With the next set of albums—Under a Blood Red Sky, The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, and Rattle and Hum—U2 firmly positioned itself as an international band. The group’s foray into the American music scene progressed from being well received in the early 1980s to smashingly successful by the end of the decade, but not without controversy. U2’s attention to global crises, along with a love-hate thematic approach to American politics and culture, earned it the praise of some and the scorn of others. On the one hand, U2 was a welcomed musical alternative to the mediocrity of 1980s pop and glam rock. But on the other hand, newfound fame brought special challenges as the band experienced chart-topping hits, award-winning albums, and a burgeoning fan base, as well as a growing cadre of critics. For some listeners, the band’s message, a carefully crafted commentary on affairs of the day, began feeling too grandiose for a culture wallowing in overindulgence.
On the stage, something unique was happening in their shows—as they played to larger and larger venues, they engaged audiences and connected with listeners in ways that most music fans hadn’t previously experienced. U2’s pioneering spirit, evident both in the studio and on the stage, transcended expectations and industry standards and inspired the group to make innovative leaps in music, media, and technology. Along with a growing social conscience, a message of global peace found its way into the band’s catalog and concerts as it paid tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., exposed US subterfuge in Central America, informed listeners about South African apartheid, and ignited a longing in the hearts of fans for something bigger than themselves. Armed with keen intellect, fresh imagination, and refined skill, U2 stormed the decade, building a franchise—and the start of a brand—that would earn the quartet supergroup status.
Under a Blood Red Sky was a pivotal album for U2 in 1983. Recorded at three different venues, including the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside of Denver, Colorado, the album, along with its companion concert film, U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky, propelled the band into the American music scene. Recorded on a US leg of the War tour, the collection of songs perfectly represented the musical creativity and raw passion of U2’s live performances, introducing a whole new audience to “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “I Will Follow,” “New Year’s Day,” and “40,” all destined to become trademarks of the band’s musical legacy. The record went platinum around the globe, selling the most copies—an astonishing three million—in America. But while the album was a crucial component of U2’s move into the United States, it was the concert video that captured and altered the musical consciousness of its new followers.
U2 Live at Red Rocks broke ground and influenced the industry in multiple ways—but it almost didn’t happen. Like many artists, the band had dreamed of playing at the historic Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Eventually, through a complex set of partnerships involving promoters and international radio and TV broadcasters, Principle Management negotiated a deal and contracted a summer date. As support teams prepared for the show, no one could have predicted that its eventual success would be due to the culmination of a perfect storm—literally! On June 5, 1983, the day of the concert, the Rocky Mountains venue was overwhelmed by an ominous weather system, resulting in torrential rain and flash flood warnings. Most of the crew assumed the show would be canceled. Despite the storm, Bono, staying true to his character, visited rain-drenched fans who had waited hours in inclement weather, and the band continued with preparations. Crew members wrapped cables, covered cameras, and mopped up water from the stage. As show’s start time approached, the storm broke and settled into a much less menacing mist. Combined with ambient lighting featuring the outdoor venue’s natural beauty, the receding storm gave way to a surreal landscape that surpassed any staging the concert’s producers could have planned.
At the show, two significant moments helped define U2’s image as an unparalleled live band, an unstoppable force of passion and energy. First, the band gave one of the best performances of its career during “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” While introducing the song, Bono explained that it was not meant to be a protest (either for or against the Irish Republican Army), as some had assumed, saying, “This song is not a rebel song. This song is ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’” In the middle of the performance, Bono marched across the stage brandishing a large white flag, a symbol of the band’s commitment to peace and a defining icon that would be used for years to come. The zeal of the band, the verve of the crowd, and the mystique of the environment coalesced in what Rolling Stone called one of the “50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.” Second, in an instant that was both exhilarating and terrifying, Bono climbed to the top of a tall, slippery lighting rig to wave his white flag during “The Electric Co.,” a seemingly appropriate name for a song during which there was a very real possibility of electrocution. In the end, he made it down safely, and the image was immortalized as the cover photo for the video’s packaging.
