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The rock singer Bono said was as important as Picasso: “Above anyone else”

Mon 11 May 2026 4:00, UK

Rock and roll always needed to mean a little bit more to Bono every single time he took the microphone.

U2 may have wanted to ascend to the same heights that their heroes did back in the day, but it was impossible to think that they were going to be one of the biggest bands since The Rolling Stones when they were cutting their teeth in Ireland back in the day. It didn’t make sense for anyone to think along those lines, but Bono could only emulate the best musicians that he heard out of his stereo.

Then again, the biggest tension in U2 usually came from all of them having wildly different tastes. There was no way that Bono would have been caught dead learning a progressive rock song by any stretch, and yet here he was in a band with The Edge playing harmonic licks that wouldn’t have felt out of place next to Steve Howe of Yes. It was definitely a strange combination at the time, but Bono knew that their passion behind the music mattered more than how the music sounded.

After all, the greatest artists of all time didn’t get to where they were by having everything sound perfect. There were mistakes scattered throughout every one of The Beatles’ best albums, and even when the Fab Four flew solo for the first time, Bono needed to have every single one of his vocals be half as good as the shrieks that he heard when John Lennon cried himself out on Plastic Ono Band.

But when you get past the emotion behind their music, the reason why those songs still resonate is because of what Bono is talking about. It’s easy to roll your eyes and the various call-outs to religion throughout their career, but Bono was also just as interested in making songs that made everyone think. Not everyone was used to bands going out on a limb on tracks like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, but Bono knew that anything that he heard from Bob Dylan was worthy of putting on a record.

He had gravitated towards the likes of Van Morrison in his homeland for years, but Dylan was giving the world something special. The Beatles had opened our ears to different soundscapes on their records, but Dylan was speaking to your soul every single time he sang. He wanted to make sure that no one settled for cookie-cutter music ever again, so when Bono got the chance to meet the scribe in person, it was like being knighted by one of the almighty titans of songwriting.

Dylan was just as much in awe of what U2 were capable of, but Bono felt that what Dylan was doing had more to do with high art than anything connected to rock and roll, saying, “I love Bob above anyone else in what you could call pop music. He is the guy whose suitcase I’d carry, whose taxi I’d call, whose drinks’ bill I’d swallow and whose grave I’d dig. He is the Picasso of pop music to me. He’s Dickens. He’s Shakespeare. He’s Thackery…with a smidge of Charlie Chaplin thrown in.”

And when looking at his lyrics, comparing him to legends like Picasso wasn’t exactly that far off, either. Most rock and roll fans didn’t really understand what they were listening to when they first heard tunes like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ or ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, but after those few minutes were over, the world seemed to sound different. Dylan had been speaking to the people with an acoustic guitar in his hands, but when he went electric, it was his opportunity to shift rock and roll on its axis.

Bono certainly has a few songs in his catalogue that could stand alongside Dylan’s works of art, but no matter how much people can dissect a tune like ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, there’s no way of replacing what Dylan could do. This was someone grappling with the problems with the world and letting the chips fall where they may, and that taught Bono a valuable lesson. Whatever he said was going to be set in stone forever, so he had better make it count.