U2’s The Edge: “To us at that time, America was Lou Reed”
For anyone trying to conquer the world, America can seem the most daunting place to go first. Although many homegrown artists have managed to reach the top of the musical food chain with no problem, it takes a lot of hard hours of work and a trace of luck to win over the American crowd when coming from another country. The Beatles managed it with ease, and bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath will always echo throughout American culture, but U2 were a completely different animal when they started to truly take over the world during the era of The Joshua Tree.
Because people weren’t simply looking at the band as another great rock and roll band. From the way that Bono conducted himself onstage to the calls for revolution whenever they played, this felt more like a social movement half the time, whether that was them going down like champions at Live Aid or their iconic era during the 1990s when they twisted what rock and roll was supposed to be.
But that kind of transition was almost necessary for them at the time. As much as the 1980s treated them well, something larger than life needed to do something different to even hope to compete with the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam on the charts. The best way to do that was to make something that poked fun at the idea of being a lavish rock star while still writing those bulletproof hooks that made people want to chant along in stadiums.
And especially considering that Rattle and Hum had come out a few years before, it was almost necessary for them to go as far away from that as possible. While the band was incredibly sincere in their reverence for American music, there were more than a few moments where they seemed to disappear up their own ass in the movie, especially when Bono takes time to critique the audience for being bummed that he’s saing some self-righteous speech in the middle of a show.
Even though they played themselves up as one of the biggest forces in music, being one of the most commercial entities in the world wasn’t what they had envisioned in their early days. When they were making their first records, they were always more interested in punk bands, and when they started looking through their own definitions of America, they wanted to reach further into the indie scene.
Whereas most people remember the image of Larry Mullen Jr visiting Graceland to see Elvis Presley’s grave, The Edge felt that much of their roots came from bands like The Velvet Underground, saying, “I think we’re better versed in our influences than in our early days. Rattle & Hum is sort of this musical exposition of our exploration of American music. It was us going, ‘Here are the songs that resulted from our interests.’ You have to remember, growing up in Dublin, we weren’t exposed to American music beyond the punk groups that we loved. To us at that time, America was Lou Reed.”
While Elvis Presley might be a more overarching version of what America was supposed to be like, Reed’s vision for what he saw in New York did have some pieces of Americana in it. Not everyone in rural America knew what it was like living on the seedy streets of New York City, but once Reed started talking about life outside his window, people got a better idea of what life in the gutter looked like.
In fact, Reed does a much better job of painting what life was like for a musician in America than someone like Bruce Springsteen or Bob Seger did. Each of them had a specific definition of what their country meant to them, but for a band that was as sincere as U2, it’s nice to know that they could take Reed as an inspiration when trying to take the piss out of themselves as rock stars.
