Entertainment

Bono and Van Morrison represent Ireland on Rolling Stones 200 Greatest Singers list

Bono and Van Morrison have been listed in Rolling Stone's 200 Greatest Singers of All Time list.

Morrison was ranked in 37th position, while Bono was further back in 140th.

"To experience the height of Van Morrison’s vocal genius, you have to get beyond the words," the publication said about Morrison.

"Zero in on, say, the free-form back half of a 1974 performance of “Listen to the Lion,” where he starts out with honeyed crooning and blissed-out humming, tries out around a dozen different cadences on the word “you” and eventually lets fly with full-on grunts and groans.

"Ever since his early days in Them, on through the overtly mystical years of Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece, and up to his current incarnation as a gruff R&B songman (yes, with profoundly wrongheaded views on Covid-19 vaccines and lockdowns), he’s always aimed to unify the moans and shouts of his idols like Lead Belly and Ray Charles with a insatiable quest for what Greil Marcus (via Ralph J. Gleason) likes to describe as “the yarragh” — the bedrock truth of a given song."

Bono, meanwhile, was for pushing his voice to "every extreme".

"It’s easy to take Bono for granted since the artist’s commendable activism and outsized onstage personality often overshadow the reason he even has these platforms: his voice."

The publication continued:

"Since the early Eighties, Bono has pushed his voice to every extreme as he has approximated how to be a singer. On “Pride (In the Name of Love),” his love letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he belts, croons, swoons, and hums as he calculates Dr. King’s passion. On “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” his voice winds and bends, with a little true grit thrown in for good measure. And on the soulful ballad “In a Little While,” he pleads with the same intensity of Marvin Gaye before slipping into his distinctively Bono falsetto with a range that spans both tone and emotion."

This list was compiled with staff and key contributors at Rolling Stone, and it encompasses 100 years of pop music "as an ongoing global conversation", where iconic Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar lands between Amy Winehouse and Johnny Cash, and salsa queen Celia Cruz is up there in the rankings with Prince and Marvin Gaye.

The list is made up of vocalists who made or continue to make "popular music for the masses" given the magazine's "purview is pop music writ large".

"In all cases, what mattered most to us was originality, influence, the depth of an artist's catalogue, and the breath of their musical legacy," the list's introduction states.

The top twenty singers of all time were listed as follows: