The one genre The Edge said was out of their league: “More innovative”
The Edge didn’t spend his days trying to play only one genre of music.
U2 were meant to be malleable every single time they walked into the studio, and even if they had a few records that didn’t hit well with the public, the point was always about them trying to make the best records that they could while still experimenting with different genres along the way. And while The Edge is a guitarist first and foremost, he could admit when rock and roll started to look drab in the modern age.
Then again, U2 have always found ways of trying to dip their toes into something new whenever they make a record. Not all of them work, and Pop is a good example of a record that had an incredibly spotty execution, but it’s not like they didn’t know how to adapt. They needed to have a soft reboot once they entered the 2000s, but it’s not like rock and roll had much to complain about once they reached the mid-2000s.
The biggest names at the time were people like The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys, and The Edge could definitely find a way to bend his sound in that direction. No one would have thought that the band would have been able to drop those walls of guitars, but ‘Vertigo’ was the kind of tune that the band could have played to only a small room full of people and got a great reaction whenever they performed it.
As the decade wound down, though, No Line on the Horizon was the first sign that things were changing slightly. The band still sounded the same, but when listening to the way they were working on some new ideas, they didn’t need the traditional setup anymore. The Edge wanted his guitar to be more of a texture, and that came from listening to what hip-hop was doing behind the scenes.
He felt that artists like The Black Eyed Peas were doing great work, and he could see the genre overtaking rock altogether in the coming decades, saying, “I think Black Eyed Peas are a great band. I’ve been thinking for a long time that hip hop and R&B production is really more innovative than rock ‘n’ roll production these days. And we just really hit it off. Will [I. Am.] was amazing – in a few hours, he’d taken the demo of ‘Crazy Tonight’ up several notches.”
It did sound at least trendy for the time, but looking back, it’s not like the idea fits U2 all that well. It’s nice to see them trying to stay current in the modern age, but when you look at the rest of the records compared to Horizon, all of them sounded a bit more authentic than them trying out different hip-hop arrangements or desperately attempting to get in touch with the kids on songs like ‘Get On Your Boots’.
That said, maybe they just needed the right person working with them. The Peas did have a lot of potential together, but even if The Edge thought they had a great time, their collaborations with someone like Kendrick Lamar go over a lot better. Hearing those icy guitars on ‘XXX’ and Bono’s voice is one of the most random pieces K Dot ever put together, and while it could have come off as incredibly cringy, it works surprisingly well in the context of that album.
So while many rock fans will listen to no more than 30 seconds of a hip-hop production before getting a sour taste in their mouths, there might be some way for The Edge to find his way into that style of production. After all, someone like Mike Dean has made a name for himself playing guitar on some massive hip-hop albums, so who’s to say that the next rapper can’t have those cascading guitar parts on their record?
