The singer Bono said no one could ever match: “To be that extraordinary”
The art of being a frontman is something that Bono has either mastered or defiled, depending on who you talk to.
The goal of any singer is to have a certain rapport with the audience before they even open their mouth to sing, but when you listen to his voice soaring over the crowd, you’re either in for one of the most heartfelt performances anyone has ever given or potentially a political rant talking about all the problems going on in the world. But if there’s anything that Bono’s favourite vocalists taught him, it was the importance of being honest every single time you had that microphone in your hand.
Considering all of the vocalists that Bono holds in high esteem, all of them are looking at the real problems going on in the world rather than the traditional love song dynamic. John Lennon grew out of that teenybopper phase of his career relatively quickly, and when listening to Bruce Springsteen rock his way through any stadium that he’s ever played, there’s not one second that you don’t believe that he thinks that his brand of rock and roll could change the Earth’s rotation, if only for a second.
Hell, sometimes Bono’s favourite acts didn’t even need to sound completely coherent to feel the emotion behind their tunes. Astral Weeks by Van Morrison is one of the most gorgeously unintelligible albums of all time if you’re willing to sit with it, but when listening to the way that he bends his voice across songs like ‘Sweet Thing’, it’s enough to get anyone emotional hearing that voice plough through the track.
There are plenty of singers like that who make the most out of the gift they have, but the true legends that Bono watched really belong in their own category. Every single frontman in rock and roll practically studied what Elvis Presley did during his comeback special in the late 1960s, but whereas ‘The King’ was an unstoppable force of nature whenever he sang, Johnny Cash was the most unmistakable voice the pop world had ever seen.
His songs weren’t the hardest things to master on guitar, but good luck to anyone even attempting to imitate that deep baritone voice. It’s one thing trying to hit all the right notes, but the inflections that he puts on every word on At Folsom Prison ranges from scary to hilarious to heartbreaking throughout the setlist. And even when ‘The Man in Black’ did his version of U2’s ‘One’, Bono figured that no one could deliver it like that.
There was simply too much character in Cash’s voice to even come close to what he did on record, with the Irish frontman saying, “Every man could relate to him, but nobody could be him. To be that extraordinary and that ordinary was his real gift. That, and his humor and his bare-boned honesty. He just couldn’t be self-righteous. I think he was a very godly man, but you had the sense that he had spent his time in the desert. And that just made you like him more. It gave his songs some dust. And that voice was definitely locusts and honey.”
And that honesty stayed with him until the very end when making his final recordings with Rick Rubin. Anyone could have bowed out and lived the rest of their lives with their family, but after spending years as one of the forgotten legends of country, Cash still had some wisdom to impart down to his final moments tracking the song ‘Hurt’, which is still one of the most heartbreaking songs anyone has ever made.
So while Bono can spend all the time he wants trying to put his name in history as a philanthropist, he knows as well as anyone that he will live on through his music the same way that Cash will. Any musician can manage to leave an impact for a little while, but when someone makes it onto the charts by saying what they feel, that’s the kind of material that will last for centuries to come.
