The best lyric of the 1970s, according to Bono
“I started to believe that you had to start with the heart; the heart as the base of politics,” U2 frontman Bono told the Chicago Tribune in 1992.
By this point, U2 had already built much of its success and reputation on being a “serious” band, one that wrote soaring political anthems like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’. In some ways, though, the band began to feel that their apparent self-importance was overshadowing some of the other vital parts of who they were, including any elements of humour, sex appeal, or vulnerability.
The 1991 album Achtung Baby was U2’s best effort at changing that narrative for a while, and it achieved its goal, becoming one of the band’s most critically and commercially successful albums. For Bono, writing songs like ‘One’ or ‘Mysterious Ways’ involved tapping into a slightly different aspect of himself.
“Marvin Gaye still strikes me as a real light,” he said at the time, “Because he mixed it up on that one album, What’s Going On: sexually, politically, spiritually explicit”.
The title track from that 1971 album, ‘What’s Going On’, has long been deemed one of the untouchable classics of R&B history, as well as one of the finest anti-war songs of the Vietnam years. Ironically, one of the first songs Bono ever wrote as a teenager in the mid-1970s was also called ‘What’s Going On’, though he later claimed he hadn’t heard Gaye’s song at that point. Still, it must have been subconsciously stalking him, because once the frontman wisened up to the original Motown hit, it immediately became one of his favourite songs.
Though it could have been a spectacular misstep, U2 even started covering ‘What’s Going On’ during their tours in the ‘90s and have since been involved in two official covers of the song: an all-star charity version for Aids relief in 2001, and a live U2 rendition for Spotify in 2017.
In 2022, while delivering an acceptance speech for the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding in Washington, DC, Bono singled out ‘What’s Going On’ again as one of the all-time great lyrics in pop history, alongside Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ and The Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. Gaye’s song was the lone 1970s representative on Bono’s short list, although he did give a special shoutout to Randy Newman’s ‘Short People’ as an example of why “funny’s OK” in pop music, too.
There’s nothing chuckle-inducing about ‘What’s Going On’, of course, and the song’s seriousness was only driven home more when—just days after recording the song for his Aids charity—Bono heard about the news coming out of New York on 9/11.
“Of all the serendipities,” Bono told the Irish Independent in November of 2011, “we’d been recording one of the most famous anti-war songs—Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’—on behalf of the Global Aids Alliance. So I guess I left on September 8th or 9th, and a few days later, you never needed to hear a song as much. In the aftermath of September 11th, it was the most played song on the radio [in the US], but it stopped as soon as military action started because some lines had started to jar.”
Bono was specifically referring to these lines penned by Gaye 30 years earlier: “We don’t need to escalate. You see, war is not the answer. For only love can conquer hate”.
