“You can see the sun shining”: When Bono named the perfect summer band in 1998
One of the more difficult feats for any rock band to pull off is the ability to have songs sound joyful. It’s not as easy as Bono simply wailing, “It’s a beautiful day!”
While it almost goes without saying that music should make people feel good whenever they listen to it, some of the biggest rock songs of all time have also been thrashy epics about lashing out in anger, with some of the most hardened badasses singing about how they won’t be pushed around. To some extent, that’s the spirit and origin story of rock ‘n’ roll.
Although Bono tried to put a bit of hope into every one of U2’s best songs, he knew that there was a bit of promise for the rest of the rock scene if he only looked for it. It seems he is often looking for the fabled middle-ground between pop and rock, which he defined as thus: “Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it’s not OK, but you can change it.”
It’s a middle-ground that most certainly exists. It’s hard to think of optimistic pop songs without bringing up The Beatles. While The Rolling Stones were the ones that were easier to copy from, Liverpool’s native sons were always the ones that preached with love first and anger second, with John Lennon especially saving all of his pent-up aggression for his solo years on albums like Plastic Ono Band and Some Time in New York City.
But, really, no rock band can have the good without the bad. Any tune that relies on sounding chipper without acknowledging the struggle that it took to be happy always sounds toothless after a while, which is why a tune like ‘Walking on Sunshine’ might not have the same gut reaction with someone as ‘Born to Run’ does, since Bruce Springsteen understands that escape from his nowhere town comes with a sense of victory.
Bono wasn’t even immune to that kind of approach to lyricism, either. War was U2’s first album where they could double down on all of their anger at the world, but The Joshua Tree saw them getting a lot more hopeful for the future. There would be tunes that had themes of moving forward like ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, songs that acknowledged the realities we still face on ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, and tracks that made loneliness sound happy on ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’.
“You can see the sun shining in their songs.”
Bono
Even with the greatest artists of all time behind him, though, Bono knew REM brought something different to the table. In his mind, they were the ultimate summer rock band. While a lot of what Michael Stipe said could vary between being abstract, straight as an arrow, and borderline unintelligible, it almost didn’t matter when he had the sound of Peter Buck’s jangly guitar or Mike Mills singing the perfect counterpoint to him in the background.
Although there were a lot of artists who could be mock-happy, Bono thought he was looking at the sunniest band to come of the alternative era when he heard them, saying, “Normally you can see the sun shining in their songs. REM are a co-op, a four-legged table, a real band in that everyone’s voice is heard (this is more difficult than you think). REM have pulled off the impossible, a giant group that doesn’t appear so. . . . Standout tunes.”
It’s not all “shiny happy people” in their discography; in fact, that’s a track that the band themselves loathe, but from ‘Nightswimming’ to ‘Orange Crush’, you can picture protagonists plunging into cool lakes on warm nights and taking long road trips. Their guitarist, Peter Buck, ventured that perhaps this is all because they often get associated with the flowery nature of the 1960s.
“There’s no conscious 60s influence. The idea that you can do whatever you want with pop songs, and play around with structures, as we do, is more punk to me than anything else – not that we’re a punk band. Maybe it’s because we’re melodic rather than buzzsaw that we come across as a 60s band,” he told the Guardian.
And that’s actually part of the magic behind their tunes. No one in REM claimed to be a rock and roll god, and yet they still managed to sell out stadiums while remaining underground for the majority of their career. Even when playing mammoth gigs like Slane Castle, Stipe seemed to approach the show like a club gig that happened to be a little bit bigger than it normally was.
While some people may have wanted more out of their rock stars, REM never bothered to cower to what other people wanted. All they could do was be themselves, and by following their muse throughout their career, they somehow managed to remind everyone that there was always an option to make their own career path as long as they had the right idea behind them.
