http://observer.com/2015/07/u2-looks-to-silence-critics-with-8-concerts-at-madison-square-garden/
Most rock stars reach a point where, if their careers aren’t sad shells of past glories, they accept the passage of time and transition away from upstart rebellion and into something resembling responsible adults, providing a link between the past and the future.
For the better part of the last 15 years, U2 has fought off that transition, in seemingly spectacular denial about its role in modern music.
Quit straining for cultural relevance and embrace your role as rock’s elder statesmen.
As a band founded in the waning days of the Ford administration, U2 is, by any reasonable definition, a veteran act, and one enduring through the many sea changes in the culture and the music industry over the last four decades.
That is a remarkable achievement.
But rather than acknowledge they are not the hungry young world-beaters they once were—in two years, U2’s Grammy-winning breakthrough album The Joshua Tree turns 30, ready to settle down with a mortgage and kids—Bono and his band mates insist on trying to hang with the kids.
(...)
To slip from a messianic perch must be humbling, particularly as other, younger bands—Imagine Dragons; OneRepublic; Coldplay; Mumford & Sons—seize upon your sound and take it into the 21st century.
But what most long-serving rock bands either ignore or fail to realize is that what makes them more valuable is context. There is a power in drawing upon nostalgia that can energize even the most calcified catalog.
All as true as it can get.
Then the article sheds some positive light to end, though:
Sensing and highlighting the through line from youth to adulthood—moving from innocence to experience—can be a useful tool, and one which more rock bands of a certain vintage should employ.
And in its own canny way, U2 appears to have realized this.
There is a sense the hostile response to Innocence left U2 feeling as though it has everything to prove on its current tour. (Judging from the rapturous critical response, U2 is, on that front, as commanding as ever.) If being scalded inspired U2, then perhaps it should stumble before every tour. Or, hopefully, the lessons learned in the last year will carry forward. After all, growing older brings with it wisdom, and an appreciation for that which has come before.
If not, U2 succumbs to the fate of so many bands before it: Adults trying to act younger than they are, oblivious to their pathetic charade.
Rock music may eternally belong to the young, but perhaps U2 intuited what the rest of us have not—the genre still needs a band to stick around and remind the kids how it’s done.
indeed, sir, indeed. 
) and other thing is the target audience (rockers in their 60s or more? Hell yeah! 
) 
And my fear is (or was) that if they hadn't had the SOI backlash plus Bono's accident, they would have gone that route. Let's hope that's changed. 