Who gets to say what a song really means? One raises the fundamental question of whether a song’s meaning is fixed when it is written and recorded, or whether, provided it is flexible enough, it can continue to acquire new resonances indefinitely. It has been variously described as a song about a band in crisis, a marriage collapsing, a father and son at odds, a country reuniting, another country divided, and a quarrel with God, and perhaps it is all of those things. It is a painful conversation but between who, and about what, is unclear. The rolling beauty of the music means that it is both angry and wounding and warm and healing. One is so powerful because of, not despite, its insoluble ambiguity. “The irony of One’s title is the band wasn’t very close at the time… we were building our own wall right down the middle of Hansa studios” – Bono “Every time I hear it or play it, it connects.”
“If I was to pick one song which encapsulates everything about who and what we are, it would have to be One,” drummer Larry Mullen Jr once told me. It remains a touchstone for the band members, too. I put the song on and just broke down crying.” In a 2003 special edition of Q magazine, it was voted the best song of all time. Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses once said he considered One to be “one of the greatest songs that has ever been written. One’s parent album Achtung Baby came out 30 years ago this week. “It’s one of those songs that has this incredible flexibility for different occasions.” “That I found incredibly powerful,” the Edge, U2’s guitarist, tells BBC Culture.
#U2 one karaoke download#
The next day, the song topped France’s digital download charts.
At a televised national memorial service five days later, his coffin was carried into the courtyard of the Sorbonne to the sound of one of Paty’s favorite songs: U2’s 1992 single One. In October 2020, a Parisian schoolteacher named Samuel Paty was murdered by an extremist after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression. Why does its single One continue to have such power, asks Dorian Lynskey. U2’s album Achtung Baby was released 30 years ago this week.
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