Masterpiece: The Joshua Tree

[Today: Lost in America...]

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America – that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.” Thomas Wolfe’s paradox is just one of hundreds of cryptic quotes that grasp at the haunting beauty and restless character of the American psyche. In the 1980s it was left to a wide-eyed band of ascendant Irish rock stars to catpure the wide-angled grandeur of the land of the free. With their 1987 album The Joshua Tree, U2 sought to contain the multitudes of America, and reflect some of the myth and magic of this country. And because this is also an album about love and death and politics, it succeeds at what should have only been wild ambitions.

Elvis Presley, Jesus Christ, John Dillinger, Geronimo, Robert Johnson, Martin Luther King, Woody Guthrie, John F. Kennedy. All are present and accounted for, if not named out loud. There are ghosts swirling around this record, like the idle thoughts of someone blasting across the country along backroads, kicking up great plumes of dust and memories. The person behind the wheel is running from death, divorce, dissolution, bankruptcy, drug abuse, scandal, heartbreak – running into the arms of America. Behind that wheel, fixed in motion, nestled within the solid arms of a great big country, is the perfect place to make peace with the most difficult questions.

‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ hits the open road in search of reinvention. ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ is spiritual questing, a journey into the desert. ‘With Or Without You’ questions the precepts of love. ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’ is war and God and money. ‘Running To Stand Still’ is a deadly habit. ‘Red Hill Mining Town’ is a broken family. And finally the fever lifts with ‘In God’s Country’ and ‘Trip Through Your Wires’, as we break on through to the other side and exalt in a country so big that it makes any problem seem small. Here it seems, we can escape the self and arrive in a new place. But ‘One Tree Hill’ and ‘Exit’ present the same conclusion to two different questions – the peaceful and the mad both end up in pine boxes. ‘Mothers Of The Disappeared’ is their eulogy.

This album’s working title was The Two Americas. That title came from lead singer and songwriter Bono, who had “…started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America.” But you can no sooner divide the country that way than you can separate a horse from the horse’s ass. America is contradiction and conformity, beauty and ugliness, great and small. America made the myths that made America, and every day we make more. Nearly every road leads to one…

Listen: Bullet The Blue Sky

Listen: Running To Stand Still

Listen: Trip Through Your Wires

Tags: The Joshua Tree, U2