“It’s about the tunes”: The band Bono said set the standard
No artist can be judged on the music they’ve written in the past. If anything, the more popular one of their tunes gets, the more pressure is on them later to write something equally as good or even better when the next album rollout begins. Although Bono has made sure never to steer U2 in the same direction too many times, he normally took his cues from the new school’s approach to songwriting.
But that’s not to say that U2 is going to release an album that sounds exactly like Chappell Roan or something today. Both are phenomenal artists in their own right, but most people would be considered spared if the same man behind such classics as ‘With Or Without You’ all of a sudden decided that the future of his music was in doing covers of ‘Pink Pony Club’. Good intentions, but not the right audience at all.
If there’s one thing Bono has in common with the new school, though, it’s that he never lost his hunger for wanting to make something new. Everyone in U2 has seen the band as an ever-evolving entity, so when they were trying to branch out, it wasn’t out of the question to make a turn into electronic music when making Achtung Baby or feature on a Kendrick Lamar album on ‘XXX’, which actually went over a lot better than either fanbase probably envisioned it would go.
Right as the band were reaching their post-ironic phase, though, the irony of rock and roll had been sapped out of it all at once. Kurt Cobain was the king of irony in many respects, and when he passed away, it felt like everything went from slightly tongue-in-cheek to deadly serious in an instant. Rock and roll didn’t have anything to be happy about any more, but it took a couple of Manchester kids to turn the tide.
While Noel Gallagher talked a big game whenever he discussed his music with Oasis, Definitely Maybe seemed to deliver on every single promise. There were many pieces of rock and roll history laced throughout its grooves, but whereas most people saw it as derivative, their contemporaries knew that Noel had hit the nail on the head in terms of what great songwriting is, even if it was hard to figure out what the hell he was getting at in tunes like ‘Supersonic’ on first listen.
U2 was already the darlings of critical opinion at that point, but Bono felt that Oasis helped give both him and the rest of the world a kick in the ass, saying, “For us, it’s about forgetting where we come from, it’s just about the present tense. We’re not even interested in the past. Written a few good tunes, great. But it’s about the tunes you write tomorrow, it’s about the tunes you’re writing today. And Oasis raised the standard on the tunes.”
Even though it would take a few years for the band to recover after flaming out on Be Here Now the tunefulness of Noel’s songs never left him. From the psychedelic haze of ‘Who Feels Love’ right through to ‘The Shock of the Lightning’ to his solo efforts like ‘Dead to the World’, he’s always made sure to focus on the melody that touches someone’s heart before committing anything to tape.
And while Liam has been able to write some fine tunes on the same level as Noel’s ever since their breakup, there’s something special about those early years that will never be captured again. They may have been arrogant as hell in their early years, but there’s also a certain innocence about tunes like ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Rock and Roll Star’ that no one will be able to repeat.
