U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday - Lyrics Meaning

This song is the opening track from U2's 1983 album, War. Sunday Bloody Sunday is the name given to actual events that occurred on January 30th, 1972 where soldiers in the British Army fired on a group of civil right protestors and bystanders in the town of Derry, Northern Ireland. Thirteen men were killed that day and this is the basis for the U2 song of the same name. The band has come out and said this is an anti-war song that is not a call for rebels to unite, but actually a call for people to unite against violence.

Lead singer Bono says, "How long, how long must we sing this song". He means that how many people need to die and how many wars need to be fought before we realize what a life is really worth. In the third verse, Bono points out that many people have been killed during this war, but no one has really won. He goes on to say that this atrocity and others like it around the globe are swept under the rug or glossed over by media outlets in such a way that the facts appear to be "fiction" and what we see and read in the papers and on television are the doctored reality.