The one genre Bono said produces “the poorest singers”
There was always a hidden superpower that Bono gained every single time he was onstage with U2.
He may be looked at as an insufferable rock star who feels that everything he does is the most important thing in the world, and while that may be true to some degree, is that really a bad thing for any singer to believe? Anyone should want their music to have the ability to change the world, and if you’re going to say something that’s going to last forever, it’s going to need to have a great singer at the centre of everything.
But great singing can mean a lot of different things in rock and roll. If you look at the technical definition of great vocals and having fantastic posture and an amazing range, you’d probably say that Freddie Mercury is the best, but what does that say about someone like Little Richard? His voice wasn’t the cleanest sound in the world, but when you hear him tearing through any of his hits, there’s no one in the world who isn’t saying that it’s one of the greatest voices they’ve ever heard.
And what about someone like Bob Dylan? The dude had a voice that would have sounded like a clothes hanger being shoved into your ears, but what he had to say when he sang meant a lot more than any technique. Bono was transfixed by any singer who had the capacity to say something, and it didn’t matter whether he was making songs with Pavarotti or looking to see what John Lennon could do at his most caustic.
U2 certainly had their fair share of opinions whenever they made one of their records as well, but Bono had a mission that went far beyond playing everything correctly. They wanted to bring positivity into the world, and even though he identified as a punk when he first started, he wanted to make sure that nothing that they ever did was about death and destruction. There were hard times that they needed to address, but their mission was always about bringing a bit of light to the world.
That’s certainly a noble ambition, but that’s not what the sound of rock and roll was at the time. The biggest names in music were the heaviest acts in rock and roll, and while Bono could find a lot of merit in songs like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin or any of AC/DC’s classic riffs, there was always going to be an asterisk next to every single heavy metal band that he ever came across.
Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy may have been the closest to heavy metal that Bono hung out with, but he had no time for metal vocalists who screamed whatever they wanted into the microphone, saying, “Heavy metal is one of the most empty-headed formats lyrically, with the poorest singers across the spectrum of pop.” But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be exceptions to the rule along the way as well.
No one in their right mind was going to call Ozzy Osbourne a bad vocalist on any of those early Black Sabbath records, and while Lars Ulrich of Metallica did eventually strike up a relationship with Bono, James Hetfield did much more than shout on a lot of their records. He didn’t carve himself out to be a vocalist, but it takes a lot of time and attention to nail the kind of phrases that he hit on tunes like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ or ‘The Unforgiven’.
They might not be reaching the same level that Bono necessarily wanted out of his favourite voices, but all they were doing was expressing themselves in a different way. The lyrics about Satan and the end of the world may have been a bit macabre for him to take in, but metal was still a genre for people that wanted to share their innermost feelings with the world.
