Holy Christ this is so right it hurts

Blender's done a collection of the 500 best songs since 1980. At number 4: One, by U2.

In late 1990 they had begun recording at Hansa studios in Berlin, where David Bowie and Iggy Pop worked up some of the ’70s’ best rock experiments. But after a few weeks, the location was starting to seem ill-chosen. Just yards from the recently toppled Berlin Wall, the band watched a city realize that unification alone wasn’t going to solve all its problems. Recalled engineer Flood: “There seemed to be this dark cloud hanging over the whole session.”

Then producer Daniel Lanois heard Bono working on some middle-eight fragments and, elsewhere, the Edge toying with a guitar line that sounded promising. He got the band together, and they reluctantly began to play what would become the basic structure of “One.” Immediately, the Edge said, “Everyone recognized it was a special piece. It was like we’d caught a glimpse of what the song could be.”

The finished product retains that initial hypnotic feeling. The opening, echoing guitar sounds more like a sad fade-out coda than a beginning — tenuous, even defeated. And when Bono’s voice enters, it’s with an exhausted question routinely asked by doctors, mothers and, most important, lovers who want permission to leave without being the bad guy: “Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?” Then, as he muddles through that achingly familiar script, something changes. Lines that could be pulled from any doomed couple’s final argument are capped by a larger idea when Bono sings the words “One love,” a little ambivalently. Of course, any devout Rastafarian or dorm-room pothead will recognize “One love” as Bob Marley’s call for solidarity among the poor — it’s as if Bono, while he ponders his failure to rescue a troubled partner, starts to consider his failure to save the world. The Edge’s guitar punctuates his every statement with a tight little riptide swirl, the sound of weariness in the face of a challenge to “do what ya should.” Amid these doubts, the drums and bass continue to urge Bono on to a nobler goal....

“One,” which never actually made it to No. 1, charting only at No. 10, is certainly a breakup song. But it’s also very much about the duty to stay together, about finding some kind of connection in times of war, fragmentation, plague, poverty and cultural difference. About being too cynical to believe in the hippie version of global oneness, but too much of a believer to reject it.

“There’s the idea that ‘we get to carry each other,’” said the Edge of his favorite lyric. “‘Get to’ is the key. The original lyric was ‘We have to carry each other,’ and it was never quite right—it was too fuckin’ obvious and platitudinous. But ‘get to’ … it’s like our privilege to carry one another.”