U2’s maiden effort at concert video production was a wild success, earning the universal approval of both music and film critics. U2 Live at Red Rocks also presented an opportunity for the band to continue its infatuation with media, through which it gained even greater access to an American audience. Soon after recording, a portion of the concert was broadcast on the upstart Showtime network, while other clips received heavy rotation on a very young MTV. In 1986, the entire concert was televised throughout the United States. As U2’s pioneering release into the home video market, the film was made available in VHS, Betamax, and the state-of-the-art LaserDisc formats. Red Rocks was both a defining and a transitional moment for U2 because it documented the group’s compelling live performances while engaging the hearts and minds of music fans who were tired of the predictable, overly sanitized, and heavily commercialized pop, new wave, and rock of the early 1980s. But just as U2 was finding a productive niche in an otherwise sterile industry, and in spite of its enormously successful War tour, the band risked everything, heading again into virgin territory with a new trio of albums.
If U2’s first three albums chronicled the journey of four Irish lads becoming a band, then the next three after Under a Blood Red Sky documented both its fascination with and critique of America. The first trilogy, including Boy, October, and War, focused largely on the innocence of adolescent musicians finding identity, the trauma of growing up in the Troubles, and the role of faith while navigating a conflicted world. The sentiments found in this series were Irish, and the content was primarily Ireland bound. But the next trilogy, comprising The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, and Rattle and Hum, took the band into very new space, picking up themes of global concern, including social justice, military conflict, poverty, and violence. Sonically, this set of albums buried the earlier recordings and redefined rock ’n’ roll. Solidly in charge of their instruments, the band and crew left behind the glockenspiels of their musical childhood in favor of lush and complex musical landscapes, partnered with rich and multifaceted lyrics.
Breaking with conventional wisdom, U2 abandoned the tried and true rock formula perfected with War, choosing instead to push into experimental territory. In search of a new sound, the band moved into Slane Castle, a three-hundred-year-old residence that doubles as a concert venue. There they spent months in 1984 testing, writing, and recording with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Both accomplished musicians themselves, Eno and Lanois brought their considerable talent in ambient and experimental music to the sessions, resulting in rich textures, ethereal strings, and complex backgrounds. Fully immersed in the ethos of both a historic castle and cutting-edge technology, the band said good-bye to the clean-cut, hard-hitting beats of their previous albums, favoring a looser, more progressive sound. Bono’s vocals were smooth and glassy, his lyrics poetic. Edge focused on melodic lead lines and looped patterns; Adam’s bass softened, and Larry functioned less as the band’s metronome and more as its quiet yet steady conscience.
The resulting album, 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, introduced a sophisticated U2 to America. Nuanced with European influences, the record’s musical understatement paralleled its audacious subject matter. More artsy, and thus open to multiple levels of interpretation, even the album’s title reflected several layers of meaning. Primarily, The Unforgettable Fire—both the title of the album and a track on the record—refers to a dark moment in American-Japanese relations and reflects the inspiration U2 received from an art exhibition of the same name commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Having experienced the exhibit in Chicago in 1983, U2 was deeply impacted by stories and visuals of the blasts. Especially moving was the artwork of children who had survived. The destruction of these two cities in Japan was a singular event—never before and never again have nuclear weapons been used in a combat situation. The results were catastrophic: At least eighty thousand people were killed instantly in Hiroshima, forty thousand in Nagasaki. Tens of thousands died later of burns and radiation exposure; hundreds of thousands suffered injury, including nausea, bleeding, and loss of hair, many eventually succumbing to multiple types of cancers. Two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed, and over 90 percent of its doctors and nurses were killed as hospitals collapsed. In Nagasaki, a heavy industrial center, factories, along with the workers who filled them, were flattened. In a flash, schools, churches, and historical landmarks were obliterated.
It was this dark side of the American story that U2 discovered while attending the Chicago peace exhibit in 1983. In an interview after the album’s release, Bono spoke of touring the exhibition: “The images from the paintings and some of the writings stained me, I couldn’t get rid of them” (King, “The Fire Within”). In the album’s opening song, “A Sort of Homecoming,” Bono sang, “The city walls are all come down / The dust a smokescreen all around.” And it’s hard not to think of Nagasaki, a city nestled between two mountain ranges, when hearing the next verse: “And we live by the side of the road / On the side of a hill as the valley explodes / Dislocated, suffocated, the land grows weary of its own.” Through “Homecoming” and other songs on Fire, U2 painted a musical picture as meaningful as the exhibit itself.
