Welcome to Before the World Was Made: U2 Dispatches, where U2’s anthems collide with philosophy’s eternal questions. As a philosopher and longtime /r/u2band mod, I’ve poured my love for U2’s music into 50+ song analyses, and I have decided to start posting here on Substack. Kicking off with “Gone,” a Pop classic loved by fans, we explore its raw wrestle with fame, faith, and, Platonism, and Kierkegaard’s existentialism. Join free for weekly dives into U2’s heart; the Unforgettable Fire Society extra posts about lyrics, live-gigs, band news, etc.
This post is on Gone from the band’s Pop album. Gone is a rocker, considered to be a classic by many fans for its outrageous composition and intricate performance by Bono. Woody Harrelson spoke highly of the song in his listen-along discussion of the album with the Edge on SiriusXM, U2songs recounts,
High-Pop
“Gone.” Woody loves the song, and sings the ‘up with the sun’ lines, and tells The Edge he had done some genius guitar on the song. The Edge says the song started on an acoustic guitar, and the challenge was to take the song away from a typical rock song, and he again used the 747 guitar sound he explored in “Mofo.” He speaks about seeing Oasis in Earl’s Court, and loved how they could take the Manchester club sounds, and mix it with the attitude of punk rock, and the melody of the Beatles. “Gone” was The Edge trying to channel some of that Oasis energy into a U2 song.” (u2songs.com)
The Edge’s guitar reaches what some may describe as its fully realized potential on this track, as it sears through the production, led by Flood. Gavin Friday told Niall Stokes that he finds the mix “disturbing” (a quality I think it shares with Mofo),
“The background is so atmospheric and disturbing,” Gavin Friday reflects. “It’s weird. The track conjures up all the things that make U2 what they are. You can’t properly put your finger on it. A vocal line here, a riff there, a lyric – it just gets you.” (Stokes)
while Flood elaborates on the origin of the “747” sound,
““We nicknamed it the ‘747’ guitar ’cause originally it just sounded like this ridiculous jet plane taking off and going absolutely mad. It’s him using his Korg SDD delay heavily fed back and then going into a couple of different fuzz pedals and a (Digitech) Whammy pedal. One of the fuzz pedals was a Fuzz Face. I can’t remember what the other one was, to be quite honest. But the way he’s got it set up, the guitar starts feeding back in a controllable way that sounds very uncontrollable.” (Jobling)
Lyrically, the song, like the album more broadly, has a deep element of duplicity. Without even touching the lyrics, we can see this in two separate quotes from Bono on the song. First, see this quote from U2 By U2, where the character of Gone is described as following a fairly straightforward narrative arc. Here, Bono is even somewhat cagey as to whether the song is “about him”,
“Gone is a portrait of the young man as a rock star, trying to cut himself free from responsibilities and just enjoy the ride, the suit of lights, fame. You change your name, well that’s okay, it’s necessary And what you leave behind you don’t miss anyway. But I think what this album tells you is that some things you can’t leave behind. That’s really it. It’s like the university professor who just can’t dance. Deep down we weren’t as shallow as we’d like.” (U2 by U2)
The moral arc, as presented here, is simply that, like a sort of university professor, the rock/pop-star is ultimately chastened by their wisdom and/or morals, such that they renounce vices like the drive for fame and absence of grounding responsibilities.
However, elsewhere, Bono has described the song as one of outright defiance,
“Right through the ’80s this is what we had to put up with,” he remarked, early on in the recording of Pop, “the idea that there was something morally superior in being an indie band. I’ve written a song now that’s like a two-finger salute to the people who tried to foist a sense of guilt on us because we were successful. The thing is, we always wanted to be one of the biggest bands in the world.” (Stokes)
Ultimately, things, as is common in U2 songs, are not so clear. Philosophers Mark Wrathall and Hubert Dreyfus read the song as advocating for a kind of Christian-Platonism, in which one would abandon worldly concerns for God. For U2, they may say this focus on God is present through their music (as the Platonist university professor might claim in their work, which strives toward truth as U2 strives toward beauty).
