Bono doesn’t consider U2 to be a rock and roll band: “We get away with it”
Rock and roll was never intended for the masses. Even though there are plenty of acts that have reached the top of the charts by playing the most raucous music you can think of, this was meant to be a rebellion against the kind of music that everyone had been bored to tears with the minute that they turned on the radio. U2 was born and bred out of the underground scenes of punk, but Bono believed that what they did might not qualify as rock music anymore.
Granted, there are more than a few purists who think U2 shouldn’t be in the conversation of any kind of good music to begin with. Despite having some classics under their belt, most mainstream fans have tried to wash their hands of Bono’s political project that makes music sometimes whenever his head disappears up his own ass, which admittedly is far too often.
If you look past all of the posturing, U2’s body of work deserves every one of its accolades. Projects like War saw them taking on political material the same way The Clash had years before, and once The Joshua Tree rolled around, they could command a crowd like no one else when they took to the stage.
Somewhere around Achtung Baby, though, something started to feel different. Bono was still playing up his frontman moves, but the image seemed to be as much a part of their aesthetic as their music as he began adopting his now-iconic Fly persona.
It didn’t matter as long as the music still kicked ass, but Bono didn’t even know if they fell under the same banner Chuck Berry built long ago, telling Rolling Stone, “We’re not really a rock & roll band. We’re pretending to be a rock & roll band, and sometimes we get away with it. Sometimes a song like ‘Desire’ or ‘Vertigo’ will arrive, and you go, Whoa! That’s rock & roll! But what we actually do is something completely different.”
While that statement is enough to make some musicians’ eyes roll all the way to the back of their heads, it’s easy to see where Bono is coming from. Just looking at where the band took their sound on albums like Pop, it would be a stretch to call any of that rock, especially when they tried to do the equivalent of breaking wind into a sequencer and calling it a song.
But still, ‘Vertigo’ is up there with the best guitar songs of the 2000s, and even though they were resting on their laurels after their experimental years, All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the kind of U2 record that any fan would be proud to call their own. Then again, being rock and roll might come down to aesthetics at the end of the day.
Each artist that got the ball rolling for the genre got attention because of how much of an antithesis they were to the mainstream, but at the end of the day, they just wanted people to have a good time. Bono isn’t looking to just entertain anymore. He’s writing a setlist with the sole purpose of making an epiphany go off in your head as you listen. The Stones may have said the genre is only rock and roll, but U2 is an example of what happens when a band starts to defy what those conventions are supposed to be.
