As I mentioned last time, the release of the single "New Year's Day" forty years ago this month catapulted U2 into the big leagues. But there was more to the album War than just its lead-off single. The other nine songs, despite some variation in style, all helped "New Year's Day" convey the same urgent message to the world: wars, and rumors of wars, needed to end. Peace, announced U2, was a moral obligation for humanity. The cost of failure, Bono noted in the song "Seconds", wasn't just guilt. It was death.
The Cold War was obviously a cataclysmic threat. But even contemporary regional conflicts, such as those in the Falklands, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the Middle East, needed to end, too. In "Sunday Bloody Sunday", Bono invokes 1972's Bloody Sunday Massacre, in which British soldiers shot and killed 26 protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, while lamenting the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland:
I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go awayBroken 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 wallAnd the battle's just begun
There's many lost, but tell me who has won?
The trench is dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apartHow long, how long must we sing this song?
How long? How long?The real battle's just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On Sunday bloody Sunday
It wasn't a rebel (IRA) song, Bono repeatedly told audiences. It was simply a song demanding the conflict end. He himself was from a mixed family—Catholic father, Protestant mother. But what had united mother and father was far stronger than what had divided them. The Emerald Isle, Bono suggested, was really the same way. Everyone was. We just needed to realize that.
In "Sunday Bloody Sunday", Bono wondered how long the Irish would sing the same old song—that is, how long they were going to keep the same conflict going. He then provided something of an answer: until everyone began singing a new song altogether. And he didn't mean that only metaphorically. He meant it literally: the band actually included a "new song" on the album for everyone to sing together. Entitled "40", its lyrics derive from David's fortieth psalm:
I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the miry clay
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new songHe set my feet upon a rock
And made my footsteps firm
Many will see
Many will see and fear
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
The four earnest guys from Dublin even began ending their concerts with this song. Everyone was invited to sing along, and to keep singing even after the band left the stage and the crowd began exiting. And so they did. It was a unifying congregational hymn.
On War, the band even preempted reluctance about adopting their position of militant pacifism. Didn't quite understand the politics of the Northern Ireland situation? Were you born Catholic or Protestant? Nationalist or Loyalist? Didn't quite understand Cold War political machinations? Didn't matter. All you needed was a desire for peace. The band itself—at this point in their career, anyway—didn't even claim to know the ins and outs of any particular situation. They just wanted violence to end. As "Two Hearts Beat As One" put it:
I don't know
I don't know which side I'm on
I don't know my right from left
Or my right from wrongI don't know
How to say what's got to be said
I don't know if it's black or white
There's others (who) see it red
I don't get the answers right
I'll leave that to you...Two hearts beat as one
All of which is to say, War wasn't really a rock album. Or should I say, it was much more than a rock album. It was a theology set to guitar, bass, and drums. It was conviction. It was crusade. It was conscience.
And if you can believe it, forty years ago this March, it was also the number one album on the UK charts. It knocked Michael Jackson's Thriller right off the top. Over in America, it rose to #12.
That a manifesto of musical theology like War, driven by a song like "New Year's Day", could attain this kind of success in the related genres of rock, college/alternative rock, and pop, was freakish. But War's success also spearheaded the beginning of what would become a profound change in how creators and executives, in every area of the West's culture industry, saw themselves.
Not even the occasional anti-war protest songs of the late '60s did that. Western culture merchants remained perfectly happy to produce spectacles with no other purpose than pure entertainment—that is, for commercial purposes. If you wanted preaching, you went to church. You didn't buy a rock and roll record. Or watch a particular sitcom or movie. Every once in a while, something like that would come out. But it was nowhere near the norm.
What the newly-successful U2 did was to begin infusing conscience—I should say, a particular kind of social justice conscience— into the West's culture industry.
Not even the great Bob Marley had managed to exert that kind of moral influence on the culture merchants. They—like normal people—loved Bob Marley's music, admired his conviction, felt intrigued by the exoticism of his Rastafarian beliefs. But that was Bob's thing, not theirs.
What the newly-successful U2 did was begin speaking directly to an essentially latent Judeo-Christian moral sense in the West, from within the West. That moral sense didn't remain latent very long. The big songs on War were calls to wake up, take stock, and take action. They were declarations of duty. They were invitations, even challenges, to join the crusade to save the world. It wasn't only the young fans who responded. It was the music executives, then the TV executives, then the movie executives, then the book publishing executives. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The first item for U2 was ending war. Next up for the band, as it turned out, was ending hunger. Before 1984 would end, for example, Bono would team up with his old Dublin chum, Bob Geldof, to promote by far the biggest humanitarian crusade in musical history: the Band-Aid single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?", which raised millions to feed victims of the Ethiopian famine. A year later, U2 would perform at the Live Aid benefit concert, which raised many millions more.
But as it turned out, this was only the beginning of U2's career in creating cultural conscience. In his recently released book, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, Bono writes that "fame is currency—I want to spend mine on the right stuff".
I can't say Bono has always spent the currency of fame on "the right stuff". But the influence alone—no, the power—he and the band managed to acquire in the ensuing years, both overtly and behind the scenes, is almost unbelievable. That I know of, it is completely novel in the history of music. How did some Irish rock singer wind up with more political power than almost any actual politician, and in various areas around the world? How does that even work? And how has the world changed as a result?
More on that next time.
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