For Millennials and Gen Zs, the band U2 is the embodiment of uncool. They've been around for more than forty years (lame), have a frontman, Bono, who is known for being preachy during concerts (eww), and once infamously shoved their newest album down our collective throats free of charge (oh the humanity).
But though it's popular to hate on U2, fact of the matter is that they're one of the most successful bands in the world and for good reason. Their staying power is impressive, especially as they came out of an era where one-hit wonders were the norm. Weirder still, U2 have never suffered a line-up change (substitutions for illness not withstanding). Their career has had the typical peaks and troughs, but with their newest residency in Las Vegas, the concert-buying public shows no sign of losing interest in U2.
And so, I want to talk about a curious near-death experience U2 suffered thirty years ago which gave them the staying power they now enjoy. This is the story of their 1991 hit single, One.
How They Got Here
In March, 1987, U2 released The Joshua Tree, an album so successful that it received two anniversary reissues and three concert tours in as many decades. This monumental work was the steady build up of a lifetime's intense musical practice. From their 1980 debut Boy right through to The Joshua Tree, the Dublin-born U2 built up a sound and a reputation that already made them an enduring act. Serious political lyrics backed by simple, almost austere, arrangements made them a socially conscious band minus the fancy bric-a-brac normally attached to such acts (looking at you, Pink Floyd).
But The Joshua Tree's success, as is often the case with an artist's greatest work, came with serious repercussions that threatened to destroy them. The follow-up was 1988's Rattle and Hum, a bizarre album-movie combo that almost made U2 a parody of itself. Self-righteous and earnest to a fault, Rattle and Hum was by no means a failure (as U2 manager's Paul McGuinness put it, "It sold 14 million copies, it's a failure I can live with"), but it left the band artistically adrift. Their embrace of rootsy-Americana—so beautiful on The Joshua Tree but painfully cringe on the sequel album—left them all dressed up in cowboy gear with nowhere else to go. At the end of their Lovetown Tour of 1989, Bono announced they would "go away and dream it all up again."
Needing a fresh start, U2 dashed off to the one place where fresh things were happening, the newly reunited Berlin. Now devoid of its infamous wall and home to the legendary Hansa Studios, U2 believed recording in the city would be glorious. A new era in world history had begun and the band needed a new era for themselves.
But then it all went to hell.
For one thing, Germany was struggling with the logistics of reunification and optimism was never the Germans' forte. Instead of a city excited by a new future, the band faced a place where stark divisions separated a common people. Hindering them further, the so-called legendary studios were actually shite and civilized recording equipment had to be imported. The freezing cold weather also contributed to their endless misery.
And on top of all of that, the band was still artistically lost. They had no direction and couldn't think of anything exciting. Jam sessions meandered along, leaving little of inspiration in their wake. Producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno sensed it was going nowhere. For one dark hour, it looked like U2 was finished. Over Christmas break 1990, they returned to Dublin and held a meeting to decide if they would breakup, but they agreed to continue.
Contributing to their decision to recommit was an unfinished song from the Hansa sessions.
ONE
The unfinished song was One, just one of two tracks the band kept from their time in Berlin. For most U2 fans, hearing it for the first time was a shock.
Starting with a quiet drumstick tap, the song subtly launches into a subdued rhythm completely lacking all of U2's 1980s hallmarks. Gone are the whomping martial drums, meaty basslines, chiming guitar arpeggios, and soaring vocals of The Joshua Tree. Instead, One gently gallops along, no one instrument standing out over the others. The drums keep time, the bass locks down the rhythm, and the guitars have a weeping tone that, were the arrangement not so beautiful, could be construed as the band lacking confidence. A supporting synth-string part played by producers Eno and Lanois kept the song's mix extremely balanced.
One's unassuming melody served as the backdrop for some of the most open-ended philosophical lyrics ever found on a pop song. Immediately on the song's release, a million interpretations appeared, all somehow equally valid. People heard and saw everything from a tale of a breakup to a recriminating conversation between a son dying of AIDS and his disapproving father to Bono commenting on the relationship problems within the band. There's certainly something to that last one. Guitarist The Edge went through a divorce at that time and the turbulent sessions strained relations between everyone in the U2 organization. Berlin's dreary recording atmosphere might have also contributed to the lyrics. After all, the two Germanies, now reunited after two generations of Cold War, were very different places. They were one, but not the same.
