Of all the songs on those first three U2, albums, only one made the Hot 100: 1983’s “New Year’s Day,” which peaked at #53.īy the time U2 came out with 1987’s The Joshua Tree, everything was perfectly set up for the band to become conquering heroes. At first, that style did not translate to chart-pop success. U2 would never write a song as nasty as “ Every Breath You Take.” Instead, they specialized in chesty, majestic hug-the-world sincerity. The Police were probably the first UK new wave band to ascend to stadium status in America, and U2 had some of their textured grandeur but none of their bite. They brought none of the arch distance of their new wave peers. U2 weren’t British, though they probably rode some of the waves from the Second British Invasion. All three were hits in the UK, and all three made a dent in America, thanks in part to U2’s willingness to tour relentlessly. U2 cranked out their first three albums, all produced by Lillywhite, in quick succession. Finally, they signed with Island and linked up with Steve Lillywhite, a young producer who’d worked with Siouxsie And The Banshees, the Psychedelic Furs, and Peter Gabriel. In Dublin, U2 were playing to thousands by the end of the ’70s. Early attempts at landing record deals went nowhere, but U2 were always a live draw. They got a boost in confidence after winning a talent contest in Limerick, and they recorded their first demo in 1978. They changed their name to the Hype and then to U2. (When Bono was born, the #1 song in America was Elvis Presley’s “ Stuck On You.”) U2 started out under the name Feedback, playing punk covers at high-school functions. Paul Hewson, the young man who would become Bono, met his U2 bandmates at the progressive Dublin high school Mount Temple in 1976, when all of them were teenagers. They took over.Įarly on, U2 were not a pop-chart act. U2’s gradual upward climb became a vertiginous spike. With The Joshua Tree, the flowers bloomed. Less than a year after Top Gun made Cruise the biggest star in Hollywood, Bono pulled off something similar with The Joshua Tree and its lead single “With Or Without You.” U2 and their management had meticulously planted the seeds over the first four U2 albums. He also looked to his elders - the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison - for approval, in ways that would’ve made other punk-adjacent arena wailers blanch. Bono would clearly be in heaven anytime anyone put him in front of a vast crowd of people. He was working with the same basic toolbox as the Psychedelic Furs or Echo And The Bunnymen, but he had bigger things in mind. With U2, Bono emerged from the mass of post-punk brooders of the early ’80s. Tom Cruise ond Bono have followed the exact same arc, over the exact same timeline. You probably see where I’m going with this. Instead, he clearly sees himself as a messianic figure - an example for the universe to follow. He’s never more cringey than when he attempts self-deprecation. But as Cruise maintained his stardom into the 21st century, he also came to seem creepy and vaguely alien - never more so than when he tried to come off as a regular guy. Cruise aimed for that sort of prestige, and he got a lot of it - enough, in any case, to avoid the fate of most of his Brat Pack peers.
Cruise pushed himself to forge alliances and collaborations with big-deal cinematic figures of older generations: Martin Scorsese, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Stone.
He also had an appetite for history, for importance. In movies like Legend and Top Gun, Cruise had a taste for spectacle. Cruise, young and good-looking and charismatic, was part of a cohort of other young and good-looking and charismatic actors, but he separated himself from his castmates in The Outsiders as quickly as he possibly could. When Cruise was rising to the top of the pop-culture world in the mid-to-late ’80s, he managed his ascent carefully.
Cruise, eternal avatar of steely confidence and absolute refusal to age, is a weird motherfucker, and the weirdest thing about him might be his determination to be normal - or, at least, to be loved and accepted by as many normal people as possible. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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