It’s also on this record that U2’s compositional skills began to show depth and maturity, especially as they considered alternate interpretations for the notion of fire. Not just a reference to the literal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the idea of flames and explosions became a metaphor in other ways. Bono reflected on his lyric-writing process, saying,
I realized as the album was moving on, that this image of “the unforgettable fire” applied not only to the nuclear winterscape of “A Sort of Homecoming,” but also the unforgettable fire of a man like Martin Luther King, or the consuming fire which is heroin. So it became a multi-purpose image for me, but it derived from that exhibition. (King, “The Fire Within”)
The seventh track on the album, “Bad,” is an impassioned plea to a lifelong friend of the band, Andy Rowen, a victim of Dublin’s raging heroin scene who nearly lost his life due to an overdose. All of the pain and grief of that experience seemed to coalesce in and then pour through the music and lyrics of “Bad,” serving as an anthem for anyone who had suffered crippling defeats in his or her own life. Played live, the song became a central moment in U2’s concerts, acting almost as an altar call as Bono sang, “Surrender, dislocate . . . let it go.”
In many ways, U2’s call to surrender was perfectly timed for an America that was consumed with itself. Politically, Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–1989) championed an aggressive brand of neoconservatism, promoting a strong military buildup, a provocative foreign policy, and a hard-hitting approach to Communism, all of which reinvigorated the Republican Party. The country turned right with economic policy too, implementing supply-side strategies (deemed “Reaganomics”) that reduced taxes, deregulated industry, and downsized government services, a scheme that favored the wealthy and increased the disparity between rich and poor. This neoconservatism in politics and economics directly correlated to a renewed religious fervor as well. The Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” had over four million members and mobilized the Evangelical Christian Right in support of conservative politicians and legislation. But the surge in political, economic, and social conservatism also coincided with an age of decadence, as materialism and consumerism began to define the American dream. With more expendable income, a new class of “yuppie” emerged, reflecting a young, well-paid urban professional who indulged in life’s luxuries. Pop culture and entertainment exploded with slick images of Wall Street, Southern California “Valley Girls,” designer clothes, and exotic vacation destinations. When Bono encouraged the audience to “let it go,” it was as if he were singing past the heroin epidemic of Dublin and right into the heart of a bloated, repressed, and self-absorbed American populace.
While on tour in support of The Unforgettable Fire, “Bad” became more than a song. It was a communal experience and part of a larger motif. With a significant catalog of songs at its disposal, U2 began to shape set lists into something that resembled a liturgical experience, not just a collection of top hits. In this era, the band learned to skillfully and intentionally map out an emotional journey for concertgoers, starting with upbeat standards, moving to thoughtful reflection, and culminating in corporate celebration. Usually performed about two-thirds through the show, “Bad” was itself a movement within a larger symphony, beginning with the hypnotic and percussive tones of sequencers (a first for U2), Edge’s echoing guitar, and Bono’s hauntingly simple vocals sung directly to the audience. As the song developed, Larry matched Adam’s ascending bass line with a full set of drums, while Bono moved into the power of his upper register, only to quiet again and then repeat the whole progression. With the final chorus, Bono invited the audience into a crescendoed exclamation, nearly screaming “Let it go!” Then, calmly, and ever so adroitly, the front man escorted the crowd back to terrestrial soil, gently singing, “Come on down,” repeatedly. Right on cue, without any verbal instruction given, the willing concertgoers would join the chorus, as if they had become members of the band themselves. And in an almost ritualistic way, the crowd’s melodic response of “Come on down” functioned as a collective release, a kind of tribal invitation to the divine and to each other. The experience was replicated night after night, in city after city, throughout the United States in late 1984 and the first half of 1985. America, it seemed, was ready for the participatory, confessional, and cathartic release of “Bad.” And U2 was eager and willing to provide.