“The group adopts imagery drawn from the Christian interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, where the sun represents God. U2’s songs return again and again to the idea that religious faith makes us unable to live in this world, in which there’s no longer even room for love and saintliness” (Dreyfus & Wrathall)
...
“Of course, the rejection of the world doesn’t lead U2 to give up on the longing for God and for the divine. It’s just that it seems a fulfillment of this longing is only possible by renouncing the world. That’s precisely the theme of “Gone,” where the singer declares: “I’ll be up with the Sun / I’m not coming down.” (Dreyfus & Wrathall)
...
“Existential Christians like Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky argue that such distractions can’t ultimately change the fact that, because of the essential contradiction in our nature, we inevitably find ourselves in despair. Despair is the state of being incapable of satisfying our most profound longings, of wanting something that can’t be had (this despair is expressed in songs like Nine Inch Nails’s “Something I Can Never Have”). (Dreyfus & Wrathall)
U2 sings in “Gone” of abandoning all worldly concerns for union with the Sun, that is, with God: “Goodbye, you can keep this suit of lights / I’ll be up with the sun / I’m not coming down.” But this is a strategy that works only if we can do without our worldly attachments and passionate bodily relations to others.”
All other things aside, I think the contradictions present in the song, the overall themes of irony and Godliness in Pop support Wrathall and Dreyfus’s conclusions, but I would add that Bono recognizes here, amongst the legitimate intellectual depth, an element of incompleteness, irony, humor, and even sexiness--I won’t be able to touch on all of that here, but would love to hear from others.
Lyrics
“You get to feel so guilty
Got so much for so little
Then you find that feeling just won’t go away.
You’re holding on to every little thing so tightly
Till there’s nothing left for you anyway.”
“Got so much for so little” captures the disproportionate rewards of rock-star life: wealth, adoration, and success gained with minimal effort (there might be poetic significance here as well, mirroring One, that he uses the word “get” instead of “got” or “have” to feel guilty). There is this idea that, ultimately, a rock-star doesn’t contribute anything of value, they just go around shouting and whining. The despair here feels played up and exaggerated, but also speaks to a certain view about greed--its pursuits leave the subject empty.
The chorus is where the song’s contradictory, almost dialectical nature kicks in. Like Socrates speaking to the Athenians, Bono sings,
“Goodbye, you can keep this suit of lights
I’ll be up with the sun
I’m not coming down
I’m not coming down
I’m not coming down.”
For Socrates, the suit of lights was his life when put on trial, and he refused to renounce his philosophical pursuits. Bono, with that same sense of unabashedly ignorant, but confident, view that he is living a life up with the sun (with God or the One or, more mildly, one of virtue--despite what the first verse says), and he doesn’t feel the need to please people, even if it costs him his fame. I wonder, though this may be a stretch, if Bono self-conscious doubts are voiced in the first verse (perhaps more prescient before he ‘leaned into’ celebrity more playfully starting in the Achtung Baby era especially), while the chorus represents the “reconciled” view.
You wanted to get somewhere so badly
You had to lose yourself along the way.
You changed your name
Well that’s okay, it’s necessary
And what you leave behind you don’t miss anyway.
The second verse, again, has this interesting sneering irony. To put it in rough Kierkegaardian terms (following Wrathall and Dreyfus) we might say that this is the ethicist’s sneering criticism of Bono, who he views as an aesthete. The changing of name is, in some sense, autobiographical in that Bono itself is a stage name for “Paul Hewson” and Bono often adopted characters like McPhisto and The Fly during the ZooTV tour, while the PopMart Tour opens with Bono showing off comically fake abs. By recognizing this move from the ethicist, Bono rolls with them as if to say, “I know this game” and, “I know how to one up you”, leading back to the chorus--sung by the Kierkegaardian model the, “Knight of Faith” (for Kierkegaard, exemplified by Abraham)
“Goodbye, you can keep this suit of lights
I’ll be up with the sun
I’m not coming down
I’m not coming down
I’m not coming down.”
