When Paul David Hewson was in his late teens, his friends gave him the nickname Bono, short for the Latin bona vox (good voice). Around the same time, his friend David Howell Evans was dubbed “Edge” because of his standoffish personality: He tended to stand on the “edge” of a social group, even of his Christian friends. The two later joined forces with Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton to form the band U2, which has dominated contemporary music through much of their career.
Bono’s collection of tinted glasses may be a distraction, but he wears them due to a severe case of glaucoma that involves painful photophobia. Even one flashbulb can trigger migraine headaches, a tough condition for the front man of any rock band, not to mention one of the greatest groups of all time, inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005 and still going strong.
U2 has won twenty-two Grammy awards and was chosen for the inauguration of the astonishing Las Vegas Sphere.
The name of the band has no connection to the Lockheed U-2 spy plane—or anything else for that matter. Rather, it came from a list of suggestions made by their friend Steve Averill in 1978. The band chose U2 because they “hated it the least,” though they appreciated its ambiguity and open-ended interpretations. At least it is better than two earlier iterations, “The Larry Mullen Band” and “The Hype.” U2 has won twenty-two Grammy awards and was chosen for the inauguration of the astonishing Las Vegas Sphere.
Many of their songs draw on Christian themes: The popular bimonthly evangelical journal Christianity Today regularly reviews their music. At the same time, the band enjoys universal appeal. Primary lyricist Bono was raised by a Catholic father and a Protestant mother and so at times attended Mass with the former and services with the latter. He and the other band members have participated in nondenominational fellowships since their early teen years. Bono has explained that the Catholic Church was not an option because of Irish sectarian violence and clerical sexual predation. The lines of one song are revealing:
We got language so we can’t communicate
Religion so I can love and hate
Aside from U2’s artistic brilliance, if there is one theme that ties their work together, it is this: Life is a spiritual quest, driven by hope and a love of beauty—a journey that accepts man’s compromised condition and the troubled world in which we live. The pursuit, moreover, is unceasing, with no end in sight in this life. Their 1987 “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” captures the idea:
I have climbed highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
. . .
You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross of my shame
Oh my shame, you know I believe it.
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.
In This World, Not of It
One of U2’s biggest hits is “Vertigo,” released in 2004. Bono explains that it was his attempt to address the tension of being in the world but not of the world. The song paints a dark picture of the struggle of a conscientious person of faith. It opens with a grim picture of the world and its effect on those who resist its pressure:
Lights go down, it’s dark
The jungle is your head,
Can’t rule your heart
A feeling so much stronger than a thought
Your eyes are wide
And though your soul
It can’t be bought
Your mind can wander
The chorus introduces the song’s metaphor—namely, the awful sensation of vertigo. It is a terrifying experience because the individual must fight to maintain control while the world spins around him. The nausea is incapacitating.
Hello, Hello (Hola)
I’m at a place called Vertigo (¿Dónde estás?)
It’s everything I wish I didn’t know
Except you give me something I can feel
Bono sings the phrase “I can feel” forcefully. For some, this may seem a capitulation to the contemporary milieu in which reason is too often trumped by emotion. Such an interpretation, though, would be hasty. Of all the heresies the Church has confronted over the centuries, the one with the greatest staying power is Gnosticism. Gnosticism prizes the abstract and theoretical over the concrete; these floating ideas, moreover, can only be understood by the few who presume to guide the rest of us. How else do we understand the distorted definition of human sexuality that breaks with history and experience? Today, for instance, you may select from at least twenty-six different sexual orientations, almost all of which have been pulled from thin air.
By contrast, St. Thomas Aquinas told us centuries ago that all knowledge begins with the senses, and that includes not only what we experience at present but also what the human race has lived for millennia. Gnosticism seems to be a focus in the First Epistle of John: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the word of life” (emphasis added).
“Oh, You Look So Beautiful Tonight!”
Aesthetics has fallen on hard times. The most vile “artistic” inventions now demand our admiration—but if nothing is vulgar, what is beautiful? Too many now cannot appreciate artistic beauty or are afraid to say that the repulsive emperor has no clothes. Political philosopher Leo Strauss once explained that education should help us cultivate an appreciation of the beautiful:
Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
“Beautiful Day” was written and recorded in a relaxed period for the band. Bono explains they were looking for something “ecstatic.” They succeeded: The song is a sophisticated composition of tricky syncopation and heartwarming lyrics.
