The band Bono said wasn’t working hard enough: “He was frustrated with me”
The meaning of rock and roll is a lot more complicated for Bono than a genre of music.
He is more than happy to be an ambassador for the genre whenever he performs, but all those moments of him putting his foot in his mouth or looking like an absolute dickhead trying to change the world didn’t come from a place of insincerity. After all, the genre needs to keep growing, and the frontman knew when he saw artists that weren’t holding up their end of the bargain whenever they performed.
Then again, it’s hard to hold anyone to the same kind of standards that U2 were setting for themselves when they hit their stride. By the time The Joshua Tree came out, they had reached the moment where they were as big as The Beatles in their prime, and even if that was undercut by the embarrassing scenes in Rattle and Hum, Bono still held onto those same beliefs, even when they had to take a hatchet to their old sound.
They needed to keep evolving if they wanted to survive, and releasing Achtung Baby right before hair metal died out was the best decision they could have made. Grunge was about to take over and lay waste to every other phoney rock and roll act, so having Bono take that persona to the nth degree to the point of self-parody was a much better version of a rockstar than trying to be a zealot of rock and roll.
Because for the most part, the Seattle crowd was already beginning to take what U2 had been doing and putting their own spin on it. The world had been inundated with hair metal, and when Kurt Cobain crashlanded on MTV, he was the breath of fresh air that put every other teased-haired frontman to rest. But even if Cobain leaned into everything, Pearl Jam was a much different story.
When you break it down, Pearl Jam scanned properly as a decent hard rock outfit, even if hair metal persisted, but that’s also the reason why Eddie Vedder was so uncomfortable. No one in the band wanted to get famous this quickly, and Vedder’s decision to pull away from the fame and stardom looked like one of the single dumbest career moves anyone could have made at the time.
And Vedder recalled a few conversations where Bono really let him have it, saying, “I’ve had conversations with Bono back in the day. He was suggesting that we needed to work harder and that you didn’t want rock ’n’ roll to become a niche. He said that when U2 makes a record, it’s like they’ve got a racehorse and they don’t just want the horse in the race, they want to win the race. I said we race the horse and then we let the horse run free. I wasn’t trying to be clever. That was the truth. He was frustrated with me.”
Neither approach to rock is exactly wrong, but when looking at where Pearl Jam have ended up over the years, it’s clear they picked the perfect route for themselves. They didn’t have to cash in on trends at the time, and by pulling themselves away, they were able to call their own shots a bit more and make the kind of records that they wanted to hear rather than play along with the market the same way U2 did on Pop.
That might mean having a few records that don’t have the same kind of impact that U2’s classics did when they were first released. They finished their time as the biggest band in the world relatively quickly, and the rest of their time featured them relating to their audience on a more natural level that fits somewhere between a traditional rock and roll outfit and something like the Grateful Dead. The fairweather fans might leave after a while, but that core audience is never going away.
