The one singer Bono thinks will be played for eternity
The rock and roll that Bono loved wasn’t supposed to be a flash in the pan.
He built his career off of songs that he felt would live on as hymns, and while that might seem like one of the most pretentious things that any rockstar could claim to do, it’s not like he couldn’t back it up when he wrote tunes like ‘One’ and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. Some of them might age better than others, but as long as someone was making music that was authentic, Bono knew that they would live on until the sun burned out of the sky.
After all, that’s the same mentality that he saw in a lot of his favourite acts. If you think about all of the greatest bands from the psychedelic era, the reason why The Beatles stand out is that they never got caught up in too many trends. They wanted to talk about universal subjects, and by going for love, peace and making the world a better place, it’s hardly a cynical message that they were trying to give the world. But music looked a lot different by the time U2 had started.
There was still a certain respect for The Beatles, but the biggest names in punk were trying to chop down the legacy that the Fab Four started. No one needed to hear a sophisticated take on pop music anymore, and when listening to what everyone from Sex Pistols to The Clash were doing, it was no longer about how fast you could play. What mattered was if you were playing from the heart, but that kind of passion wasn’t exclusive to punk.
Sure, there were people from the prog sphere that sounded like they were doing exercises every single time they made a record, but the real legends were playing every note like it was their last. They wanted to make every song feel like it was a matter of life or death, and while Bono fell in love with that style of rock and roll, there was no one who could put their finger on what Lou Reed was doing.
Both in the Velvet Underground and on his own, Reed still remains one of the most enigmatic characters that rock and roll ever spat out. He may have been insanely confrontational when it came to his music at some points, but the only reason was that he was so close to it. He might not have written autobiographical songs every single time he made a record, but when listening to Berlin or Transformer, both have the same kind of immediacy in the way that they deliver their songs.
Not everyone was going to get what Reed was going for, but Bono felt that people would still be singing his praises until the end of time, saying, “The music is eternal. It will keep being made even without him. It’s too easy to think of Lou Reed as a wild creature who put songs about heroin in the pop charts. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. He was thoughtful, meditative and extremely disciplined.”
He did a good job at playing up the kind of gutter rat that hung out at Max’s Kansas City back in the day, but anyone from Bono to David Bowie to Patti Smith would have told you, he was a much softer soul than he let on. His music was a part of his life, and while it wasn’t always the prettiest thing in the world, you can hear a lifetime’s worth of experience every single time one of his songs comes on.
His voice might not be the greatest, and it’s completely understandable that the general public would latch on to someone like Bono, but what Reed created was beyond a couple of decent underground songs. Whereas most artists claim to have rock and roll chops, Reed was rock and roll in every sense of the word, and it wasn’t until he passed away that everyone realised that the world was a little darker without him.
