(Credits: Far Out / Daniel Hazard)
Thu 1 January 2026 17:05, UK
For the average rock and roll, Bono seems to be one of the few frontmen who doesn’t really know when to shut up.
He has written some fine songs for U2 and has been a godsend for his philanthropic work over the years, but he has also earned the award for being one of the most pretentious rock stars on the planet, thanks to the way he conducts himself onstage like a living musical messiah. But when he got down off the soapbox, he realised that his music was about something bigger than whatever platitudes he had to talk about in between songs.
Then again, it’s not like the band has knocked it out of the park every single time they tried to make a record. Songs of Innocence is still a bad memory for anyone who owned an Apple product circa 2014, and while there were moments where they could take chances that paid off, it’s clear that Pop certainly wasn’t one of their shining moments as a group. But in their prime, there was no one who could touch them.
They were already a bit of a weird case when they stormed out of the post-punk years with albums like Boy, but even with the other anthemic rock bands that came out around the same time, like The Alarm and Big Country, U2 stood apart from everyone. They were fascinated by the mythmaking that came along with rock and roll, and while a lot of their music had that kind of self-serious nature to it on War, it wasn’t until The Joshua Tree that people started to realise what they were listening to.
This was a band that wanted to change the world in the same way that The Beatles and Led Zeppelin had done before them, and by the end of the 1980s, it looked like they could pull it off. And if there was anything that sealed the deal, it was Achtung Baby coming out in 1991. A band with that sense of self-worth should have been dead in the water in the age of grunge, and yet ‘The Fly’ introduced everyone to what could be done if the band loosened up and embraced the irony of their place in the world.
Some musical potholes were just around the corner, but even when they made their musical revival on records like All That You Can’t Leave Behind, they were still open to trying new things. ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ remains a classic from their renaissance period, and while tunes like ‘Vertigo’ from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb managed to land on the radio, there was a much more mature band waiting on the rest of the record on songs like ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’.
But above all of the pretentious moments like Bono’s political speeches and nearly everything that turned up in Rattle and Hum, the frontman was convinced that his music would be played for decades after they’re gone, saying, “In terms of my work, I think the activism will be forgotten, and I hope it will, because I hope those problems will have gone away. But our music will be here in 50 years, 100 years time. Our songs occupy an emotional terrain that didn’t exist before this group did.”
That might look like the height of pretentiousness for anyone who has working retinas, but there is some truth to that. Most artists of their stature weren’t willing to write those kinds of earnest songs at the time, and even when grunge came along, U2 were among the only bands brave enough to make songs like ‘One’ or be able to help an entire nation move on from a tragedy like 9/11 on tunes like ‘Walk On’.
For all the work that Bono put into becoming one of the greatest activists of his time, though, it says a lot that he puts his accomplishments as a musician before any of them. Because no matter how hard he tries to change the world, the one thing that most people will never forget about U2 is the way those songs made them feel, whether they were getting into them during the War era or were sucked in the minute they heard ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’.
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