“This was revolt”: Bono’s strange opinion on the inventor of punk rock
Say what you will about Bono and U2, but one thing will always be true: there’s a level of authenticity and self-belief at the crux of his artistry that few musicians will ever come close to.
It’s also why Bono and the band have landed themselves in hot water on more than one occasion, and why U2’s position in the broader scope of rock legends almost always depends on a specific era or piece of material. After all, it’s easy to accept their stance as revolutionary when looking at records like The Joshua Tree, but this is harder when you take into account the many times they’ve unintentionally entirely missed the mark.
And yet, while it’d be just as fun to go through all of the most obvious examples – the infamous iTunes incident, for one – it’s somehow even more interesting to look at how the band responds to such scrutiny, and how, almost every single time, they veer the conversation back to authenticity and musical integrity.
For instance, after they dropped Songs of Innocence onto millions of iTunes users’ accounts, Bono argued that it was “a gift to people” who might see the opportunity to listen to free music and “choose to reach out toward it”. While acknowledging that critics might have labelled the entire move as an “overreach”, he doubled down, saying it was an ambitious way to try to reach people who might not already be fans of their music.
Elsewhere, Bono also addressed that strange period of time in the early 2000s when many people – fans included – thought they’d lost direction, both artistically and professionally. At the time, Bono was attempting to iron out many creases, many of which caused outsiders to wrongly assume they were becoming sell-outs, and not so much the poster of integrity they always claimed to be.
In the face of these claims, Bono did what he always did and reframed misinterpretations as them having their defining moment. Specifically, he clapped back at claims that their Super Bowl performance was one of these betrayals, arguing that it was actually their “Ed Sullivan moment”, just 25 years later. He also argued that rock music suffers from a “poverty of ambition”, alluding to the fact that, no matter what people say about U2, they’ll always go above and beyond.
With his strong opinions on what rock should or shouldn’t be, especially in the realm of authenticity, Bono will always come to any such discussion equipped with the necessary ammo, not just in terms of the genre itself and the contexts of U2’s broader legacy, but also when looking further afield at those who laid the groundwork for excellence in the first place.
For instance, like many, Bono regards Elvis Presley as the moment when it all began. Not only that, but he sees ‘The King’ as the one person who, quite literally, changed everything beyond the parameters of modern music itself. “Out of Tupelo, Mississippi, out of Memphis, Tennessee came this green, sharkskin-suited girl chaser, wearing eye shadow,” he once said, saying that Presley “had the whole lot; it’s all there in that elastic voice and body”.
“This was punk rock. This was revolt,” he continued, saying that everyone witnessed the course of music history in just one figure, the celebratory moments as well as the controversies. Which, as we’ve seen, is something he can likely relate to – especially when certain scenarios, performances, or sounds become mistaken for something else.
That, in itself, is what legends like Presley do: they challenge, or, as Bono concluded, “The more he fell to Earth, the more godlike he became.”