While the darkness of Dublin’s heroin culture, along with America’s nuclear bombings, provided material for U2’s exploration of a despairing world, “fire” also had another meaning, a more positive one, demonstrated in two songs honoring the efficacious spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In King, the band found a model for dealing with the Troubles and the terrorism of the Irish Republican Army. Bono remembers, “America had had its own troubles with race relations in the sixties. We started to see similarities with the civil rights movement. We became students of nonviolence, of Martin Luther King’s thinking” (Assayas, Bono, 170). Other similar influences also came from Mohandas Gandhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and the biblical Jesus, all rooted in active resistance through nonviolence.
“Pride (in the Name of Love),” one of U2’s most recognizable hits, captured King’s spirit of peaceful activism. With sweeping dynamics, a strong progressive guitar background, and a soaring yet singable refrain, the song quickly became a standard, an anthem in which Bono and the audience called back and forth to one another in a chorus of ohs, a pattern that soon became a regular feature of U2’s concerts. Talking about the writing process, Bono recounts, “We looked for a subject big enough to demand this level of emotion that was coming out. We had discovered nonviolence and Martin Luther King, not just in relation to his use of the Scriptures and his church background, but also as a solution to the Irish problems” (Bono, “Rolling Stone Interview”). With “Pride,” U2 combined strong song writing, powerful content, and maximum audience engagement, all inspired by King’s peaceful activism. The Unforgettable Fire came to a close with another song honoring King, this one a sweet, understated lullaby. In “MLK,” the album’s benediction, Bono offered the tranquil blessing, “Sleep, sleep tonight / And may your dreams be realized.” For those who didn’t know of King’s legacy, the song was ambiguous enough to still be a simple but effective word of hope and encouragement. But for those who had studied the activist’s life, the song was a powerful and challenging reminder of King’s mission.
The Unforgettable Fire was far more than a mere follow-up to a successful trio of albums. Through Fire, U2 rejected the typical rock formula and reinvented themselves, combining experimental music with bold content and raw emotion, giving attention to cultural critique and subjects that captured the hearts of its listeners. The accompanying tour took the band into sold-out arenas across the United States, as well as to a record number of international venues. Eventually selling seven million copies worldwide, Fire landed a number-one spot on the UK charts, while in the United States it hit number twelve, with “Pride” becoming the group’s first single to break into the Top 40. In 1985, as they traveled across America, Rolling Stone put U2 on the cover of the March issue with the caption, “Our Choice: Band of the ’80s.” While the first trilogy of albums had primarily focused on the local Irish context, this record began a journey into the global conscience, and the world, especially the United States, cheered for more. The result was a mature and seasoned band, poised to create what many critics say became the greatest album of its career and, hence, gave them a bigger platform to champion a set of values and ideals that reached far beyond musical composition.
The Joshua Tree, the band’s fifth studio album, became the quintessential U2 record, representing everything that the quartet had been working toward. It was a combination of thoughtful writing, accomplished musicianship, and cutting-edge production, embracing themes of faith, politics, justice, and philanthropy. Continuing where Fire had left off, this 1987 release delved deeper into the mystique of the American West, finding inspiration in the high desert of California. Both the title and the cover art symbolically depict the rugged individualism of the American conscience, simultaneously capturing the perilous isolation and enduring beauty of a lone Joshua tree. While The Unforgettable Fire had hinted at U2’s fascination with America, The Joshua Tree fleshed it out.
With regard to production and composition, the band hit a stride while recording the album. Bono’s talent as a lyricist was noticeably improving, combining his lucidity on War and his romanticism on The Unforgettable Fire. Eno and Lanois continued their roles as producers, but this time with less experimental ambience, appealing to the listener’s need for accessibility yet still being intelligent and sophisticated, creating a tangible mixture of pop and art. The band also invited Mark “Flood” Ellis to engineer the recording sessions, asking him to help create a sound that would match the expanse of the desert motif. The work went so well that Flood was called to assist on many successive albums. In postproduction, old friend and producer Steve Lillywhite returned to remix some of the tracks in order to give them stronger commercial appeal, something that had been lacking on The Unforgettable Fire. Similar to the recording of its previous album, U2 ditched a professional studio and retreated instead to an eighteenth-century house in the hills of Ireland. The old wooden floors and lofty ceilings of the dwelling provided a perfect, yet unconventional, recording space, as well as a creative and inspiring atmosphere.
