Embrace the bothersome, overplayed perfection.
Try to recapture that virgin listen, embrace the way that all the pieces of U2 fit together. “See the stone set in your eyes / see the thorn twist in your side.” The swell before the damn breaks at the three-minute mark.
The synth fills in the blank spaces followed by Bono’s lovesick vocals. Tune into Larry Mullen’s subtle changes in cadence and Adam Clayton’s heartbeat bassline. Listen to “With or Without You” with your eyes closed. 30 years of constant airplay tends to turn even the greatest songs into Roger Williams.Ĭheck back in with these songs one more time. The trio of songs that open the record reek of perfection – their omnipresence might diminish their luster to the point that they’ve become background music, easily tuned out. Instead I’d like to track back and take a slightly different perspective on the record. Bono famously described Achtung Baby as “the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree.” Bestowing further accolades upon the record seems futile. Tinged with gospel, blues, and folk influences, The Joshua Tree would become U2’s greatest success, selling more than 25 million copies, but also the record they desperately longed to escape. They’ve turned fans into naysayers (and vice versa), but the one constant remains that one record in the middle of their discography. The band has existed long enough to survive multiple shifts in tone and ideology. It’s no longer my favourite U2 record, but the imprint of that moment of discovery remains The Joshua Tree has positioned itself outside traditional criticism.
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Unlimited availability, fractured attentions, and the ways in which we consume and download music have eroded the event record. Movies retain the power to unite a movement around an individual work of art, but by and large, those days in music have passed. The smell of the Spring air, the type of flowers blooming… and you don’t even like flowers.įor someone born into an era of digital music, a sonic grab bag of unlimited potential, it’s perhaps difficult to comprehend the way a specific record release could freeze time, if only for a short while. Something as mundane as a placing a cassette in a car radio becomes epic poetry. Where were you when you first heard the opening of “Where the Streets Have No Name”? Can you remember how you felt when the Edge’s guitar first broke through that wall of synthesizer? Maybe you don’t quite remember the feeling, but you know where you were the first time you heard U2’s The Joshua Tree. Impossible details remain vivid, imprinted forever. Music feeds nostalgia, it places moments in time, and for a certain generation, few records documented a time and place more precisely than U2’s fifth record, The Joshua Tree, in March of 1987. The Joshua Tree (30th Anniversary Edition)