It’s a beautiful day
Sky falls, you feel like
It’s a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away
The song is a sophisticated composition of tricky syncopation and heartwarming lyrics.
The song’s bridge begins with an allusion to astronaut Bill Anders’ description of the earth from Apollo 8 in 1968:
See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
The song then finds beauty in the ordinary:
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
The song then ends with an allusion to the story of Noah’s ark after the flood:
See the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out
The elegant “City of Blinding Lights” may be the band’s most moving composition. It addresses the beauty of humanity and includes the marvelous line, “Oh, you look so beautiful tonight!” But beauty does not so much stem from our appearance as from our dignity, so that “they’re advertising in the skies for people like us.” To see the beauty of others means looking beyond the superficial and gazing past the things that distort our vision of each other:
Don’t look before you laugh
Look ugly in a photograph
Flash bulbs, purple irises
The camera can’t see
Yet, the beauty of our dignity is, at times, obscured by our tainted nature:
Can you see the beauty inside of me?
What happened to the beauty I had inside of me?
Forgiveness and Surrender
In 2000, U2 released All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The record won seven Grammy Awards, and it is the only album in history to have multiple tracks win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year: “Beautiful Day” in 2001 and “Walk On” in 2002. But when it comes to Christian ethics, “Stuck in a Moment” may be the most meaningful. The song gets right to the point:
You are such a fool
To worry like you do. Oh
I know it’s tough
And you can never get enough
Of what you don’t really need now
The chorus describes a state of immobility, of self-inflicted inertia:
My, oh my
You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a moment
And you can’t get out of it
Oh love, look at you now
Fulfilling the deepest longing of the heart requires releasing the white-knuckled grip of control.
The Key to Victory Is Surrender
In 2023, U2 released a multi-album compilation of many of their previously recorded songs entitled Songs of Surrender to coincide with the publication of Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Fierce control of his life has been a defining element for Bono, programmed into his psyche at an early age by his inscrutable father before and after the untimely death of his mother. Indeed, the title of U2’s 2004 album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, refers to Bono’s lifelong struggle to comprehend his father. As a kid, Bono snuck into a Ramones concert and experienced a transcendence he relates in “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone).” He writes,
I was shaking from a storm in me
Haunted by the specters that we had to see
Yeah I wanted to be the melody
Above the noise, above the hurt
. . .
I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred
Heard a song that made some sense out of the world
Everything I ever lost, now has been returned
In the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard
Who would have thought that an American punk rock band might be an instrument of God’s grace?
“Moment of Surrender” explains that the way to freedom is paradoxical. Fulfilling the deepest longing of the heart requires releasing the white-knuckled grip of control.
My body is now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control
The song employs Catholic metaphors with striking lyrics and appealing melody:
I was speeding on the subway
Through the stations of the cross
Every eye looking every other way
Counting down til the pentecost
Bono was a fan of Flannery O’Connor; he even gave a collection of her short stories to Bruce Springsteen, an influence reflected in the latter’s austere album Nebraska. In the chorus of “Moment of Surrender,” Bono anticipates an experience of “vision” over “visibility”:
At the moment of surrender
Of vision of over visibility
In O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, the odd protagonist begins to see the “light of Bethlehem” only after he has blinded himself. Here, then, is another great paradox. Although the world we live in is first apprehended by the senses, contemplation is an invitation to move beyond the senses, to grasp a “vision” that is more profound than “visibility.”
No Line on the Horizon
U2’s twelfth album, No Line on the Horizon, was released in 2009. The album title suggests infinity, optimism, and a quest without end. This meaning captures the general thrust of the album. Bono still hasn’t found what he’s looking for because it is not found in this life, yet it is the longing that defines existence. The song “Walk On” from All That You Can’t Leave Behind admits that the yearning may involve suffering. The music video opens with an image of a crucifix:
And if the darkness is to keep us apart
And if the daylight feels like it’s a long way off
And if your glass heart should crack
And for a second you turn back
Oh no, be strong
But it is all worth the struggle because we are destined for another place:
You’re packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen.