(Credits: Far Out / Phillip Lebowitz)
Few figures have undergone such seismic upheaval across three short years as Bono.
Throughout the 1980s, Dublin’s little new wave quartet had grown to one of the biggest bands on the planet, shaking off the post-punk embers and pushing their thinly veiled Christian rock toward a stirring plane of atmospheric arena happening befitting Bono’s earnest frontman chops. By 1987’s The Joshua Tree, U2 had conquered the world and elevated to headlining stature, not far behind The Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen, delivering a record smattered with country and blues and scoring a UK and US album number one.
U2’s love affair with Americana continued for the following year’s quasi-live-come-studio sequel Rattle and Hum. Despite winning another canonical single with ‘Desire’, the song’s pairing with BB King, live renditions of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, and Bono’s on-stage proclamations of seizing The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ away from The Manson Family’s bloody lore triggered accusations of runaway egos and a band lacking a sense of humour plus self-awareness. Sensing a creative stagnation, U2 sought to reinvent itself for the new decade.
Guitarist The Edge cut his hair, U2 looked toward dance music and the industrial underground for inspiration, and Bono abandoned their former cardinal rule of never using “baby” in their lyrics. A looser, irreverent, and creatively unreined band decamped to a freshly reunified Germany to soak up the political air of renewal for 1991’s Achtung Baby, a kaleidoscopic and infinitely more groovier album that pulled U2 away from The Joshua Tree’s solemn wanderings to the Zoo TV tour’s arch-subversive multi-media act lampooning the rock and information landscape and sparking Bono’s gallery of alter-egos and costume changes.
“We used to have this thing about our image: ‘What image? We don’t have an image. We’re playing with images, like the desert or whatever, and we dress in a way that is sympathetic with the music, but it’s not an image,’” Bono mused to Rolling Stone in 1993, months before the conceptual sister album for the tour Zooropa’s release. “And finally, I just said, ‘Fuck it, maybe it is.’ In fact, if it is, let’s play with it, and let’s distort it and manipulate it and lose ourselves in the process of it. But let’s write about losing ourselves in the process of it, ’cause that’s what’s happening to everybody else on a smaller scale anyway.”
An unabashed embrace of aesthetic and stylistic exploration had yielded a new appreciation for one of the era’s mammoth pop stars, and a queen of reinvention unseen since David Bowie’s leap from Pre-Raphaelite hippy to Ziggy’s Martian exotica: “Madonna, I’m interested in anything she does. The music is a little off the shelf for me, but it’s almost like the lack of personality in the music heightens the personality in her voice.”
It’s a curious statement. Madonna had charted a similar creative course as U2, likewise burnished in the new wave, but hopping toward the bristling pop underground aflame in New York’s Lower East Side, finding fame with synthpop and gleaning mega stardom as a new icon of the decade’s MTV revolution. As Bono was donning wrap-around bug-eye shades for Zoo TV, Madonna was deep into her Erotica era, absorbing the contemporary pop trends in house and R&B, scoring her notorious Sex coffee book at the time.
Madonna was eagerly keeping an ear to the ground just as much as U2 were during their dual creative chapters, U2 developing an obsession with Einstürzende Neubauten’s metallic racket as much as Erotica’s keen wallow in TLC’s early new jack swing. While U2 forged a firmer grasp of their sonic identity amid the new musical ingredients with their long-running production relationship with Brian Eno, Madonna would hop between different DJs and remixers with a greater haphazardness, yielding a back catalogue entirely shaped by whoever the Queen of Pop had roped into the studio.
Yet, “the lack of personality”, while arguably true decades later for both U2 and Madonna, is perhaps a clumsy statement for Bono, remarking on an artist shrewdly pursuing pop’s evolving trends as doggedly as Ireland’s biggest cultural export had with equal vigour.
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