Cards on the table; U2 are one of my favourite bands, certainly in the top five, maybe even number one, on a good day. Almost all of the music that I grew up listening to was fundamentally negative: the blistering venom of the Manic Street Preachers, the icy darkness of Joy Division, the eerie autism of Radiohead, the acerbic wit of Morrissey, the reptilian deviance of Depeche Mode, the murderous, self-destructive rage of Nine Inch Nails. But U2 are an exception, a force for unalloyed, life-affirming, humanitarian goodness in my otherwise misanthropic musical palette. Even at their snarkiest, on the ironic, leatherbound, subterranean-Berlin-nightclub camp of Achtung Baby, they’re still basically on the side of love, light, and life – “the Fly” is a reprobate on a payphone in hell, but he’s just joking, really, and there’s a lot of things, if he could, he’d rearrange.
In fact, we might say, U2 are not just on the side of good, they’re on the side of god, because The Joshua Tree frequently verges on Christian rock. I was not totally unprepared for this, because I’ve long been familiar with their hits, their lyrics about “the kingdom come”, “Gloria”, or “If God Will Send His Angels”, and Bono’s prattling about how their music is “sacred” etc. etc. But while writing this review and listening more analytically to the album, I was struck by how Christian sentiment and gospel music tones colour much of it. Uncomfortably struck, in fact, because it forced me to consider if I connect with this band precisely because I too was raised in a Christian tradition (like Bono, I am the product of a Protestant mother and a Catholic father). Even though I left the church behind long ago, and was never much into it to begin with, perhaps the very architecture of my brain was shaped by childhood exposure to its rituals and hymns, and U2 somehow tap into this.
Come to think of it, this entire album starts like a church service, with the quiet, murky organ of “Where the Streets Have No Name” building to a furious, joyous, epic rock song, constructed around Edge’s trademark, ebullient guitar sound, and lyrics about god knows what, pardon the pun. “I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside”, sings Bono, apparently about social inequality in Belfast and how you could determine someone’s religion and income based on which street they lived on. But it could be about anything – the second verse comprises a succession of somewhat apocalyptic images about the city being “aflood” and a mysterious “place high on the desert plain.” I neither know nor care what it’s really about – it’s so overpowering as to effectively nullify my capacity for rational analysis.
A good proportion of The Joshua Tree is comprised of what could be considered love songs, but even these are peppered with Christian language and themes. The relentless beat and bassline of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”is the most gospel-inspired song on this album, and its imagery is intrinsically biblical: climbing the highest mountains like Christ during the temptation, believing in the kingdom come when all the colours bleed into one, speaking with eternal angels, having a hand on the devil, carrying the cross of shame, etc. All “only to be with you.” And yet, the song seems to articulate the classic neurotic dilemma of not being able to get what you want and, indeed, of not really knowing what you want to begin with. Bono, after all, never actually tells us what he’s looking for. A tax haven, perhaps.
“Without or Without You” is the third entry in The Joshua Tree’s opening trio of bona fide classics; its still, ambient opening evokes the silence of a church before mass, but it builds to a spittle-flecked fury. Some have speculated that it’s about addiction, others that it’s about Bono’s difficult relationship with his faith, but it’s surely, in the end, a love song of remarkable desperation and anguish, an angry accusation levelled at a loose lover who “gives themselves away.” The swingy country music of “Trip Through Your Wires”, meanwhile, is less effective than these two mega-hits, but it’s in a similar vein, a tribute to an unnamed she, an “angel or devil” who picks up a dishevelled Bono and wets his lips like Saint Veronica ministering to Christ on the road to Calvary.
Other songs on The Joshua Tree are exercises in U2’s familiar social and political commentary but, like the album’s love songs, these too are shot through with Christian sentiment. “Bullet the Blue Sky” is a menacing, outraged condemnation of US foreign policy in South America, which saw the Reagan administration back military dictatorships in order to keep supposed “communists” out of power. The language is that of the Book of Revelation; “souls on the tree of pain”, a “demon seed”, and Jacob – here the embodiment of secular military power – overcoming the angel, marking the defeat and absence of god in the spectacle of fighter planes bombing civilians. “Mothers of the Disappeared”, the album’s closer, is a gentler, more plaintive, but also haunting affair, its sinister synths and swirling sound effects reminiscent of Depeche Mode, its lyrics an affecting tribute to those whose children were abducted and presumably killed by the dictatorships.
