"What's this I see over here?" Bono drawls in his strange, Mid-Atlantic accent in San Francisco, 1987. "I see two letters: SF and U2", he points at a fan in the crowd holding up a flag. "Is that a girl's name or does that stand for Sinn Féin, the Irish republican army's..." he trails off as the anger in his voice rises. "'Because if it does I don't know how you can stand or stomach to wave that sign this week. Because you bastards left those people - eleven dead, fifty-five wounded in the name of freedom. Fuck freedom!"
It may have come as a shock to the U2 frontman to discover that San Francisco is in fact, NOT a hotbed of Irish republicanism or support for their political wing, Sinn Féin.
The SF on the flag, of course, stood for San Francisco.
The tirade came a few days after the Remembrance day bombing in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, as the rest of the band played the intro to their 1983 hit: Sunday Bloody Sunday, a song written in protest of the violence which had engulfed Ulster. The song does not protest against, or take the side of, anyone involved in the conflict. Named after the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972 in which fourteen unarmed civilians were killed by British soldiers, the song empathises with those who have experienced such brutality before urging them to resist the temptation to resort to violence themselves: "But I won't heed the battle call/ It put's my back up, put's my back up against the wall". These lyrics are sung to the backdrop of the abrasive, yet melodic, musical arrangement which make it an irresistible piece of pop music. The ferocity of the drums in the song's intro and the melancholic guitar riff further underline these themes of resistance and hardship.
The meaning of the song, however, goes no further than this. Power is never questioned, nor is it mentioned for that matter. Even the paramilitaries who Bono condemned during the song's 1987 performance in San Francisco were spared any mention over the course of the song. As much as the frequent reports of violence on the six o'clock news may have upset him: "I can't believe the news today", this song is the work of a Dublin native with no direct experience of the issues at hand. As a result, the end product is a protest song which, like so many others, can be condensed down to a very simple message: "Violence is bad".
Two years earlier, U2's British counterparts, The Police, had released a song with a similar subject matter. Invisible Sun reserves itself to more indirect references to the violence in Northern Ireland: "I don't want to spend the rest of my life/ staring down the barrel of an Armalite". Lines such as these were, tellingly, enough to get it banned by the BBC. The song begins in a fittingly despondent mood before veering into a strangely upbeat inflection for a chorus that could have been written by an AI approximation of The Police's music, as Sting sings the similarly run of the mill lines: "There has to be an invisible sun/ It gives its heat to everyone". Once more, there is very little to be interpreted here, other than that violence is unpleasant, Sting would imagine.
Nine years earlier, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had released a song, from which U2's aforementioned piece borrowed it's name. Written months after the Bloody Sunday massacre, this song is unlike the others in that it posits a genuine and damning critique to the British state: "Not a soldier was bleeding/ When they nailed the coffin lids". However well intentioned and befittingly addressed this song may be, there remains something rather strange about it. The musical arrangement is genuinely jaunty. Replaced with lyrics about LSD or Maharishi, this piece could easily be mistaken for a more forgettable number on The Beatles' White Album.
This is the problem with protest music. Even on the rare occasion that it accurately locates and critiques the root of the issues it addresses, it is compromised by it's intentions as a work of popular music. As the eternally dour Theodor Adorno put it: "The entire sphere of popular music...is to such a degree inseparable from consumption, from the cross eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial". In other words, by attempting to discuss serious issues in a realm which commercialises everything it touches, you essentially commodify serious topics. In no way do any of the songs mentioned above advance the discussion on the violence in Northern Ireland. In fact, the sole achievement of each of these works is that they emphasise the social consciousness of the respective artists involved, acting as a branding exercise of sorts.
None of which is to say that music is not a free space to express discontent or disgust at a particularly harrowing news story. It just so happens that protest music rarely steps over this boundary. The lived experiences of those who are not so far removed from these issues as Bono or Sting seldom make their way into the realm of popular music. In fact, Northern Irish punk music of the late 1970s paid very little attention to the violence which surrounded it. Far more lyrical focus was placed on the lack of anything else in the six counties. The Stiff Little Fingers' song Alternative Ulster, is a direct depiction of this perspective: "There's nothing for us in Belfast". The punk scene was actually one of the few areas of society which made a concerted effort to avoid and overcome sectarian divides by paying relatively little notice to the issue of the day.
The disparity between the discourses of those who were angry at the news for ten minutes every evening and those who had to live with the consequences of those stories is very revealing. For many in Northern Ireland during the troubles, music was an escape from violence and sectarianism. The intricacies of the conflict would, no doubt, have seemed tiresome to those experiencing it. Furthermore, these lived experiences carry a certain understanding of the fact that a conflict this complex, the roots of which span back centuries, cannot be condensed into four minutes of verse-chorus-verse-chorus.
Discourses such as "stop the violence", in contrast, are perfectly suited for this medium.