The one vocalist Bono was always jealous of: “So many characters come together”
Music is never meant to be a competition. It’s always about projecting the innermost feelings someone has in their heart and hoping to bring it across efficiently within just a few minutes on record. Most people are lucky enough to capture that kind of feeling on a few occasions, but while Bono has made legions of fans understand themselves a bit more through his lyrics, he thought that he was nothing compared to what Patti Smith had been doing nearly a decade before he burst onto the scene.
Then again, there’s a good chance that many fans would want to tell Bono to shut the hell up sometimes when singing what’s in his heart. Despite his lyrics being absolutely spellbinding across The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, hearing him translate those emotions live led to moments of him going off-script and sounding like one of the most self-righteous buffoons to ever touch a microphone.
But that kind of soapbox delivery has served him quite well on a few occasions, too. U2’s performance at Live Aid was absolutely electric because of his rallying cries onstage, and for as much trash talk the band got for partnering with Apple in the 2000s, their decision to take a stand on political issues during the Iraq War ended up serving various charity organizations quite well around the same time.
For all of Bono’s preachiness, though, it still came from a sincere place, and Smith practically built her career off of sincerity. She was never going to spend her time trying to bend over backwards for what any label wanted, and when she launched onto the scene as a frontwoman on Horses, she wanted to leave her emotions and raw energy on the vinyl the same way her idols like Jimi Hendrix had.
At the same time, considering her strictly as the ‘Godmother of Punk’ feels wrong. She was never thinking in those terms when she got started, and listening back to how she constructs all of her anthems, her delivery toes the line between outright singing and slam poetry most of the time, especially when she hit upon magic on albums like Wave and Easter.
Despite being one of the most high-profile frontmen in the world, Bono still thought that Smith was fighting the kind of battles he wished he could tackle, saying in Surrender, “Patti Smith has served words and melody, and I notice that I’m jealous of her singularity and purpose. So many of the characters I wish to inhabit come together in Patti Smith: the poet, the seer, the spitting-venom punk rocker, the revelry and reverie…Above all, the pilgrim. Leaving home to find home.”
Looking at how he constructs many of his lyrics, it’s not like that influence isn’t on his sleeve, either. When listening to ‘New Year’s Day’ or the more pointed political material like ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, the frontman is just as willing to stick his next out on the line just like his hero did, down to the outro of the latter where he starts rambling in a free-verse style about being welcomed into the dystopian world of America.
But even without the punk credentials, Smith dared everyone else to dream of something better. No one wants to find themselves unhappy in their own skin, and through her work, she taught everyone that life was about finding something out of the world deeper than yourself.
