“The most important musical force”: Bono on the genre that was the greatest since The Beatles
The beauty of the music industry is how elastic it can be. Even though some bands might be heralded as the kings of music one day, there’s a good chance that their music could be considered passe a few years later when the new kids in town come along to knock them on their asses. The Beatles tend to have a shining halo around nearly everything they’ve done, but Bono thought that this production guru has done as much for music history as the Fab Four have done.
Then again, competing with The Beatles in anything is no tall order. While many have seen pop culture luminaries like Michael Jackson rack up as many chart hits as the 1960s hitmakers, their impact on culture at large can’t be ignored, whether that’s the fashions they pioneered, the bold musical choices they made or even the drugs they used throughout the 1960s.
There’s no one way for someone to impact the music industry, and as far as making music goes, it’s important to keep every genre open to reinvention. Even though many people have tried relying on their nostalgia to get them out of their darkest moments, Bono knew that some of the biggest names in music came from going outside the norm of what their fans wanted and giving them what they didn’t know they needed.
Even U2 can claim to have a few of those moments in their catalogue. As much as Bono has come off like a pretentious windbag in recent years, the fact that he was never afraid of trying something different is why albums like Achtung Baby resonate so deeply with listeners, both catering to the core audience that U2 had cultivated and piling on a heavy layer of irony on every single track.
But nothing was ironic about what was happening to hip-hop around the same time. Even though the genre was still known as fairly underground in the mid-1980s, watching it go mainstream with the rise of Public Enemy and absolutely explode in the 1990s with Tupac and Biggie Smalls gave rock a run for its money with voices that had something more to say without needing any loud guitars.
Bono was still looking to work in the context of rock and roll and pop, but he knew that hip-hop was absolutely necessary for mainstream music to keep innovating. When talking about music mogul Jimmy Iovine, the U2 frontman knew that hip-hop’s golden age was as important as what the Fab Four did, saying in Surrender that the genre was “the most important musical force since The Beatles reinvented rock and roll”.
And it’s not like Bono couldn’t put his money where his mouth was. Of all the ways that U2 have tried to stay current with the times, the fact that they didn’t manage to look like buffoons during their cameo on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘XXX’ is a strange miracle considering their laughable attempt to work with iTunes for the album Songs of Innocence.
But it wasn’t only a new genre of music to Bono. When looking at the biggest names in hip-hop, he saw a new way for people to make music the same way that he saw punk rockers doing it back in the days of The Clash and Sex Pistols.
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