The U2 song Bono said would be at “the top of my list”
It doesn’t take someone like Bono to start talking about the genius of his own band.
While his love of all things rock and roll has made him either look like a firm believer in the power of music or one of the biggest pretentious windbags on the planet, you can’t deny that he always believed that music had the power to change the world every single time that the band plays live. But even if he isn’t proud of everything he’s done, he’s willing to admit when the rest of the band knocks it out of the park.
Then again, a lot of what makes U2 work doesn’t have to do with any of The Edge’s effects or the strange rhythms that Larry Mullen Jr plays underneath everything. That certainly helps, but many of the best U2 songs ever made come from the passion that the band are playing with, whether that’s the raw anger in Bono’s voice singing ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ or the entire band capturing themselves playing live in a room on ‘Vertigo’.
Even if they have a lot of great moments together, the one valid critique of the band is their need to feel important. There’s a reason why they had one of the best performances at Live Aid after Queen, but when looking at the footage from Rattle and Hum, it’s easy to dismiss them as a band calling their shot as one of the greatest bands in the world. When you’ve reached an album like The Joshua Tree, though, you could basically do whatever you want.
For years, the band had been painting a picture of their love for America, and on their fifth outing, they took everything that they had built up to create their magnum opus. Bono was at the peak of his vocal range throughout the entire record, but before we even hear a note that comes out of his mouth, ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ makes the entire album feel like you’re watching a musical movie in your headphones.
And while Bono has said that his lyrics are far from his best, he couldn’t argue that the rest of the band created a masterpiece underneath his voice, saying, “I love the idea of the song–about taking someone on a journey, because that’s what a concert is. It’s saying to the audience, ‘We may be in a car park or a stadium or some other absurd place to listen to music but the music can take us somewhere else. It can transcend time and place.’ As a piece of music, it is near the very top of our stuff for me.”
But that work of genius was about more than simply writing a cool opening to the record. The whole thing was meticulously designed to get everyone to lean into whatever the band were working on, and while getting the right take was so frustrating that Brian Eno was writing everything out on a blackboard, it was worth it knowing that they found that little bit of magic in the studio.
Even at this stage in their career, though, the band never forgot about putting the passion into every single note they played. There are many moving parts that make up ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, but if you were to put Bono’s vocals and The Edge’s guitar parts next to a track like ‘One’, the reason why both of them work is because you can feel that everyone is 100% committed to giving their fans the best song that they have ever heard.
Bono might still be in search of the one classic song that everyone forgets about, but ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ has earned its spot at the peak of U2’s career for a reason. You can take one look at the man at the front with the sunglasses and automatically roll your eyes, but before anyone even knows what the song is, hearing those cascading guitars is the musical equivalent of looking through a time tunnel into the future.
