Is this the greatest song of all time?
The song continued to evolve during the Zoo TV tour, as Bono introduced an extra verse, which came to him out of nowhere one night in North Carolina in March 1992. Known to fans as Hear Us Coming, it asks God a series of questions, ending with, “Do you hear us scratching/ Will you make us crawl?” “It allows a chance for anger and the focus of that wrath is best kept for religion itself,” Bono says. “In the Hebrew Bible, this level of spleen is allowed in the imprecatory psalms: King David shouting at God.” He once said that this turned One into “sort of a protest song against God, from a believer”: yet another take on a father and a son.
In January 1993, Michael Stipe and Mike Mills of REM teamed up with Mullen and Clayton under the name Automatic Baby to play One at an MTV Rock the Vote concert to celebrate Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Bill Flanagan describes the scene in his fly-on-the-wall book U2 at the End of the World: “When Stipe sings, ‘We’re one but we’re not the same, we get to carry each other’, he is using the song – however hopelessly – to plead a case and make a promise to this whole country. That’s a lot of weight for a song to carry! One is a pretty strong song.” (Stipe actually changed “get to” to “got to” halfway through but the moment vindicated it.)
The song’s fluidity is a thread running through Flanagan’s book: “One seems to have an infinite capacity to open up, and U2 shows no inclination to tie it down.” In Germany in May 1993, amid a political storm about immigration, Bono dedicated One to “the immigrants to Deutschland”. In July of that year, it followed a satellite-linked conversation with a friend of the band in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Bono told journalist Niall Stokes how, in certain contexts, One “suddenly becomes what it is about that night.” It is a sturdy, inviting vessel for whatever emotions are circulating in the room, or the country, for there is always conflict and the hope of resolution. “I have been reduced to a puddle by it myself in the most differentiated environments,” Bono says.
Edge’s favourite memory of performing One is from Madison Square Garden in October 2001: U2’s first New York concert after 9/11. “After that show, all of the first responders who were present invaded the stage and it became this kind of group therapy session,” he recalls. “It was a really humbling thing just to be present as a witness, leave alone being the catalyst for it. It was unforgettable.”
‘An unfinished song’
Bono initially resisted naming the ONE Campaign, the non-profit he co-founded in 2004 to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease, after this “very bitter song”. Nonetheless, it has become a popular choice for U2’s benefit concert appearances: for Bosnia in 1995, for Tibet in 1997, for Nelson Mandela in 2003, and at Live 8 in 2005. That same year, U2 performed it at a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina, bringing Mary J Blige on stage for the second verse. While learning the words two years earlier for a tribute to Bono, she had begun thinking about 9/11 and its aftermath. Later, it came to encompass the human catastrophe of Katrina. For her, the lines “Love is the temple, love the higher law/ You ask me to enter and then you make me crawl” represented the broken promise of America. “The United States say they care about us and stuff like that, and we got to go through so much,” she told journalist Gavin Martin.
“Mary J Blige brought the song places I couldn’t possibly have been or understood,” Bono says. “I don’t know exactly where she went, or the names she put on the places, or the problems she was trying to solve with her interpretation, but I felt them so strongly.”
“She made it her own in a way that is kind of amazing,” Edge agrees. “Same lyrics, same melody, but it felt like it was a different song when she sang it.”
