The U2 song The Edge doesn’t enjoy listening to: “It never sat right for me”
Half of the appeal of U2’s songs comes down to how The Edge plays guitar.
Sure, Bono has the kind of range that any other singer would have killed to have in their prime, but whenever those delayed effects started going back and forth in the speakers, it often sounds like stepping into the future whenever the rest of the band locks in together. And while The Edge had a lot of landmarks across all of U2’s discography, there are more than a few songs that he would rather not go back to whenever going through their old classics.
But that’s often the nature of the beast, isn’t it? Every band has to start somewhere, and even for a group of legends like them, there’s a good chance that the songs off of Boy mean something a lot different to them whenever they play them live today. That must feel like a whole different generation to them, but The Edge was always working on making his own niche as a guitar hero. Because, really, what he did on guitar wasn’t natural for the average rock and roll guitarist.
He was no match for the blues heroes that had come before him, nor did he care to be. His strengths were in building parts like his contemporaries, like Andy Summers, and despite the rest of his effects pedals doing some of the work for him, that doesn’t make him a poor guitarist. You can say that he is an average guitarist without the delay effects, but to say that he isn’t that good is like saying a peanut butter sandwich isn’t as good without jelly. Technically, you’re right, but you’re thinking about it all wrong.
Then again, it’s not like The Edge is proud of everything they created. Even someone like Bono could admit when they struck out on records like Pop, but The Edge was the perfectionist who needed everything that he made to sound right once he started making some of their best records. And while War already showed them growing towards the band that they would later become, The Unforgettable Fire did have a few rough edges in his mind.
The album itself is one of the finest that they had ever made up until that point, but ‘Elvis Presley and America’ was bound to be divisive for people who weren’t as into their artsy side that much. But that didn’t matter when they had a wrecking ball of a track like ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’. Bono had captured a feeling better than anyone else ever could, and yet it’s one of the few songs that the guitar legend never wants to hear again.
The song has all the elements that made the band legends, but The Edge felt that there were pieces of the track that could have been a lot better from a sonic standpoint, saying, “Here’s a case where I think the song itself is better than the record. It never fully sat right for me as a recording. I thought we touched on a rhythmic approach that we could never follow all the way down. It may have been our limitation as musicians. On my list, it would be somewhere in the middle rather than near the top.”
But being overrated in a band’s catalogue isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If anything, this is the song that helped launch them into the stratosphere on both sides of the Atlantic, and even if it came with a bit of controversy by scumbags that felt that one of the greatest activists of the modern age wasn’t all that important, there’s no way to erase the impact that Martin Luther King Jr had on legions of people that wanted to see a world where people are judged by their character rather than the colour of their skin.
So while there might be a few bum notes or the occasional effect that didn’t go off like it was supposed to, ‘Pride’ doesn’t even seem to exist in that kind of league anymore. It was about finding the kind of music that would move people, and even if The Edge doesn’t like listening to it, it’s much better for him to take a chance on something a little off than playing it safe with the perfect take.