The Joshua Tree deploys Ronald Reagan as a tried and tested pantomime villain, so it’s not very surprising that the album also trains its guns on his ideological soulmate across the Atlantic. “Red Hill Mining Town” is a rousing reflection on the British miner’s strike which, in the mid-1980s, brought civil war-like conditions to parts of the UK, in response to Thatcher’s attempt to forcibly close coal mines. The song recognises that the profession of mining provided the lifeblood of myriad communities (“from father to son / the blood runs thin”), and that, despite the tenacity of their struggle, the writing was very much on the wall for British mining (“the lights go down on Red Hill Town”). Ultimately, the extinguishment of these communities was but one symptom of broader global economic change, which would see rich nations outsource their manufacturing bases to the rising economies of the global South – at considerable human cost to the blue-collar workers of the West. In the end, the “faces frozen still” of Red Hill Mining Town are mere collateral damage of globalisation and an inexorable, ruthlessly enforced economic logic.
In the wake of listening to albums like Rio or Purple Rain, which are ceaseless barrages of supermodels, beaches, mansions, and “the beautiful ones”, it’s interesting to review an album that confronts us with the denizens of places like Red Hill Mining Town, the damned of the earth, excluded from the promised land of 80s largesse. Other songs on The Joshua Tree tell similar stories. “Running to Stand Still” is a lowkey, piano-driven ballad about a junkie couple living in Dublin’s notorious Ballymun Flats, the kind of brutalist 70s monstrosity from which Bono “sees only one way out.” Addiction is cast in the by-now familiar language of Christian allegory (“Sweet the sin, bitter the taste”). “Exit”, the album’s penultimate song, also takes us to the fringes of society, but this is a more sinister affair, a slow-building and smouldering throwback to U2’s early days as a post-punk band. It depicts the building fury in the mind of a deranged murderer who feels the divine “healing hands of love”, but who also discovers that “hands that build can also pull down.” Bono, apparently, had been reflecting on “the anti-Christ in all of us” when he wrote it – I like to think that it’s about Mark David Chapman, though none of the band have ever claimed this.
I have some vague recollection that, in the 90s or 2000s, some magazine or television station – maybe it was VH1 – rated The Joshua Tree as the “best album in rock history”. In my opinion, this is going too far. There are no bona fide duds here, but I’m not blown away by the forgettable U2-by-numbers of “In God’s Country”, while “Trip Through Your Wires”, though ecstatic, points the way to the risible Americana of Rattle and Hum. But these are minor quibbles. It’s an outstanding collection of songs; in the history of popular music, the triple punch of “Where the Streets…”, “Still Haven’t Found…”, and “With or Without You” is one of few to rival Michael Jackson’s genre-defining trilogy of “Thriller”, “Beat It”, and “Billie Jean.” And, unlike Thriller, the rest of The Joshua Tree remains remarkably consistent – even the weaker songs are anything but skippable. It’s one of very few albums that I can almost always put on and happily listen to from start to finish.
In the end, though, it’s Christian rock, I tell you. It’s a lot less gauche, and the songs are about a thousand times better, than, say, Creed, and it’s far more subtle than Dylan when he went all bible bashing in the 1980s. But almost every track on this album is riven with Christian themes and imagery, while the music flirts with both gospel and the god-fearing country of the Deep South. Perhaps the only song on The Joshua Tree that fully liberates itself from the album’s Christian moorings is “One Tree Hill”, an affecting tribute to a Kiwi friend of the band who was killed in a motorcycle accident and given a Māori burial. On this song, the pre-Christian imagery of nature worship comes to the fore in Bono’s likening of his lost friend to “a river running to the sea,” which I suppose was designed to indicate U2’s undogmatic sympathy with non-Christian spiritual traditions.
But as all of this indicates, and despite how brilliant The Joshua Tree is, U2 got a bit too po-faced and holier than thou on this record. It was all to the greater good, though – if they hadn’t carried their tendency toward Pentecostal moralising to its logical endpoint, they’d never have reacted against themselves by delving into the dingy European electronica of Achtung Baby, one of the greatest albums and re-inventions in rock history.
9/10
Highlights: “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, “Without Or Without You”