“Eternal music”: the three songs Bono said will live on forever
U2 frontman Bono has always chased hymnal universality in whatever the Irish stadium behemoths have been scoring, be it bluesy Joshua Tree wanders or 1990s dance electronica.
It’s a quality that rubs the band’s detractors the wrong way. Burnished by punk just like every other 1970s teenager, the early U2 cut a distinctly wide-eyed optimism at odds with their new wave peers’ trend for ironic cool or darker shrouds.
It took U2 a good decade to ever nab a piece of ‘cool’ for themselves when launching their Zoo TV spectacle, but across the preceding 1980s, earnestness fatigued the cynics while winning them fans all over the world, lapping up their anthemic expanse and Bono’s unerring confidence leading the band’s spiritual soundtrack.
One listen to The Unforgettable Fire or Achtung Baby reveals a band that pays close attention to how songs are gonna hit the 100th time as much as the first. Draped in their sonic chasm and The Edges’ guitar chimes, Bono lyrically wades through faith, doubt, injustice, and the human condition with all the fervour of a preacher reaching out to a higher power. The nayasyers will, not entirely without merit, call out his lapses into messiah complexes, but whatever show U2 puts on, or album is committed to master tape, the lads are gunning for something beyond mere rock and pop.
They know pop serves the perfect medium to reach the masses, however. Its power as an art form even conceptually underpinned 1997’s Pop meta-commentary, a wry guise of mass consumerism and shallow hedonism propped up as a canvas to interrogate Bono’s spiritual doubts and conflicts. A chart topper’s capacity to stir the senses with just as much gravitas as classical music or rockist elevation was reflected on when discussing the process of songwriting with Oprah Winfrey.
“The hit – what might be called eternal music, if you want to be high-minded – is a song that most people feel familiar with,” Bono mused in 2004. “And the most extreme end of that spectrum is music…”
He then reeled off three such hits, he felt possessed by that unmistakable eternality. The Temptations’ ‘My Girl’ first came to mind, highlighting the opening “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day” line, which makes sense with his thematic motif of joyful embrace and could be said to echo throughout ‘Beautiful Day’s parted heavens. Then he plumbs for Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ country ballad, reinforcing a sentiment of seeking guidance in the throes of struggle that wanders similar introspective roads to ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ and much of October.
Most telling, and reinforcing all the po-faced caricatures his critics are committed to, but Bono reaches back to the 18th century and selects John Newton’s ‘Amazing Grace’ hymn as a fundamentally eternal pick. He’s not wrong. Sung to this day, the Christian message of forgiveness and redemption guides Bono’s lyrical pen as much as the countless US church halls and sports games in the 2020s, a secular appeal his former Shallow Fellowship faith has always danced around.
“So where does all music come from – be it hip-hop or rock ‘n’ roll?” Bono furthered. “I don’t know. But I do know that all music is praise.”
