The one singer Bono said was out of everyone’s league: “A great mash of joy and sadness”
The music that Bono loved was never held to be exclusively rock and roll.
From the minute he started singing, a lot of his favourite artists were the ones that could make you feel something whenever they performed, and that could have been as diverse as John Lennon crying out in pain to the raw pain that Billie Holiday could project whenever you heard her sing ‘Strange Fruit’. Regardless of genre, that kind of emotion can go a long way, so it’s no surprise that U2 started to feel the same way when switching up their sound.
They weren’t exactly David Bowie levels of experimental whenever they made a new record, but there was a lot more going on than a bunch of rock and roll anthems. The fact that Achtung Baby managed to succeed in any capacity is a strange miracle for anyone to pull off, but by putting on a pair of sunglasses and playing up what it means to be a rock and roll star, Bono was clearly doing a piss take of what the insufferable frontman is supposed to be like.
He was still the same old rock and roll messiah figure that he always was, but he could at least find the humour in taking himself too seriously. At the same time, it’s strange to think that putting on that act and pretending to be God’s gift to frontmen everywhere actually managed to put him in the same league as the true giants of the industry. No one had thought that U2 were ready to be jamming with BB King back in the late 1980s, but Bono had moved on to hanging out with Johnny Cash by this point.
But was there any rule that said the U2 frontman couldn’t expand his horizons? Sure, some of the purists of rock and roll may have been a little bit pissed off, but if anyone got a call saying that they could sing a song with Frank Sinatra, it would be pretty hard for them to say no to that. Bono had been taking things one step at a time, still after making records like Zooropa, but you’ve truly reached a higher status as a musician when writing a song for Pavarotti to sing.
Even when stacked up against Freddie Mercury, there is no sense in anyone trying to compete with what Pavarotti could do. There are many rock stars who have tried to share the stage with the classical legend to get some sense of credibility, but there was never any duet partner that he couldn’t wipe the floor with, even when Bono joined him singing the song ‘Miss Sarajevo’. But what set Pavarotti apart wasn’t about the raw finesse of his vocals.
It was more in the way that he approached every single note he sang, and when Bono listened, all he heard was his soul coming out through his mouth, saying, “No one could inhabit those acrobatic melodies and words like him. He lived the songs, his opera was a great mash of joy and sadness; surreal and earthy at the same time; a great volcano of a man who sang fire but spilled over with a love of life in all its complexity, a great and generous friend.”
This probably explains why some of the greatest musicians in the rock realm eventually try and match what he did. There’s a lot of vocal precision that comes with singing some of Pavarotti’s greatest tunes, but his lyrical phrasing was what set him apart. He admittedly wasn’t always as articulate when he was singing in English, but when singing in Italian on a song like ‘Nessun Dorma’, you’d hardly find anyone in the audience who isn’t moved by the sheer power behind his voice as well.
Bono may have tried his hand at reaching the greatest peaks he could as a vocalist, but even with a song like ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, there’s no chance that any singer, rock and roll or otherwise, will ever come close to what a legend like this could. Others can try to equal him, but what Pavarotti did on his own was almost too beautiful for words.
