U2 Changes ‘Pride’ Lyrics to Honor Hundreds of Music Fans Slaughtered in Israel Festival Massacre
U2 struck a topical, tragic note in the band’s show Sunday at Sphere in Las Vegas, adding “Pride (In the Name of Love)” to the set and dedicating it to the hundreds of music fans killed at a music festival in Israel, referring to them as “stars of David” in rewritten lyrics.
“Sing for our brothers and sisters — who they themselves were singing at the Supernova Sukkot festival in Israel,” Bono said. “We sing for those. Our people, our kind of people, music people. Playful, experimental people. Our kind of people. We sing for them.”
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After leading the crowd in a wordless refrain, Bono continued, “In the light of what’s happened in Israel and Gaza, a song about non-violence seems somewhat ridiculous, even laughable, but our prayers have always been for peace and for non-violence… But our hearts and our anger, you know where that’s pointed. So sing with us… and those beautiful kids at that music festival.”
As the first verse of “Pride” kicked in, Bono changed the first verse to refer to the massacre in Israel instead of the death of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Early morning, Oct. 7, the sun is rising in the desert sky,” he sang. “Stars of David, they took your life but they could not take your pride.” He repeated the “Could not take your pride” line three times before leading the band into the anthemic chorus.
The attack on music fans by Hamas took place at the Supernova festival, held in the desert in southern Israel in conjunction with the Jewish festival of Sukkot. According to witnesses, rocket attacks were followed by close-range gunfire and sniper shots from dozens of terrorists invading the festival grounds.
As of Monday morning, more than 260 bodies had been recovered from the festival scene so far, according to the rescue agency Zaka, with more still missing. About 3,500 people were attending the concert, about three miles from the border of the Gaza Strip.
The appearance of “Pride” in U2’s Sphere setlist came during a mid-show sequence of songs that took a break from the full run-through of “Achtung Baby” to include numbers from earlier in the band’s career. At the outset of the Sphere run, those songs were all from the “Rattle and Hum” album, but those have been switched out. At Sunday’s more poignant performance, “Pride” was preceded by “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (including a snippet of Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross”) and followed by another Martin Luther King Jr.-inspired song, “MLK.”
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