Having found the perfect blend of writing and recording, The Joshua Tree quickly won the respect of critics and fans, topping charts and breaking records. With a compelling set of musical sketches, U2 had demonstrated something unique: here was a band set on shaping American culture while allowing itself to be influenced by it. The result was not just a collection of songs but a cinematic landscape as big as the country it sought to conquer. This give-and-take, love-hate relationship, however, was not coincidental but rather the product of a series of experiences, events that began two years before U2 released the historic album.
On July 13, 1985, just as it had closed The Unforgettable Fire tour, U2 performed at Live Aid. The concert, unlike any other because of its high technical requirements, was a satellite-linked simulcast incorporating major venues in Philadelphia and London, as well as smaller partners around the world, in an effort to raise money for the devastating Ethiopian famine. An earlier yet similar project, the Band Aid recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” which was released in December of 1984, had proven that artists and fans wanted to help alleviate suffering in the African nation. At the time, Bono and Adam joined Band Aid and represented U2 with over forty other well-known musicians, including Phil Collins, Boy George, George Michael, Sting, and Bob Geldof, the project’s producer. When the much larger Live Aid event developed just six months later, the members of U2 were eager to lend support, demonstrating their unified heartbeat for Africa, a continent they would address again and again through their music and activism.
U2’s performance at Wembley Stadium that warm summer day was momentous. Even the band couldn’t have predicted how epic the event would end up being. The group’s plan to do three songs had to be scrapped midshow due to an extended, unplanned version of “Bad,” the second song of the set, as Bono pulled several young girls from the pressing throngs and danced with them. The feat involved some dangerous acrobatics, which had Bono leaping over a barrier and off the edge of a high stage to the cheers of an ecstatic crowd. In that chaotic and serendipitous moment, U2 conveyed one of its primary messages to the seventy thousand people in the London stadium and the nearly two billion watching on TV: this was a band that could flood a stadium with a colossal wave of sound yet still be an intimate member of the audience. The thirteen-minute performance of “Bad” clearly and finally established the group as an incomparable live band—as Jack Nicholson said in his introduction of U2—“whose heart is in Dublin” and “whose spirit is with the world” (U2, “U2—Sunday Bloody Sunday”). Indeed, the band’s spirit extended far beyond the United Kingdom, soon reaching across the globe into places it had never considered, ultimately germinating as deeply rooted themes on its next couple of albums.
Specifically, two cross-cultural experiences of Bono’s had impacted the development of the album and, thus, the growth of the band. First, as a result of Live Aid, Bono, along with his wife, Ali, accepted an invitation from the international Christian relief agency World Vision to witness the plight and devastation of the ongoing famine in Ethiopia. For nearly a month in 1985, the couple quietly volunteered at a feeding camp in Ajibar, serving refugees and helping at an orphanage. While there, they wrote songs and short plays to help educate children about basic hygiene and eating habits. The sights, sounds, and smells of Ethiopia left an indelible mark on Bono. He remembers,
In the morning as the mist would lift we would see thousands of people walking in lines toward the camp, people who had been walking for great distances through the night. . . . Some as they got to the camp would collapse. Some would leave their children at the gates and some would leave their dead children at the fences to be buried. (Assayas, Bono, 223)
Even so, there was a beauty to the place, a rich culture filled with strong and noble people. Amid the greatest suffering, Bono witnessed an enduring spirit in the laughter and smiles of the Ethiopians. The vast and expansive desert was itself a place of remarkable natural beauty while also a cruel and harsh wilderness, a violent oppressor to those without food and shelter. Bono developed the contrast in one of The Joshua Tree’s most popular songs, “Where The Streets Have No Name,” singing, “I want to feel sunlight on my face / See the dust cloud disappear without a trace” and “We’re beaten and blown by the wind, trampled in dust.”
