“We couldn’t possibly hope to be”: The band Bono thought U2 could never match
It’s almost impossible to narrow down how many rock stars will look cool years later. Most people can only hope to capture that kind of zeitgeist in one moment, but the minute trends start changing, a band that seemed to be one of the coolest things in the world either sounds incredibly dated or something that no one wants to revisit ever again. There had always been some debate as to whether U2 were ever in that cool conversation, to begin with, but even Bono had enough foresight to know that they would never scale to the same heights that The Clash did.
Outside of the band itself, though, punk rock has always been an evergreen place for rock and roll. Right when the genre was getting too pompous, punk was the thing to disassemble everything back to its essentials, and to this day, the genre feels like the litmus test on whether a song could be considered truly cool or not.
Whereas John Lydon was just trying to cause destruction, Joe Strummer was looking to make an epiphany go off in the listener’s head from the minute they listened to The Clash. Not everything was played in time or perfectly in tune, but those first records worked so well because no one could deny that Strummer meant every word he said.
The songs were all about politics in some form, but given how catchy the songs were, no one could really care that much. Even when they were talking about race riots on ‘White Riot’ or the ins and outs of the music business on ‘Complete Control’, they never sounded like they were giving a sermon. They were servants to the song more than anything, and that’s half the reason why they could be so eclectic.
Considering how much thought was put into the arrangements on their tunes, it was never that far of a stretch for them to dip their toes into the likes of reggae on ‘Police and Thieves’ or dabble in nearly every genre under the sun from dub to punk to old-time rock and roll on Sandinista. U2 had a similar vision, but after years in the spotlight, Bono knew they were still only scratching the surface.
There had been some theatricality in the way they made their political material, but the U2 frontman felt that nothing they ever did had the potential to touch people the way The Clash touched him, saying, “After we saw the Clash, it was a sort of blueprint for U2. We knew we couldn’t possibly hope to be as cool, and that’s proven to be true, but we did think we could get behind a sort of social justice agenda.”
That’s not to say that U2 haven’t had their place in the post-punk world, either. The Clash were nearly a thing of the past when they burst onto the scene with Boy, but looking at where they went with The Joshua Tree, songs like ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’ felt like them taking the energy of The Clash and combining it with the futuristic soundscapes of progressive music in some spots, especially in the way that The Edge created a landscape on his guitar.
Still, it’s impossible to really dismantle anything that The Clash or claim to improve on their foundation. They were the ones that taught people to dream of something bigger than just three chords, and as long as they had someone counting them off, there was nothing that they couldn’t do in three minutes that didn’t have the potential of knocking someone on their ass.
