“Since the Beatles”: Bono names the most important musical movement in history
While forged by punk, Irish stadium rockers U2 always cut an earnest counter to the movement’s wrecking-ball nihilism. Straight from 1979’s ‘Out of Control’, a buoyant optimism eschewed new-wave irony or post-punk cynicism going straight for the heart, evolving across the 1980s as one of alternative rock’s biggest names.
From 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, U2 began to immerse themselves in Americana’s musical foundations—evoking the States’ blues and country heritage ensconced in the widescreen sonic atmospheres shaped by producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.
While U2 enjoyed critical acclaim and ginormous commercial success off of 1987’s The Joshua Tree, the following year’s Rattle and Hum quasi-live/studio album was met with a less favourable reception—accusing the band of lapsing into self-aggrandising pretension. Finding themselves at a crossroads, U2 embraced the political and cultural sea changes taking place around them and entered the new decade inspired by the Eastern Bloc’s collapse, the contemporary media saturation, and the rapidly shifting musical underground running a pace while they were cutting numbers with BB King.
The new decade saw a very different U2. Out were Southern bolo ties and dusky harmonicas, in were wraparound bug-eye shades and a fresh coating of Manchester baggy and German industrial electronica. Spinning the multi-media Zoo TV touring frenzy supporting Achtung Baby and later Zooropa, the renewed vitality wrought from arch-subversion thrust U2 to the fore of mainstream relevancy, managing a perfect marriage of their stirring anthemic scope yet familiar with the alternative trends of the day.
Zoo TV also boasted one of the most impressive runs of support acts in live rock ever—Pixies, Einstürzende Neubauten, Ramones, The Velvet Underground, Pearl Jam, Björk, and Public Enemy all among the Zoo TV openers across its nearly two-year run.
Frontman Bono’s always been open about his adoration for his musical heroes. Never one to shy from high praise, he spoke to the Los Angeles Times a few months after the similarly mammoth and self-deprecating PopMart Tour in 1998 to offer a list of artists he was digging at the time. Reeling off the likes of REM, Nine Inch Nails, Beastie Boys and Patt Smith, it was New York’s Public Enemy he singled out as “the most important movement in music since the Beatles…”
It can’t be overstated just how radical Public Enemy’s impact was on the world of music, let alone hip-hop. Cutting an imposing figure with their S1W militancy and hypeman Flava Flav’s eccentric chaos, Chuck D and his Long Island crew terrified white, conservative America with their lyrical attack on the States’ colonial mythologies and media-bludgeoned narratives. Stirring Black political consciousness on a level unseen since the days of Motown and Stax, for a moment across the late 1980s to early 1990s, Public Enemy were sincerely the most dangerous band on the planet.
The binding agent between Flav’s cartoon anarchy and Professor Griff’s disciplined Nation of Islam academia was the Bomb Squad’s dense sonic collages of funk, soul, and rock heft that injected fury onto the club floor or blared out the boom box—1988’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet the apex of their bruising rap assault. Counting Bono as well as a whole spectrum of stars as one of their fans, Public Enemy’s creative and political innovation saw them cast a hip-hop legacy none have touched since.
