9 minute read
THE SOUNDCHECK SERIES
GRIEF, FAITH AND JUSTICE IN U2
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BONO AND U2 HAVE POURED THEIR FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES OF LOVE AND LOSS INTO THEIR MUSIC
BY MICHAEL SHERMAN
Bono
If you listen to any of U2’s albums you will hear stories that are about grief, faith and justice. Lead singer Paul Hewson, a.k.a. Bono, and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. both lost their mothers during their teenage years. In 1976, just over a year after Bono’s mother died, the band had its first meeting in the kitchen of Larry’s family home. About ten teenagers turned up to audition. Adam Clayton talked himself into the set-up by claiming he could play bass – which he couldn’t – and Dave Evans, a.k.a. The Edge, and his brother Dik, got in because they had built their own guitar and were the only ones who knew how to work an amp. Initially, the group were known as ‘Feedback’, then later, after a year or so, the name changed to ‘The Hype’, and eventually, when Dik left, and five became four, they settled on the name U2. A close friend of the band had suggested the name based on the fact that on May 1, 1960 (ten days before Bono was born) a USA U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces deep inside Soviet territory. There were other suggestions too, but the band choose U2 and the rest is history. In their successful career to date, many of their songs have explored personal stories and experiences of grief, faith and interpersonal/political issues concerning justice. In this article, I will explore these themes in a number of songs from the early, middle and most recent periods of their career.
GRIEF
Bono was just 14 when his mother died at the graveside of her own father’s funeral. It was a shocking and life-changing experience of grief that he has written about many times. Take ‘Iris’, a song named after his mother on Songs of Innocence (2014). It reflects on his earliest memories of her, which are intertwined with his grief over her death.
The ache in my heart Is so much a part Of who I am.
Iris standing in the hall She tells me I can do it all Iris playing on the strand She buries the boy beneath the sand memories of her have on him, even 40 years after her death. Another song that deals with his mother’s death is ‘I Will Follow’ from the band’s debut album Boy (1980). Written from the perspective of Bono’s mother, the song explores what he understands as “the unconditional love a mother has for her child”. The chorus captures this with the lines:
If you walk away Walk away Walk away Walk away I will follow
Even though she is no longer with him, he wants her to follow him. The song opens with two notes played repeatedly on guitar accompanied with syncopated drums and random notes played on a glockenspiel. If you listen on a good pair of headphones you will hear in the background sounds of cutlery rubbing against the spokes of a spinning wheel of an upturned bicycle, and bottles falling over and smashing on the ground, all of which make what Bono called “the underlying instrumental colouring” of the song. It also sounds like four teenagers trying to keep a house party under control.
A boy tries hard to be a man His mother takes him by his hand If he stops to think, he starts to cry Oh, why?
In all of this organised musical chaos, a boy misses his mother and longs for her to follow him. It is as if he is telling himself in his grief that it is okay because he believes she will look after him. For Bono, it seems that the flipside of grief is faith, and this idea is evident across all of the band’s albums.
FAITH
This undercurrent of faith is evident in ‘Gloria’, the opening
track on October (1981). The chorus, sung in Latin, with a reference to Psalm 30:2, is a shout of faith to God after the singer confesses his incompleteness in music and fame and recognises, with reference to Colossians 2:9-10, that only in God is he complete.
I try to sing this song I, I try to stand up But I can’t find my feet I try, I try to speak up But only in you I’m complete.
Gloria, in te domine Gloria, exultate Gloria, gloria Oh Lord, loosen my lips.
In the second verse, there is an interesting reference to doorways (James 5:7-9). Again, Bono is trying to sing his way through something, but has a block of sorts which is only resolved in a gesture of hospitality from God.
