“Overwhelmed by your own ego”: The 1981 lyric Bono looks back on with regret
There are plenty of rock musicians that the general public will frequently find themselves complaining about because of their insufferable egos, and more often than not, this is something that applies to frontpersons who are constantly striving to be the centre of attention.
If it weren’t for frontpersons having massive egos, they possibly wouldn’t have ever made it to the positions they found themselves in, and this constant act of bigging themselves up is ultimately what made them more noticeable than those who approached their craft with a touch more modesty.
To some degree, you’ve got to have an unbelievable amount of confidence in yourself to front a band, and while being the face of a project with this amount of belief may well infuriate people, it’s also going to create an air of untouchability about you, giving those critics no option but to applaud you for how your brazen approach to making yourself the central focus has ultimately elevated the status of the band around you.
However, one thing that you often have to have alongside this ego is a sense of self-awareness, and some people who front bands certainly lack this, and end up constantly making a mockery of themselves and almost parodying what a frontperson should be.
But for all of the people who might consider Bono to be a prime example of someone whose ego has ballooned over the years to the point it’s impossible to ignore it, there have been moments in his career where he’s displayed a degree of understanding of the man he is beneath it all and taken a step back to laugh at how much his ego has managed to display itself.
In the early years of U2, they weren’t aiming to be the stadium rock act that they ended up becoming, but that ego was still there, present within lyrics that positioned Bono as the sort of frontman who was capable of making a seismic impact not just on the music industry, but the whole world around him.
Reflecting upon it in a 2025 interview with The Talks, he looked back on a lyric from the band’s 1981 song ‘Rejoice’, and how he would later reference it again in 2014 on ‘Lucifer’s Hands’ with the inverse sentiment, all while laughing at the sheer stupidity of making such a claim in the first place.
“When I was 22 I wrote, ‘I can’t change the world, but I can change the world in me,’” he claimed, referencing the line from the October track. “Now, as an older person, I wrote, ‘Maybe I can change the world, but I cannot change the world in me.’ And that’s the humiliation of this writing! You realize, ‘Oh, God, you go through all of this, you get to 64 years old, and you’re still overwhelmed by your own ego?’”
He may well have changed as a person, noting how his ego was constantly morphing, but at least he was able to understand that it was perhaps still a self-important thing to say, and that he ought to distance himself from this sentiment of being powerful enough to change anything at all in order to give off a greater sense of humility in his work, bringing him back down to earth.
