Silver and Gold: Everything I First Learned About South Africa was From a U2 Song

Everything I first learned about South Africa was from a U2 song. The live cut of “Silver and Gold” from 1988’s Rattle and Hum, to be exact. I really begin to delve into the music of U2 at the age of 12 with 1992’s Achtung Baby: that Eno/Lanois masterpiece was my gateway drug and from there I fell down the rabbit hole that is their catalog. I spent most of the money from my 8th grade graduation party on their back catalog. I took whatever Best Buy had to offer: full lengths, EP’s, singles, anything to add to my CD collection. So it was somewhere in those awkward junior high years that I learned about apartheid.

Getting into a band is like finding an author you like to read, you want to get your hands on whatever they have written. And like a good book, I was listening for every word, every turn of phrase, and reading the liner notes as if it was required reading. You wonder who reads the production notes, the thank yous in miniscule type, I do. I was looking for any additional context, any hidden meaning, as if these songs were puzzles to be solved.

We’ve established I read liner notes cover to cover, so it should come as no surprise that I was also intently listening to every spoken interlude on a live track. I was hanging onto Bono’s every word. Rattle and Hum is a hybrid record filled with both live and studio tracks. “Silver and Gold” is one of the live tracks and there is a spoken bit just over a minute long at the 3:34 mark that goes like this:

This song was written in a hotel room in New York City

Right about the time a friend of ours, Little Steven

Was putting together a record of artists against apartheids

It's a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg

A man who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa

A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor

A man who has lost faith in the peace makers of the West

While they argue and while they fail to support a man like Bishop Tutu

And his request for economic sanctions against South Africa

Am I bugging you?

Don't mean to bug ya

Ok Edge, play the blues

It was years until I figured out the irony of “Ok Edge, play the blues” as the song is anything but bluesy. At the time I was simply excited to get a piece of the puzzle and find out where and why they wrote this song. I knew enough about U2 to know there was so much more in that minute. I already knew that U2 liked to write about recent history with earlier tracks like “Pride (In The Name of Love)“ and “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” written about the 1972 Bloody Sunday Massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland; which introduced me to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. So I knew there was more to “Silver and Gold” than the fact it was written in a New York City hotel room.

That one minute was a capsule history lesson. It introduced me to apartheid well before I got to a high school history class. It made me go to an encyclopedia (life before the internet) and look up Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Who was this man Bono was talking about? An anti-apartheid and human rights activist who was the Archbishop of Cape Town at the time. What is apartheid? It was eye opening to find out that somewhere in the world, this far off South Africa, racial segregation was still going on. It may sound silly, but this song literally put South Africa on the map for 12 year old me.

I am well aware that Bono is a polarizing figure. I am also well aware of my preoccupation with the band, its music, and its frontman, that borders on fixation. Say what you want about Bono, but his voice, their music, introduced me to a world larger than my own. He is a true global citizen. As a 12 year old girl in the suburbs of Chicago, who only knew as far as the city, their music brought me to places beyond my reach and taught me about so much more than melody. Their music took me around the world well before I got my first passport.

When I got accepted to this program our first city was listed as TBD. A couple months before we left, it was announced as Cape Town. My first thought was, wow that’s far. My second thought was, that city has never been on my radar. It wasn’t until I got here that I realized, the seed was planted years ago, in a shared bedroom with a cd player and some liner notes.