U2 frontman—and official Glamour Woman Of The Year—Bono gave a massive new interview to Rolling Stone this week, touching on everything from his political activism, to the way Paul McCartney convinced him to spend time and energy writing songs like this for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark:
It was, indeed, a whole lotta Bono. The most eye-catching quote, though, came when Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner asked his mononymic pal about what kind of stuff his kids listen to, which led into Bono’s brief diagnosis of modern music: It’s “very girly,” it seems.
From context, “girly” in Bono-speak appears to mean emotional, or touchy-feely, or anything that isn’t channeling the primal sonic rage for which present-day U2 is so thoroughly known. Bono went on to label hip-hop as the only genre currently allowing musical young men to channel their anger into song:
I think music has gotten very girly. And there are some good things about that, but hip-hop is the only place for young male anger at the moment—and that’s not good.
That particular assessment—and its willingness to discount 50 percent of the earth’s population and their own deep rage at the fucked state of the planet—managed to come off as pretty tone-deaf to a lot of readers. Meanwhile, if Bono is so deeply concerned about young men and their ability to find an outlet for all their “young male anger,” we’d be happy to point him in the direction of the entirety of the internet.