Adding to the song's multifaceted interpretations were its three very, very different music videos.
The first video was directed by the band's long-time Dutch friend Anton Corbjin. Corbjin's video is an arthouse screwball, featuring scenes of the band back in Berlin dressed in drag and driving Trabants painted with sexually suggestive characters, all filmed on a horrible dark sepia tone. It passed muster, but just as they were about to release it, a startling thought occurred to all parties: the proceeds for the single would be going to AIDS charities. By 1991, AIDS had only just shed the misperception that it was caused by perverted licentiousness. Suddenly, a new video featuring U2 dressed in drag threatened to reopen that can of bigoted worms and the video was quickly pulled. Flailing, the band hired director Mark Pellington to put together a replacement.
Somehow, Pellington turned in an even weirder video. For one thing, the band is completely absent. Instead, images of flowers and the song's title in multiple languages languish on the screen for an agonizing 10-15 seconds at a time. Slow-motion black-and-white footage of buffaloes running across the plains is interspersed throughout these painful still shot segments. The art-deco PowerPoint presentation culminates in a photograph by the artist David Wojnarowicz depicting buffaloes falling off a cliff. Pellington's postmodern snoozer might have worked as concert background footage (a purpose it served on the band’s Zoo TV tour), but it wouldn't help promote the song where it mattered, MTV.
And so U2 tried for a third time, hiring Rattle-and-Hum director Phil Joanou to make a more straightforward video. Jaonou's cobbled-together creation featured Bono sitting in a bar with some girl looking miserable intercut with the band performing the song. Did it work? Not really, but it was better than nothing and it got the band much needed MTV airplay.
Listeners first heard One in November 1991 with the release of the completed album, Achtung Baby, which sounded even less like their 1980s style than One did. The radically different record featured hip-hop drum beats, growling guitars drenched in pedal effects and lyrics about relationships rather U2's typical blend of politics and social activism.
Not only did U2 sound different, they looked different too. For the past four years, they sported a midwestern, Americana look with lots of browns and beiges. For the new decade, Edge had glittering trousers, Bono wielded cartoonishly large sunglasses, bassist Adam Clayton looked like a renegade hip-hop star and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. looked like a Levis model demoing the new European bad-boy collection. Irony and excessiveness were the order of the day.
But even amidst all this glitz and glam, there was still the very sober One. It sounded out of place on Achtung Baby and probably sounds out of place on any U2 album.
And yet, it's arguably the most emotional song they ever wrote.
Their New Lease On Life
Following Achtung Baby, U2 went overboard with the supporting Zoo TV tour, a multimedia blitzkrieg that perfectly prefigured what the Internet would do to us fifteen years later. They completely lost the plot when they hastily recorded the follow-up album, 1993's positively weird Zooropa, whilst on the tour. Like their earlier 1980s iteration, 1990s U2 reached its absurd apex with Zooropa's follow-up, 1997's Pop. But unlike Rattle and Hum ten years earlier, Pop was a disaster.
The songs had no hook, no clear melody and no obvious way of sounding good live. The supporting Popmart tour was an equally garish monstrosity. Bewildered fans endured Popmart's enormous LED screen, a giant stage arch that looked like a cross between the McDonald's logo and a vagina, and the tour's signature 40-foot high mirrorball lemon, which split in half to reveal the band hiding inside before they pranced into their lousy encore. After Pop, U2 did another about-face and spent the 2000s perusing a safer combo of their 1980s and 1990s sounds…until that ran its course with 2009's No Line on the Horizon, a thoroughly bland record eclipsed by its superior concert tour.
U2's fourth decade, the 2010s, saw them settle into the role of live music's consistent steady-hand as the record business that supported their early career was strangled by streaming services. Few U2 records were released in the 2010s, but their concert game was as good as ever, seeing as how they held their own against younger artist like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift in terms of sales numbers.
The past 30 years have been interesting to U2, but of one thing this writer is sure: without One, none of it would have happened.