“Untouchable and incomparable”: The American band Bono said would live on forever
Bono isn’t the kind of person who can exactly hide his love of some of his favourite music.
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned throughout U2’s career, it’s that Bono likes to talk a lot, and even if what he says can rub some people the wrong way, it’s hard to deny the passion that he has for everything he talks about, whether it’s about rediscovering The Beatles after a long time or the massive relief work that he wants to do for third-world countries. All of those are noble efforts for someone of his capabilities, but he also wanted to make sure that the true legends were set in stone until the end of time.
Because no matter how much U2 likes to carve out their own legacy, Bono is one of the firm believers of what rock and roll could mean to the rest of the world. He didn’t get into the industry to be another pin-up star, and a lot of the best moments on U2 records come from the fact that they want to make music to turn the world on its axis. They truly felt that music could move mountains if the artist believed hard enough, but some musicians are a bit more subtle than what they were singing about.
After all, not every Beatles album had to beat someone over the head with the greatest hooks of all time. Some of their greatest tunes are the sleeper hits that don’t usually call as much attention to themselves, but Bono wanted to shout his love from the mountaintops by comparison whenever he made a new record. But by the time that the band made Rattle and Hum, the frontman had fallen in love with American culture.
While no one in U2 has any problem displaying their Irish heritage, there’s a certain romanticism that comes with their depiction of the US on records like The Joshua Tree. They don’t shy away from the rough patches of the country on tunes like ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, but there are many legends that taught them what it meant to be a musical legend along the way, whether that was Bono following in the footsteps or getting outclassed in every single way when BB King started singing the blues with them.
But aside from the American legends that stood alongside them, there was something else going on underground. It was hard to call U2 an “underground” band by this point, but for a group that had started loving genres like punk when they first began, Bono saw something in Pixies when he first heard them. This was the start of something new, and he felt that what they did would last far longer than whatever kitschy schlock was running on MTV around the same time.
And while it took the rest of the world a little while to catch on, U2 felt that the band would become based on tunes like ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’, saying, “In the history books, if we are still writing them, Pixies will be one of a dozen bands described as progenitors in the rock era. Their song about a monkey heading off to break the Kármán line… It’s the first of its kind. Untouchable. And incomparable. A big bang we were waiting for.”
You wouldn’t exactly hear the same kind of sound coming from U2 at the time, but they did have a bit more grit in their delivery later down the line. They might have been pulling at their sound a lot more when they began working with Brian Eno on records like Achtung Baby, but even at the height of their mainstream success, a song like ‘Vertigo’ does benefit from having a more stripped-back approach in the same way that a lot of Frank Black’s songs did on records like Doolittle.
The true turning of the tides came when Kurt Cobain mercilessly ripped the band off for songs like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but Bono knew that Pixies needed to be there to get that ball rolling. The rock and roll world was in danger of turning stale, and it’s bands like them that help keep things interesting for new bands whenever they start putting together the next earth-shattering record.
