U2’s surprise EP, Days Of Ash, opens with Bono declaring through a loud hailer effect: “You have the right to remain silent, or not.”
It’s a bold statement from a cultural figure who was slammed for accepting the US presidential Medal of Freedom in the middle of a US-supported slaughter in Palestine, and whose statement on Gaza – seven months after Joe Biden placed that blue ribbon around his neck – felt unnecessarily garbled in a context that demanded clarity. These instances are of course not the totality of Bono’s activism nor political activity. Yet while one’s musical career is judged in the canonical, one’s political career is judged on what happened yesterday.
Nevertheless, here are five protest songs from U2. And this is a fertile moment for protest songs and songs of politics, because, well, everything. U2 are an Irish band, and in an Irish context, how can one get one’s message across with the same directness as, say, Kneecap, whose recent single declared, “F*** Keir Starmer, Netanyahu’s b**** and genocide armer”?
It may not surprise you that U2 are not going to tell the UK prime minister to go and do one, but they do have something to say. And they are saying it from the generational buffer zone of Gen X and Boomer territory, which is fine, because everything and everyone exists in their own context, and there are plenty of other artists out there getting stuck in more radically.
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When musicians make political songs, they open themselves up to a critique of their politics, and indeed their political – not just musical – judgment.
So what is that voice really declaring at the outset of this EP? Is it a declaration that U2 are back and taking a stand? Is it a provocation to artists who do not speak out? Is it rooted in some knowing self-referentiality that they haven’t said enough?
And yet, there is a strain of energy throughout this work that has an almost surprising urgency. It doesn’t all work, and some may loathe the politically broad tone, but the band sounds reinvigorated. There is power and tenderness. There are muscular guitars and all the vocal affectations and biblical references that – depending on where you land on the fan spectrum – are either an expression of beautiful sincerity, or cringe.
It is an EP of songs demanding peace in a world wrapped up in war; American authoritarianism and the killing of Renée Good; Sarina Esmailzadeh and the crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran; a reading of the Israeli poet Yehuda’s Amichai poem, Wildpeace, by the Nigerian artist Adeola; a track for the Palestinian activist, Awdah Hathaleen who was killed by an Israeli settler; a song of hope for Ukraine, featuring the musician-turned-soldier Taras Toplia.
American Obituary opens the EP, with a Billy Joel fire-starting-denial lyrical cadence, plus the yelp of “America will rise against the people of the lies”. This is about the power of the people being so much stronger than the people in power, a motivational message naming Renée Good and Minneapolis, as the country U2 loves so much falls apart.
The melodically and structurally rather stunning The Tears Of Things, written from the perspective of Michelangelo’s David (I know), is a micro-opera creaking under the weight of metaphor, with god, Mussolini, songs made of rain, floods made of tears, the Holocaust, men in cages, exiled hearts, frozen deserts, all stacking up until the weight of ambiguity almost becomes too much. It is also an epic of the sort that even at this stage of their careers feels like a creative progression.
Song of the Future, honouring the Iranian teenager, Sarina Esmailzadeh, is loaded with squelchy guitars, before drifting into Wildpeace, and then One Life At A Time, the song for Hathaleen.
In the press release for the EP, we are told One Life At A Time is a title borrowed from one of the directors of No Other Land, Basel Adra, spoken at Hathaleen’s funeral where he said Palestinians were being erased “one life at a time”, and that “U2 took that line and turned it around to suggest that a peaceful resolution will be wrought ‘one life at a time’.”
The radio hit on the EP is Yours Eternally, written from the perspective of a letter from a soldier on active duty in Ukraine, but also, musically, from the perspective of Coldplay.
It’s a saccharine, stadium-rattling, hopeful splash of an anthem, wearing its hook on its sleeve, all about the dreams of waking up free. It even has Ed Sheeran punching a fist of pure emotion through the second half.Yes, it’s a musical vehicle parked up somewhat in the lot of cliche, but it’s also an immediate and technicolour banger, however thin, with the kind of blatant hook that often evades late-career U2.
[ Bono calls for Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti to be freed from Israeli jailOpens in new window ]
On geopolitics, the world in which Bono rose to a position of influence within the top tiers of American liberalism, yachting with captains of industry, clubbing with titans of tech, dining with the milieu of global leaders who clutter Davos stages, is, of course, over. His reality – a rock star with that access and that company – was singular. Where to now? On One Life At A Time, Bono sings: “You say you want to save the world, well how you gonna to get that right?”
A hubristic goal always has a tricky next step.
