The album Bono thought fans never gave enough credit to: “I was disappointed”
It’s anyone’s guess whether great art will ever be appreciated in the moment. A lot has to be working in an artist’s favour to capture a moment in time perfectly, and even if something is a hair out of place, it’s easy for some of the greatest works of all time to either go over someons’ head or come off as too ambitious for its own good. But U2 have made their living out of swinging for the fences, and Bono has had to fess up to being a bit in over his head more than a few times.
But can you blame them for wanting to change things up? If U2 had continued being the political-adjacent band for the rest of their career, they would have painted themselves into a corner and never come out. It was necessary for them to take risks, but sometimes records like Pop and Songs of Innocence only left fans angry, especially when the music was being shoved on everyone against their will with the latter.
It definitely left an impression, but you could never say it was boring. The frontman may seem insufferable at times and has a habit of not knowing when to get off the soapbox, but it’s important to have someone out there willing to stick their neck out on the line rather than spend their entire lives looking at their shoes onstage and singing the songs with as little passion as possible.
You can’t say Bono never believed in the power of U2, but the Irish legends may have had a little less power than they thought making Rattle and Hum. It was safe to say that they were all becoming living legends after The Joshua Tree came out, but coming out with a film about their trek across America and rubbing elbows with legends made them look like they were making their case to be considered rock and roll gods.
“What I was disappointed in was the lack of insight into the LP, what it said about us.”
Bono
The fans may have seen right through that kind of move, but the frontman still felt like the film and album never got the credit they deserved, saying in 1988, “What I was disappointed in was the lack of insight into the LP, what it said about us. There’s so much in there, so many heavy things — it has a beginning, middle and end in its own ragged way. And that people didn’t question the idea of why we did ‘Helter Skelter’ other than ‘Why are they doing a Beatles’ song?’ — that people didn’t think further than that, I must say, amused me.”
He’s got a fair point, but many of the problems that people have come down to what’s happening on those cover songs he’s talking about. There are many ways for people to talk about the greatness of those that came before them, but when you hear Bono talking about stealing ‘Helter Skelter’ away from Charles Manson, it feels tasteless before the song even starts. Yes, Manson used The Beatles’ classic as an excuse to do heinous things, but that hardly means he owns the song.
It’s not much better when looking at it in the context of the film. It’s easy to ignore some of the pretentious moments in the movie when listening to tracks like ‘Desire’, but when listening to them play ‘All Along the Watchtower’, hearing Bono changing the lyrics Bob Dylan wrote to serve the moment is about as effective as erecting a giant sign saying ‘I AM IMPORTANT’ next to you as you sing.
Does Rattle and Hum feature songs that should be counted among U2’s best? Absolutely. Is it also one of the more embarrassing things that they ever got up to during their classic run? Also yes. It might be hard to take seriously all the way through, but their landmark transition into film fits in some strange dead zone of being both loved and hated at the same time.