Deeply moved by his visit to Ethiopia, the images became metaphors for the band’s own journey through America, providing connecting points between the abject, yet preventable, poverty of a Third World country and the excessiveness of the richest, most powerful nation on the planet. But it was a second international excursion, this time to Central America, that angered Bono to the point of openly challenging the US government from the stage.
“Bullet the Blue Sky,” the fourth song on The Joshua Tree, is universally viewed as one of U2’s most political songs, inspired by a trip Bono and Ali took to El Salvador and Nicaragua in 1986. Having just finished a short tour called A Conspiracy of Hope, an effort by U2 and other artists to raise awareness for Amnesty International, the couple set out on an adventure that took them deep into rebel-controlled territory in El Salvador. At the time, people in El Salvador were caught in an extended struggle between a militant government and a leftist guerrilla revolt. There, Bono saw firsthand the effects of America’s support for the Salvadoran government, a regime that routinely intimidated rural civilians with violent methods of repression, using death squads and a scorched-earth policy. Here was a people, Bono thought, that had struggled for basic human rights in the same way African Americans had during the civil rights movement. And despite the pleas for the United States to defund El Salvador’s government by reformers like Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was later assassinated for his antigovernmental protests, the United States continued to pour aid into the Salvadoran government, ignoring human rights violations.
This was the violent situation Bono stepped into while visiting the small farming project he helped fund. Had he known how intense it was in advance, he might not have gone. One day while walking down a forest path with their guide, he and his small party of travelers encountered a group of government soldiers. In the next terrifying moment, the air came alive with gunfire, bullets whizzing overhead. It was heart-stopping for Bono and his friends, though nothing more than a perverse joke for the soldiers as they discharged warning shots. Once again, on the frontline of violence, poverty, and injustice in a foreign context, Bono’s thoughts went beyond El Salvador. “[M]y subject was America,” he noted. “I wanted to know what was the on-the-ground effect of American foreign policy, because I was a fan of America” (Assayas, Bono, 184). Through this intense experience, Bono penned one of the most biting and cynical songs of U2’s career. Recalling the people he had met and the suffering they had endured, he wrote, “See the face of fear, running scared in the valley below . . . Bullet the blue sky.” This was also the first U2 song that included a spoken-word segment. Part confession, part rant, the outcome was a blistering, yet somewhat veiled, critique of US involvement in Central America. The song’s political commentary has endeared it to both fans and critics as one of their favorite tunes.
Bono’s trip to El Salvador also included an excursion to Nicaragua, still another influence on the writing of “Bullet the Blue Sky” and The Joshua Tree as a whole. Here, too, the people suffered immensely due to civil war, but in this country, the United States gave its support to the guerillas, a group of violent revolutionaries resolved to overthrow the Communist Sandinista government. Labeling the Nicaraguan president a dictator, President Reagan covertly supplied Contra guerrilla forces with funds and illegal weapons. The resulting armed conflict destabilized the country, confirming what Bono had seen on his Salvadoran trip: America, in its quest to defeat Communism, was guilty of supporting political movements that grossly violated human rights.
I was angry with what I saw as the bullying of peasant farmers by big aeroplanes supported by American foreign policy and dollars. . . . There was a lot to despise about America back then, there was shameful conduct in the defense of their self-interest. . . . They were bad times. I described what I had been through, what I had seen, some of the stories of people I had met, and I said to Edge: “Could you put that through your amplifier?” (U2 and McCormick, U2 by U2, 179)
Indeed, Edge could, and he did, filling out the pounding rhythms of Larry’s toms and Adam’s bass with layers of compressed distortion, an emotional slide guitar influenced by the Mississippi delta blues and dissonant tones that sounded part siren and part wailing child.
