The one singer Bono said no one should mess with
Bono didn’t get to the top of the musical food chain by asking politely.
For anyone to reach the kind of heights that he has, they would need to have a little more than a few decent hits in their pockets and a song in their heart. In rock and roll, it’s as much about the attitude as it is about the music, and the Irish legend always knew when he was listening to someone who wasn’t to be trifled with.
Because if you think about it, almost all of Bono’s greatest inspirations had that same sense of swagger whenever they got onstage. Whether it was listening to John Lennon baring his soul on record or Joe Strummer driving The Clash forward whenever they played, there was always a sense of power behind every word they sang. It might have seemed like simple pop music to everyone else, but anyone who was looking saw something much bigger. This was life and death for musicians, and those few minutes were their excuse to let everything out.
And while it’s easy to look at the most powerful musicians in the world wasting away in their mansions and counting their stacks of money, it’s not always that black and white. Anyone who has ever achieved legendary status might have all the rewards that money could bring, but that doesn’t come without knowing what real heartache feels like along the way.
Bono certainly had his fair share of that kind of heartache if you listen to nearly any U2 record, but that pain goes much farther back than their brand of music. It’s the kind of pain that lingers around for generations, and before The Beatles, before The Stones, and even before the genesis of rock and roll even came to fruition, people like Frank Sinatra became a safe haven for anyone else who had their heart shattered into a million pieces at the end of the night.
But for all of the vulnerability that Sinatra packed into his music, he seemed to approach it with strength every single time. Anyone else would have sang a song like ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ and been absolutely torn up by every single line, but hearing Sinatra sing it with such gusto let everyone know that he has had to pick up the pieces of his broken heart more than a few times.
And when giving Sinatra his flowers at the Grammys in 1994, it was that badass exterior that Bono always came back to, saying, “Rock and roll people love Frank Sinatra because Frank Sinatra’s got what we want. Swagger and attitude. He’s big on attitude. Frank’s the Chairman of Bad. Rock and roll plays being tough, but he’s the boss. ‘The Boss’ of bosses. The Man. I wouldn’t want to mess with him. Do you?”
It’s that kind of cocksure attitude that also made Bono’s cover of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ work so well. Any other artist would have been laughed out of the building if they went from a song like ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ to crooning with a lounge singer, but when you look at the mechanics of what a song like ‘One’ is trying to do over the course of its runtime, it’s not all that different than the kind of hurt that went back to the dawn of popular music.
Although Sinatra has been considered one of the greatest entertainers of all time by countless people, the reason he works so well is that what he touches on is so simple. Everyone has been in his position at some point or another, and even if the world seems to be falling apart, Sinatra’s voice is always there as a reminder to keep your head up, even when things look grim.
