U2, Nirvana and why Bono called Kurt Cobain a “pop star”
In the history of rock ‘n’ roll, there have been few bands that’ve reached the level of cultural ubiquity and sheer size of U2.
They’re the kind of band that everyone, no matter how familiar with their music they are, has an opinion on, and they were that kind of band a long, long time before they stuffed their 2014 album Songs of Innocence onto everyone’s iTunes account without consent. Yet, despite this level of notoriety and audacity, it’s difficult to call them a pop group. No matter what you think of them, they’re unique in a way that I don’t think enough people give them credit for.
This is a band that became the biggest in the world not by releasing bite-sized pop classics that everyone and their mother could hum after six months without hearing it. Instead, they reached that scale by, quite simply, acting at that scale, then letting the public come to them. A band whose star-making slot at Live Aid consisted of two songs over the course of about 16 minutes. Whose first three singles from The Joshua Tree, their biggest album ever, each clocked in at nearly five minutes. Two of them hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 all the same.
This is despite U2 regularly saying that they wouldn’t be a band if it weren’t for the Ramones and The Clash. Despite their hilarious misfire of a tour documentary, Rattle & Hum, featuring an extended, brutally cringe-worthy sequence where they visit Graceland and fawn over Elvis Presley. Despite the band releasing a whole album in 1997 called Pop, with reverence for classic pop songs and classic pop songwriting, they’ve just never really made them.
There are a few in their back catalogue, often so consciously made that they come across a little like pastiches but they are there. They’re mainly found on the accompanying soundtrack album to Rattle & Hum with singles like ‘Desire’ and ‘Angel of Harlem’. ‘Mysterious Ways’ from their masterpiece Achtung Baby counts if you squint, but the band arguably didn’t start making these traditional pop classics until the early 2000s.
What inspired U2 to make these pop songs?
There’s an argument to be made that 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and 2004’s How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb marked the commercial peak of U2, especially over an extended period of time. They may have been bigger for individual albums, like the aforementioned Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, but followed both of those records up with commercial stumbles so bad they had to go away and, in Bono’s words, “dream it all up again”. Leave Behind was the result of that attitude after Pop, and its follow-up was equally successful.
This came from two seemingly disparate inspirations: the desire to be a proper rock band for the first time in their career, and the desire to start writing pure pop songs. Surely those two don’t work together, but then you look at the singles they released over that time and start to see where they’re coming from. ‘Beautiful Day’, ‘Walk On’, ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of‘, ‘Vertigo’, ‘All Because of You’, all songs that walk the line perfectly between being recognisable rock songs and undeniably brilliant pop songs. To Bono, though, those two concepts are one and the same.
In a radio interview conducted at the time Atomic Bomb was released, Bono was asked if it was important to have a hit single and responded, “Yes, I want to have hits, sure! The greatest rock and roll songs are pop songs. I love that interview with Kurt Cobain where he says “I’m a pop star, this is a pop song”. He was a great student of The Beatles and Buzzcocks, and whether it’s The Sex Pistols or The Clash or The Rolling Stones or The Kinks or The Who, they’re great moments, those great 45s.”
Kurt Cobain is arguably the coolest example of what U2 were going for with that pair of albums. Stripped down, guitar-led rock ‘n’ roll wrapped around delicious pop melodies. It was U2’s commercial peak, and the further that the band have strayed from that path since, the more cataclysmic their career has gotten. Coincidence? I think not.