Using experiences gleaned from international contexts, as well as the band’s own inherent Irishness, The Joshua Tree became a poignant commentary on American culture. On the one hand, U2 was sounding like America’s loudest cheerleader, while on the other hand, it came across as the voice of an amped-up Old Testament prophet, calling out the sins of a nation. But there were also moments in the band’s performances when fans couldn’t quite tell if it was praising or critiquing American culture. The brilliant irony was that U2, through thoughtful artistry, was creatively embedding political and social commentary deep within the vehicle of popular music, taking important subjects like the Ethiopian famine and the civil wars of Central America and translating them into the daily vernacular. The resulting album became a symbol of the 1980s, a pop icon for an entire generation of rock ’n’ roll fans.
U2’s rise to fame in the 1980s wasn’t due solely to its interest in America’s foreign policy, though that was a huge part of the project. Some listeners, content to take U2’s music at face value, simply heard a good set of new rock tunes on The Joshua Tree. For many fans, oblivious to the political and social subtext of the music, U2 was merely a welcome addition to the blandness of the 1980s, providing an alternative to synth-layered new wave and guitar-driven speed metal. For others, the desert expanses of the American Southwest weren’t just physical places, they were metaphors for the hopelessness many US citizens felt as they scanned the horizon. Anton Corbijn’s album artwork perfectly captured the mediocrity of the times with black-and-white desertscapes featuring a lone Joshua tree and moody photos of a disconsolate band. The bold but pensive cover art grabbed fans’ attention and tugged at their hearts even before they had a chance to listen to the music.
For many Americans, the setbacks, disappointments, and tragedies of The Joshua Tree era were easily observed, part of everyday life: millions of people watched the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on live TV; the United States bombed Libya in reaction to terrorism; the Iran-Contra scandal raged on the nightly news; stock markets in America and around the world crashed; nuclear armament reached a peak during the Cold War; Chernobyl became the site of the worst nuclear accident the world had ever seen; acts of terrorism, including airline hijackings and several prominent hostage crises, were becoming more common. It was in this climate that the four members of U2 stepped up to fill the role of the shaman—medicine men of sorts—offering healing through sacred and communal participation, facilitated by an intriguing blend of pop and art.
But contrary to the assumptions of some critics, U2 wasn’t exclusively concerned with the dark depths of the American conscience. The band also wanted to experiment with music, bringing a freshness to the industry of rock ’n’ roll. While developing ideas for The Joshua Tree project, Edge stumbled onto some of his most iconic sounds. Evolving along with the technology, his musical sensibilities, combined with his mathematical wit, provided the foundation for an innovative quality on the album. Using a four-track cassette deck, sequencers, and a drum machine, essential tools for musicians in the midst of a flourishing home studio movement, he tested chord structures, shifting time signatures, and syncopated delays. The efforts culminated in a background demo track for “Where the Streets Have No Name,” a tune that he imagined would be as bold live as on a record. Musically, “Streets” proved to be a very complex tune, sounding quite strange at first and requiring hours upon hours of rehearsal time. But the band finally mastered the piece and used it as the opening song for the record and the tour, eventually garnering a peak chart position of thirteen in the United States and four in the United Kingdom.
Edge’s imagination and inventive spirit resulted in another signature sound as well. “With or Without You” featured the uncanny and ethereal tones of the prototype “Infinite Guitar,” an instrument he had built and experimented with on his 1986 solo album, Captive. Layered one on top of another, the heavily compressed and sustained notes became a trademark for Edge. Additionally, as Adam tested a pronounced, driving bass line and Larry blended live and electronic drum parts, the song progressed into something beyond the typical verse-chorus structure of standard pop tunes and became a sophisticated yet understated expression of raw, conflicted emotion. Though it sounded odd compared to the average Top 40 hit, “With or Without You” eventually earned U2 its first number-one spot on the charts in the United States and Canada, turning into a staple of live performances and a fan favorite for decades.
