UPROXX:

In the press, U2 and Apple were called “inconsiderate,” “kinda creepy,” and “tone-deaf,” and even likened to Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984. Customers complained that uploading Songs Of Innocence was a grievous invasion of privacy. And they were offended that a band as, well, old and uncool as U2 had encroached on the sanctity of their digital music collections. Many people took to social media to register their displeasure, including the rapper Tyler The Creator, who memorably compared the indignity of finding Songs Of Innocence on his phone to “waking up with a pimple or like a herpes … F*ck Bono. I didn’t ask for you, I’m mad.”

But looking back all these years later, I can’t help but wonder: Why were we so mad about U2 putting a free album on our phones? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live again in a pre-Trump world, where you had the luxury to get worked up about a so-called Orwellian scheme involving a melancholic late-period U2 record? Isn’t it crazy that people cared so much about this?

Oh, it’s crazy now and it was all kinds of crazy then.