How 9/11 informed the imagery for U2’s love song ‘Electrical Storm’
Despite hailing from the windy shores of Ireland, I’ve always felt like U2 were an innately American band. Ever since their seminal release Joshua Tree, they’ve mastered a brand of stadium rock more suitable for the expanse of America than the craggy streets of Ireland.
The ringing guitar line of ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ and ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ were a fitting backdrop for Bono’s musing on a spiritual quest set against the American backdrop. From that album on, they became a global band. No longer were they introduced with the sort of prefaces of “Irish four-piece” that their compatriots The Pogues were consigned to; they were instead the world’s rock band.
Come the millennium, they were leaders of commercial rock, embracing the futurism of a new century. Bono was rarely seen without lightly tinted glasses, and Edge lent into reverberated arpeggios in an attempt to create that sort of postmodern excitement.
But while the actual turn of the millennium brought with it artistic excitement, built on a decade of 1990s liberation, the societal realities didn’t match. Just one year after the new century was ushered in, America’s ultimate symbol of capitalist prosperity was tragically attacked on September 11th, 2001.
America was in mourning, and the world waited with bated breath as it watched the biggest televised attack in history and what felt like the beginning of a dark, war-ridden chapter. The bright lights of the world’s most iconic city were falling, and the sheer visual panic of seeing what were otherwise deemed as impenetrable structures being brought to their knees raised questions over the state of modern living. The very foundations of a life we knew were crumbling.
It was an idea that Bono felt compelled to engage with, after all his career with U2 up until that point had effectively been projected on the digital screens of New York’s billboards. But rather than penning a ballad in direct reference to the attack, he wrote something more universal. U2’s 2004 track ‘Electric Storm’ was a rousing ballad that compared fractious relationships to the dark days of a thunderstorm, set in the backdrop of an uncertain America.
“It’s about a couple in a room feeling a storm brewing in the sky outside and equating that to the pressure they feel in their relationship,” Bono explained. But he added, “I think it captures a sense of unease I feel around the world, especially in America, an air of nervous anticipation. It’s not an overtly political song, but I don’t think we could have written it before what happened in New York.”
As Bono says, the song never overtly references the September attacks, but there’s a drama and immediacy to his lyricism and performance that understandably places it in his historic context. Alluding to the skies cracking no longer became a lofty metaphorical trope in the early 2000s, instead it was an image that depicted the constant state of panic and fear that permeated the worlds most populated cities.
