The album Bono said turned U2 into a prog rock band
U2 always toed the line between being sincere and unbelievably pretentious.
Although that line was crossed more than a few times throughout their career, there was always something endearing about listening to Bono whenever he talked about the religious power behind music. It truly felt like he thought that music could change the world, but he knew that nothing could be done if they had submitted to prog rock.
Then again, it’s not like the genre was completely alien to them, either. The Edge had been a student of the early prog-rock giants, but as soon as 1976 arrived, rock and roll had a much different face. Sex Pistols and Ramones were now the biggest bands in the world, and considering how well they could get their point across with a couple of chords and a song in their hearts, most people were better off burning their old King Crimson and Yes records before anyone caught on to what they were listening to.
And there was no firm believer in prog-rock boycotting than Bono. It didn’t matter if it had seven-minute exercises if it didn’t have any soul behind her, and no matter how much The Edge loved listening to those records, Bono would rather go back to straight chords and the myriad of guitar effects than throw in anything overly flashy.
But maybe that’s the biggest problem with prog-rock for Bono. Every band in that genre could have written fantastic stuff, but if any of them were soloing for the sake of soloing, the whole thing didn’t even matter. U2 had thought they had learned their lesson before they even stepped up to the plate, but the rest of their career proved that the hardest lessons are the ones you have to learn from experience.
They already had to deal with looking like one of the most egotistical bands in the world on Rattle and Hum, but when Achtung Baby came out, they actually managed to sidestep everything and become post-ironically cool again. It was in their nature to take chances like this, but by the time they got to Pop, even Bono realised that they had swung too far back the other way for most people to care anymore.
This was them selling out by throwing as many digital effects in as they could, and as much it pained him, Bono felt that they had finally reached the levels of prog rock pretentiousness, saying, “Imagine if ‘Discotheque’ was a No. 1 pop song? Now that record makes sense. We didn’t have the discipline to screw the thing down, and turn it into a magic pop song. We didn’t have the discipline to make ‘Mo Fo’ into a loud concoction of rock ‘n’ roll, trance crossover. We learned from that album. We’d become progressive rock! Ahhh! It’s on us!”
But even if they had crawled up their own asses ever so slightly, they at least had good reason to keep moving once they hit the 2000s. All That You Can’t Leave Behind may have been the soft reboot, but How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was the first time that they seemed to recapture the magic all over again, even if ‘Vertigo’ was the kind of earworm that was impossible to outrun.
If nothing else, Pop did at least give the band the incentive to prioritise their songwriting again. It’s one thing to start building songs out of jam sessions, but the minute that the experiments start overtaking the integrity of the tune, that’s normally when everything starts to go a little bit haywire.
