U2 - The Joshua Tree

Alright, let's hear The Joshua Tree by U2. Were they the first famous Irish rock band? Maybe. They came from Punk and by 1987 were barely starting to have an opinion about the wider world. This album is weird because Bono specifically wanted the theme of the album to be America. The mythological America, not the Bob Geldoff "that place is insane" America. The result is that the desert (Joshua Tree, obviously) is his metaphor, and the losing side of the American Dream is what he's trying to really experience. Nobody really "got it" when he wanted wide open sounds and straightforward lonliness in pop song form, but they just went with it and eventually this album popped out. It's produced by Eno and Flood, so they didn't pick guys who suck at that atmosphere, and it shows. This might be the loneliest sounding album I've ever heard, like you could walk for miles and die of thirst before seeing another person.

But, it's a peculiarly Southwest picture. This isn't what the midwest sounds like, this isn't the Pacific Northwest or the Eastern Seaboard, these aren't the diners and Ski Lodges of Supertramp, it's not the big city nightlife of Boomtown Rats, this is bleached bones and cactuses of Nevada and Arizona. On that count, they definitely succeed in the mental picture.

So what's the lyrical message? Uh, pretty freakin' desolate. There's intense restlessness smacked over the head by a shovel. Even if you could make it over the horizon, you'd feel so left behind and out of place that you'd probably just turn back around and leave.

It's no surprise this is their biggest album in the US. Bono says this was basically the album he felt obliged to make from experience. Not just his experiences touring the US, but the part of the US that resonates with the rest of the world. That little lower left hand pocket of desert is what America shares with the rest of the world. The little pockets of beauty and prosperity are just that, reality is chasing a dream we'll never actually attain. Freakin' bleak.

Should it be on all the "best album ever" lists? Yeah, sure, it's quite fantastic. U2 the band was about being the opposite of the Synth Pop mainstream of the 80s. They owned straight ahead vanilla Rock in the 80s, touring to massive success every single year and then making great albums. You can almost hear Gin Blossoms say "screw it, we'll just play the whole Joshua Tree album tonight." 

The atmospherics are what does it for me. These aren't songs they are physical spaces. Highly stylized cinematographic spaces with one room white wood country chapels in the background with everybody waiting for their cold, black, sun-cracked souls to come alive, but still. This album does not end on an up turn, by the way. Exit and Mothers of the Disappeared are borderline industrial anguish. This is an album for a lost and left behind world, and it still hits surprisingly hard today. 

Interesting note, the disc in my hand is not the same disk in the CD drive. There's like 19 copies of this album around here, but only 1 case that i can't find at the moment. Go figure. Anywho, on the scale of 1 to that's what we were trying to do, The Joshua Tree is probably a Yahtzee.