![\"Bono](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Bono-Singer-U2-U-2-2019-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n
Bono<\/a> didn\u2019t sign up to be a rock and roll star just to emulate the kinds of artists that he had seen on television. <\/p>\n There are many opportunities for people to break into the mainstream, but the reason why most of them stay at the top of the charts is that they have something to say that lasts a lot longer than any trends do whenever they have an idea for a song. And while U2 have practically cornered the market on their brand of larger-than-life rock and roll, that only came from Bono starting at the underground level.<\/p>\n The biggest names in punk were what he studied well before playing to massive stadiums, and even if the band have become one of the biggest sellouts that the genre ever saw, it was never about them trying to be massive pop stars. Bono still wanted to enact change, and a lot of the causes that they are shooting for are all meant to be part of a much bigger way to help the world that isn\u2019t necessarily about the spectacle.<\/p>\n The stage show does get everyone to pay attention to a certain degree, but the lion\u2019s share of the greatest moments in U2\u2019s career have come when they are working off the stage. Their tunes are the hymns that have helped people figure themselves out, and a lot of that came from Bono looking deeper at what people like Bob Dylan<\/a> and John Lennon had to say. And yet when looking at all of them next to each other, no one seemed to have the same kind of authority that Patti Smith did.<\/p>\n Smith was far from the first hard rocker to come out of New York, but her brand of rock and roll was about a lot more than a couple of chords. She only needed a few basic rudiments to make her statement, but whenever someone heard \u2018Gloria\u2019, they weren\u2019t just listening to someone who was making rock and roll. This was a living art piece<\/a> that was weaving throughout every one of her tunes, and Bono couldn\u2019t ignore what he was hearing if he tried when he first laid ears on Horses.\u00a0<\/p>\n The songs were already fantastic, but it was the persona that Smith gave off that struck a nerve in him, saying<\/a>, \u201cThere was something about her music that separated her from the rest of the pack. I think that was the mixture of the profane and the sacred.\u201d No one had heard anything like her, but even if it was too heavy for most people to take in at the time, Bono was absolutely smitten that someone could have actually managed to make something that sounded that raw and real.<\/p>\n A lot of people like to classify Smith as the queen of the punk rockers and everything, but that\u2019s really selling her way too short. Punk was only a blip on the radar when she first started, and while Ramones and Sex Pistols came later and began making more hard-edged music<\/a>, none of them seemed to have the same kind of lyrical prowess as she did. Smith was a poet that turned herself into a musician, and Bono was willing to reverse engineer that by turning from a rock singer into a poet.<\/p>\n Not everything that U2 made throughout their glory years is necessarily known for having the best lyrics, but the one thing you can\u2019t deny is the conviction that Bono has singing them. You can hear him struggling with his own sense of faith on a record like October, and while everyone might not have been ready for how political he would sometimes get on records like War, he was still willing to put his beliefs out there for the world to see the same way that Smith did on all of her records.<\/p>\n So while Smith is the kind of once-in-a-generation artist that no one can ever touch, Bono seemed to take a few cues from her sense of independence. There are many opportunities for him to take one of her songs and turn it into a U2-style hymn, but if he wanted to make music that was a lot closer to the bone, he needed to be himself, just like she had taught him on that debut record.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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