The whole outlook is seen for what it is, a mere “suit of lights” compared to the light of god. However, armed with this understanding, the Knight of Faith might go on to produce great works of art such as those produced by U2, unlike the ethicist, who will inevitably fall into debilitating despair.
“’Cause I’m already gone
Felt that way all along.
Closer to you every day
I didn’t want it that much anyway”
This part was apparently added late, and is considered by Bono as the song’s emotional high point,
“The bridge, which was put in to make it more of a pop song for me – and for Edge too – ended up having this incredible emotional weight,” he says. “It’s almost like Gavin’s ‘The Last Song I’ll Ever Sing’. That’s what it felt like to me. It felt like the last song I’d ever sing.” (U2 by U2)
Bono’s voice cracks with rawness, “I’m already gone” reveals a long-felt detachment, not a new escape—a confession that the narrator’s been adrift all along. “Closer to you every day” is ambiguous: “you” could be God, a lover, or even the audience--it’s a nod to love or divinity. The line evokes Plato’s ascent toward the Sun—beauty and truth—but also Christian yearning for grace, per Wrathall’s reading.
I think this is the closest the song comes to being really straightforwardly honest. The knight of faith comes down off his steed to an admittance of struggle. Again mirroring Abraham’s struggle with Isaac, it was not without “fear and trembling” that Abraham was set to kill Isaac. “Closer to you...didn’t want it that much...” is a clever line that I think can be read as addressed both to God and any individual that the person perhaps feels his commitment to God is distracting them from, or to God, in moments where he feels he is not being pious or faithful enough in the face of temptation, occasionally even telling God, “I didn’t want it that much anyway”.
You’re taking steps that make you feel dizzy
Then you learn to like the way it feels.
You hurt yourself, you hurt your lover
Then you discover
What you thought was freedom is just greed.
Here we come back to the ethicist, and his most cutting points. The ultimate incompatibility of the worldviews is present in that what is, for one, a desire for eternal salvation is to the other ultimate greed. Bono’s weary tone is tinged with regret, with a hint of terror. The narrator’s growth is real—he sees through the illusion—but incomplete, still caught in the cycle of ironical ethical thinking, underscored by the naïvely reductive notion that it was “just” greed that he confused with freedom.
Wrathall’s Kierkegaardian lens applies again: the ethicist thinks he is speaking to a mere aesthete, but from Bono’s perspective, which he admits is caught somewhere in between the ethical and religious, this fails to enunciate the issue, Bono isn’t greedy, it’s that he oscillates between valuing human life and wanting a more totalized relationship with God. And this is where Bono’s more Platonic view comes back to the fore, the aesthetic and affective final chorus and outro. He reaches out again for God, but not merely through renunciation, instead in the embrace of not only the “ethical”, but the beauty of the world, echoing the Existential Christianity and Platonism discussed by Wrathall and Dreyfus.
“Goodbye, and it’s an emotional
Goodnight, I’ll be up with the sun.
Are you still holding on?
I’m not coming down
I’m not coming down
I’m not coming down.[Outro]
Gone, sun, time, sun
Gone, sun, gone, sun
Sun”
(the Edge from the Pop album art)
Notes
U2.com
“Woody Harrelson Talks Pop with The Edge,” U2songs.com, [https://www.u2songs.com/news/woody_harrelson_talks_pop].
The Edge, quoted in “Woody Harrelson Talks Pop with The Edge,” U2songs.com, [link if available].
Flood, quoted in John Jobling, U2: The Definitive Biography (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014).
Gavin Friday, quoted in Niall Stokes, Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song (Carlton Books, 2005).
U2 By U2 (HarperCollins, 2006).
Niall Stokes, Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song (Carlton Books, 2005).
Mark Wrathall, “If You Want to Kiss the Sky,” in U2 and Philosophy (Open Court, 2006).
Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, “Staring at the Sun,” in U2 and Philosophy (Open Court, 2006).
Mark Wrathall, “Existential Christianity in U2,” in U2 and Philosophy (Open Court, 2006)