The one singer Bono says will stay with you forever: “It’s extraordinary”
There are two schools of thinking whenever it comes to Bono: he’s either a rock and roll saviour or he’s a self-righteous windbag.
While both parties are right to some degree when it comes to the frontman, there’s no question that he was at least reverent when it came to all good rock and roll that he was raised on when he first heard The Clash and The Beatles when he was younger. He wanted to make music that meant just as much as those bands did for him, and while he did make a few enemies along the way, he wasn’t about to apologise for speaking his mind, either.
Sure, it can get more than a little bit tiresome to listen to him wax poetic about the greater atrocities going on in the world, but chances are that not everyone is playing for a U2 ticket to hear him talk about his politics. But even if he drags out his speeches a bit too long for some people’s tastes, Bono knew that all good rock and roll meant documenting the times, even if that came with upsetting a few people.
‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ was a real risk for them to take when they first recorded it back in the 1980s, but when you look through Bono’s influences, all of them had decided to shake people up whenever they played. Joe Strummer wasn’t looking to play everyone some catchy tunes with The Clash, and by the time John Lennon was out of The Beatles, he was going to throw out his darkest feelings into the world, even if it meant alienating a few people on Plastic Ono Band.
But years before the Fab Four had even started to branch out, Bob Dylan was already telling everyone about the greater problems with the world. He didn’t fit the description of what a rock and roll star was supposed to be, but you could feel the genuine hurt in his voice whenever he sang tunes like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, almost like he was desperate for answers to questions about why men cater towards violence.
And when he did write story-driven songs, they were practically modern biblical passages set to music. These were modern parables about the way that we treat each other, and while not everyone needed to know the specifics of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, they could relate to someone who was trying their best to live a normal life and the malicious pig that wanted to bring her life to an end for merely not meeting his specifications.
This was about bringing morality into rock and roll, and Bono felt that what Dylan was saying was bound to stick with people for the rest of their lives, saying when talking about the song ‘Brownsville Girl’, “Whether she’s real or imagined isn’t important to me, but it’s extraordinary. In your twenties you’re not so much interested in ideas like that: you’re more interested in ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. But Bob Dylan is there for you at every stage of your life.”
That doesn’t mean that Dylan is a musical chameleon by any stretch, but when looking at how he approaches his work, every era of his career is about what it means to be truly human. It’s easy for kids to get riled up when they hear his protest songs for the first time, but he covers practically everything that you’ll ever go through, from historical fiction to heartache to what might lie on the other side when you start thinking about one day crossing over to the next phase of existence.
You can say that he doesn’t have a voice by any stretch, and while that might even be true to some extent, it was never about the tone whenever Dylan sang any of his songs. It was about performing with conviction, and no matter which era Bono found himself listening to, he knew that he was hearing someone that didn’t mince any of his words when it came time to quote his own heart.
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