‘Walk On’: the Nobel Peace Prize winner behind a U2 classic
Back in 2022, my friends and I had a saying for whenever we got in the car of one specific person. This person was an Apple Music user, a minor personality blemish we would forget until the moment we clicked in our seatbelts, and he went to turn the ignition. “Quick, open up his phone before we get U2’d” was the cry. Because, like all users of Apple Music in 2022, U2‘s album Songs of Innocence had been downloaded to his phone without invitation and would automatically begin playing when connected to Bluetooth.
It was a bizarre turn of events that was followed by a suitably bizarre apology from the band. Sitting outwardly facing on a box, the group expressed their regret in what felt like a satire of a celebrity apology. In turn, they became the butt of satirical jokes to follow, and Bono’s sincerity was viewed as obnoxiousness.
The point of this anecdote is that despite the band’s butchering of their own image, sincerity has long existed in their career trajectory. While their apology was essentially a high-on-their-own-supply performance of self-importance, they’ve mainly been philanthropically engaged artists and have forged a deep kinship with their fans for it.
This quality culminated in their 2000 track ‘Walk On’. It largely references Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese activist who was sentenced to house arrest in 1989 for protesting her government and wasn’t freed until 2010. While she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, her arrest was a symbol of defiance for the liberal world and inspired Bono to pen the piece as part of All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
“It’s a song about nobility and personal sacrifice,” Bono explains in the book U2 by U2, “about doing what’s right, even if your heart is telling you otherwise… Love, in the highest sense of the word, is the only thing that you can always take with you, in your heart. At some point, you are going to have to lose everything else anyway.”
The record was eventually banned in Myanmar (Burma became Myanmar in 1989) because of this specific song, but the band regularly played it as the closing track to their 2001 Elevation Tour, which, in the US, became the most profitable tour of the year, making a cool $69million.
However, after Kyi’s release in 2010, the National League for Democracy (NLD) won a majority in a historic election in Myanmar, where she assumed the position of state counsellor and, by proxy, became the cause’s leader. The movement escalated to a point where the military drove out hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in what the United Nations has recognised as “ethnic cleansing”.
This change of events caused Bono to reevaluate the band’s link to her, telling Rolling Stone, “Maybe she was always a politician. She was not a saint. She was not some sort of saviour. Maybe we were always wrong, and we just have to accept we were wrong. Or maybe something terrible has happened to her that we just don’t know.”
