Three Chords and the Truth: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (II)

I used to know this guy who was an accomplished bass guitarist, and occasionally he would quip that Adam Clayton is the luckiest bass player in the world.

For him, the joke was that Adam Clayton is one of the most successful and wealthy bassists on the planet, despite his relatively rudimentary skills on the bass.

You could say similar things about the other members of U2. The rock-and-roll legend about lead singer Paul Hewson—aka Bono—is that his nickname came from an Italian phrase, "bono vox," which means “beautiful voice.” He earned this mysterious sobriquet as a kind of ironic nod to the fact that he is not an especially great singer. Passionate, yes. Distinctive, of course. Endowed with a compelling urgency, sure. But his voice is not considered by most—even among ardent fans—to be particularly “beautiful.”

Nor is the Edge exactly a guitar virtuoso. In saying that, I don't mean any disrespect to his music, because more than half of everything I know about guitar I probably learned playing U2 songs. And I don’t mean to imply that he lacks talent, either. When it comes to creating atmospheric soundscapes, the Edge is, in my opinion, a genius at his craft. When it comes to riffs, scales, licks and phrases, however, he does not have an especially diverse vocabulary. If you’ve learned three or four different U2 chord progressions, you’ve pretty much learned them all. There is a telling scene in the movie Rattle and Hum, where U2 is rehearsing the song Love Came to Town, with blues guitar legend B. B. King. As they’re preparing the arrangement, King says something about how he doesn’t usually play chords, to which Bono replies: “Don’t worry, Edge can do that—there’s not much chords in this song; I think there’s only two.”

For all their fame and admiration—a renown that is, in my opinion, well earned—still, none of the members of U2 are truly virtuosos of their respective instruments. When you strip away the layered studio production and surreal sound effects that makes their music so distinctive, few of their songs rate much higher than campfire choruses, when it comes to musical complexity.

Which I don’t bring up in this series on U2 as a criticism. It’s only to illustrate something profound about their music that makes the band so fascinating to me: the fact that U2 is one of the more compelling instances of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

In sociology, we use the word “emergence” to describe this phenomenon. According to sociologist Christian Smith, emergence refers to the process of “constituting a new entity with its own particular characteristics through the interactive combination of other, different entities that are necessary to create the new entity but … do not contain the characteristics present in the new entity” (Smith, p. 26). Emergence occurs when two or more entities at a ‘lower level’ interact, serving in this way as the basis for a new, ‘higher level’ entity with characteristics that cannot be reduced to those of the lower entities.”

To consider how emergence works, we might examine one of U2’s most popular songs, ranked 93rd in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” According to Wikipedia, many critics consider it to be one of the greatest rock songs of all time—U2’s “Let it Be,” as it were. It has certainly always held a special place in my heart as one of the quintessential songs of my growing up years.

Musically, however, the song is relatively simple, and easily dissected: a modest 3-chord progression and a relatively straight-forward melody, with a couple of chiming guitar parts composed of relatively simple arpeggios on some suspended major chords, played with a delay over a four-note bass line . It’s true that the drum groove is unique, and helps to make the song so memorable, but even so, it is not an especially complex composition.

When all these rudimentary parts come together, however, something profound emerges that cannot be reduced to this mere list of its basic components. I have always felt that “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” opens a window onto something almost archetypal, something not present in any of its individual parts, or even in the arranging and recording of the tune, but is only audible when it's all heard together and taken as a whole. 

One might argue that this is true of music generally, and in some ways, it is. One of the reasons music is such an evocative medium, I think, is its ability to bring into existence polyphonically something that somehow cannot exist when individual sounds are simply made on their own.

There is something especially “emergent” about the music of U2, however. As basic as so much of their music is, what emerges when the four of them make it together is irreducible. It probably has something to do with the earnestness with which they tackle their art, the genuine desire to connect with their audience, the sincere love they seem to have for each other, as much as it has to do with the musicality of their playing, but whatever it is, there is an “emergent mystery” to the music of U2 that I’ve always admired.

It might be pushing it to draw this connection, but I like to think about the church in a similar way: the community that emerges when followers of Jesus bring their simple, rudimentary gifts together, I mean, allowing the Holy Spirit to bind them together for the glory of God, is also impossible to reduce to a simple sum of its constituent parts. In the case of the church, of course, it is the presence of Christ himself that causes the “transcendent something” to emerge, whereas U2 has been notoriously ambivalent about their Christian convictions. Even so, the way the church becomes something far greater than just a collective of individuals, an emergent body of believers loving the world with a love not present, or even possible, in any one individual’s passion or care, is perhaps symbolized beautifully by the way four mediocre musicians from Ireland took 4 basic chords and a whole lot of heart, and turned them into something that could touch lives and change the world.