I try to sing this song I, I try to get in But I can’t find the door The door is open You’re standing there You let me in. Bono and God in ‘Gloria’ that is almost identical to that between the boy and his mother in ‘I Will Follow’. Both songs are about searching for connection, for support, for hope and for love. In these songs the band are realising that life is difficult, it is supposed to be difficult, and we never make it through the difficulty on our own. U2 were singing in the early 1980s about what Karl Rahner had named over ten years earlier in one of his interviews:
I am convinced that such an immediacy between God and the human person... is of greater significance today than ever before. All the societal supports of religion are collapsing and dying out in this secularized and pluralistic society. If, nonetheless, there is to be real Christian spirituality, it cannot be kept alive and healthy by external helps, not even those which the Church offers, even of a sacramental kind...but only through an ultimate, immediate encounter of the individual with God.
For U2, and for Rahner, God is experienced often unknowingly in our ordinary and everyday life. The first way that we can experience God is through our stories and our experiences, our beliefs and our questions, all of which take place in the mystery of who we are.
JUSTICE
However, the band’s songs are not just about experiencing God at the level of interiority. For U2, faith is rooted in a communal action of protest for justice. The last track on The Joshua Tree (1987), ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’, is a lament about the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentinian women whose children were forcibly disappeared by the Argentinian military government in the 1970s and 1980s.
Midnight, our sons and daughters Cut down, taken from us Hear their heartbeat We hear their heartbeat.
In the wind we hear their laughter In the rain we see their tears Hear their heartbeat We hear their heartbeat.
The children were young people who had opposed the government during the so-called Dirty War in Argentina. Bono could relate to these mothers from his own experience of losing his own mother when he was a boy. The grief that is expressed in so many U2 songs usually ends up staring itself or God in the face and asking ‘why?’ Take ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ the opening track from War (1983). It is known for its signature militaristic drumbeat introduction, harsh guitar riffs and electric violins. The band have always stressed that it not a so-called rebel song, but it is political. The song describes the horrific events during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, primarily focusing on the 1972 Bloody Sunday incident in Derry where British troops shot and killed unarmed civil rights protesters. Commenting on the song, the band’s drummer, Larry Mullen Jr., said that the band are “into the politics of people”.
You know people are dying every single day through bitterness and hate, and we’re saying why? What’s the point? And you can move that into places like El Salvador and other similar situations – people dying!
And this song could easily be about the war in Ukraine as we hear more and more disturbing news each passing day.
I can’t believe the news today Oh, I can’t close my eyes and make it go away How long, how long must we sing this song? How long? How long? Broken bottles under children’s feet Bodies strewn across the dead-end street But I won’t heed the battle call It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall.
This song is a protest for justice. The question “how long must we sing this song?” expresses frustration at history repeating itself, or what Pope Francis calls “the end of historical consciousness”. In Fratelli Tutti (2020) the pope critiques a deconstructionism whereby the modern idea of human freedom claims to create everything from zero which results in a growing loss of the sense of history. The pope offers the younger generations of the world the following advice:
If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he himself holds out, doesn’t it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them? He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans. That is how various ideologies operate: they destroy (or deconstruct) all differences so that they can reign unopposed.
The danger of such a society is that everyone ends up wilfully blinding themselves to reality and to the possibility of genuinely thinking for themselves. ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, for its part, calls out this attitude of cultural indifference and hood-winking:
And it’s true we are immune When fact is fiction and TV reality. And today the millions cry We eat and drink while tomorrow they die.
The song is not without hope, however, and the chorus sings about the possibility of peace and unity:
‘Cause tonight we can be as one, tonight Tonight, tonight Tonight, tonight Alright, let’s go Wipe the tears from your eyes Wipe your tears away.
There is an urgency in these songs to protect hope for oneself and for others. Bono has often said that the death of his mother inspired him to become a rock star. To deal with his grief he decided to sing about it. “I didn’t know at the time, as I filled it with music. I became an artist through her absence and I owe her for that. I thought the rage I had was a part of rock ‘n’ roll but the rage was grief.” In many of U2’s songs, as is often the case in life, the other side of grief is a faith that is realised in a community of individuals working together to create a better world for everyone.
