture it. Bono teaching R.E, Larry computing, Alan maths with The Edge as the slightly slow janitor. Every school disco they get a night away from the wife and get to show the kids how ‘cool’ they can be.

Like most school teacher bands U2 had no idea that what they were about to unleash were not great cool youthful tunes but ammunition for every smart arse, critic and comedian in the vicinity. ‘Holy shit did you see Bono last night, what a state!’

If this had been U2’s second album they would have sunk without trace. Instead it’s become something of an ironic classic. In it isn’t terrible its just a prime example of trying too hard to another audience . An audience sadly which didn’t exist.

REM -UP

Most critics deemed UP an ironic title. One critic ’wittily’ went so far as to say it should have been named ‘Down’ (hilarious eh?). Whilst most big bands went electro due to a fear they were missing out on a youthful dance orientated audience, REM went electro on UP purely because they had to stretch their sound and challenge themselves.

There is no euro dance trite here just slow electronic ballads and mid tempo highbrow pop songs. UP was an album brought about through circumstance (Berry, Had just left them) and some believed it would be the bands last after its mixed reception. Indeed it would be a few years till Reveal was released then Around The Sun. Listening to both of those its hard to believe UP was ever criticised.

I'll stick my neck out here and say UP is REM’s 2nd best album.

David Bowie - Earthling

As a musician Bowie must be one of the most schizophrenic. Prior to Earthling his incarnations had included an alien dressed like Gary Glitter, Goblin King, film noir hard man, festive crooner and mad haired 80’s rocker. Angry jungle/techno/electro pioneer was as much a natural next step as any you might say.

Bowie had already begun to alienate fans with Outside but Earthling is regarded as his all time low. The stomping ‘I’m afraid Of Americans’ almost redeems things, it sounds good . . . until that is Dave decides to whack in the lyrics ’Johnny loves to suck on the cock’. Not that those lyrics are overtly offensive, just out of place. A bit like Tony Blair announcing the shinty scores in the middle of Prime Ministers question time then giving Chancellor Brown a high five when he gets to the Fort William result. You get the rather sad feeling this like U2’s Pop is a pathetic attempt to get in touch with dance music culture. If I could picture Bowie blind drunk, glow stick in hand stumbling around Aberdeen’s Windmill Brae I could almost imagine this is good. But I can’t.

Written By Hammond