The singer Bono called the Marlon Brando of music
From the moment U2 started out, Bono was never satisfied with having a group that was merely decent at rock and roll. Throughout their entire career, the frontman wanted to make sure that every show the band put on meant something to the greater story of music, whether making stage sets larger than life or relating to the audience on a more spiritual level. Although Bono can inhabit many different styles as a frontman, he believed one singer was way above and on the same level as high cinema.
When first starting his band, though, Bono was used to following in the footsteps of the punks that came before him. Even though his life was changed by hearing The Beatles for the first time, Bono would undergo a conversion once the punk revolution began, loving the sounds emanating from acts like The Clash and Sex Pistols.
Once the initial shock of punk began to wear off, the frontman was left to soldier on in the post-punk world with the first U2 albums. As much as Bono may have liked the idea of rebelling against a corrupt system, his lyrics would be a lot more pointed than the punks, pointing fingers about war atrocities on albums like War and taking on the mantle of religion on the album October.
However, before the punks even took up their causes in the 1970s, another artist was already shaping rock and roll. For as much as The Beatles may have set Bono’s world on fire in the early days, it took Bob Dylan to shape him into the artist he is today.
After working in the folk scene, Dylan wanted to paint broad musical landscapes whenever he strapped on his guitar. Always speaking out of both sides of his mouth, Dylan notoriously shouldered material that many of his peers were too scared to take on, all while playing with every interviewer to ensure that they would never know the full man that lay behind his weary voice.
When listening to Dylan’s music for the first time, Bono was inspired to look towards causes close to his heart as well. Taking the political angle of Dylan’s writing, Bono would put bold melodies to counteract the heavy subject matter across albums like The Joshua Tree, like the political upheaval going on in a song like ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’.
Looking back on Dylan’s influence, Bono would also claim that the songwriter was comparable to the work of Marlon Brando, telling Rolling Stone, “Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience’s face and said, ‘I dare you to think I’m kidding’”.
While Brando may have had an equally turbulent career working in front of the camera, the trajectory of his work and Dylan’s are necessarily that far enough. Whether it was watching the bold character portraits in Apocalypse Now or listening to the voice singing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, both artists were able to keep their personal lives a mystery only to reach deep within themselves to create magic with their art.
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