Several videos also accompanied and lent support to The Joshua Tree, each of which was nominated for multiple MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs). “With or Without You” presented an artsy and brooding U2, featuring provocative close-ups of Edge’s girlfriend interspersed between grainy black-and-white clips of the band performing. Nominated for an astounding seven categories at the VMAs, the song won “Viewer’s Choice,” signaling its wildly popular reception by U2 fans in 1987. The music video for “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” a bluesy, gospel-styled spiritual, was filmed on the Strip in Las Vegas. In it, band members wandered through the decadent nightlife of Sin City as Bono sang, “You broke the bonds and you loosed the chains / Carried the cross of my shame.” The overt biblical imagery of angels, a devil, and the “kingdom come” sat in stark contrast to the prurient casino culture of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. The quirky formula, however, worked, winning four MTV awards in 1988. “Where the Streets Have No Name” also had a city for its backdrop. Filmed on the roof of a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles, the video was part of an unannounced free concert, a stunt that shut down an area of the civic center and brought police into real-time confrontation with the band, providing footage that ended up as part of the final production. But though fans loved the freshness and spontaneity of the video, it failed to win any of the categories for which it was nominated. Overall, The Joshua Tree provided U2 with an opportunity to move boldly into the rapidly expanding and increasingly influential world of music videos, putting the group front and center with MTV’s young audience.
The band also made new strides on its tour for The Joshua Tree. Starting in arenas and ending in stadiums, venues routinely sold out through three legs across North America and Europe, making it very hard for fans to find tickets. On April 30, 1987, U2 stepped onstage in Detroit as the headlining act in a stadium, a first for the group on a US tour, playing to over fifty thousand people. The show, though successful, also raised a new dilemma for the band and crew, causing them to ask about the place and purpose of video screens in large venues. Would a screen help people at the back of the stadium see and experience the band better? Or would it divide the audience’s attention, causing concertgoers to focus on an image rather than the real thing? A difficult challenge, this became a core issue that U2 would revisit on every successive tour, always speculating about the relevance of state-of-the-art technology. The question at hand, however, was answered on September 20 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, DC, when a video screen was installed, the first step in U2’s new interest in visual production. And while Willie Williams, the band’s longtime stage designer, considered the implications of video projection, he was also responsible for illuminating the stage and the stadium. True to form, U2 wasn’t just interested in lighting the show but also wanted to feature and highlight the audience at key moments during the concert. On The Joshua Tree tour, Williams and his team installed massive lighting rigs that would periodically flood the entire coliseum. On select nights, U2 would start its show with all of the house lights on as it played the first couple of songs. This practice of lighting the audience was another precedent-setting technique that found a home on all future tours.
U2 also sought to bring a bit of levity to at least three of its stadium shows on the tour. Demonstrating their love for irony, on November 1, 1987, at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis, the four members of U2 disguised themselves as a country western band—complete with clothes, wigs, and twangy accents—then took the stage and sang two songs as the Dalton Brothers, essentially becoming an opening act for themselves. (Adding an additional layer of irony, Adam donned a skirt and appeared as a Dalton sister!) Unable to recognize Bono through his thick drawl, a common accent in the southern states of America, fans dismissed the young unknowns as novice and uninteresting, not realizing they were turning their backs on the very band they had come to see. In the end, the harmless prank worked, and U2 discovered the powerful potential of having an alter ego. The Daltons only made two more appearances, in Los Angeles on November 18 and in Hampton, Virginia, on December 12, but this wouldn’t be the last time that U2 used misdirection and trickery to intentionally portray something it was not. In the 1990s, U2 employed even greater irony, building shows around multiple alter egos in an effort to convey themes the band really cared about.
In 1987 and 1988, U2 became the hottest ticket on the planet, offering a perfect combination of polished studio production and skillful yet passionate stage shows. Working day and night, the band pursued a relentless schedule of recording and touring, along with media performances and various philanthropic appearances. The hard work eventually paid off, earning The Joshua Tree a number-one position in nine countries, selling over ten million albums in the United States, totaling more than twenty-five million worldwide, and winning two Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Best Performance by a Duo or Group in 1988. During production, the band continued developing the creative process and deepened its commitment to global justice, simultaneously offering both praise and critique of American culture. U2 learned how to mix playfulness into its sometimes somber set lists and how to nuance its image in the growing eye of the public. No longer merely capable musicians with a moral conscience, the members of U2 were now superstars. But while the band enjoyed its newfound fame and fortune, it showed signs of being unsure of how to deal with the pressures of success.
Never content to stand still, U2’s next project continued building on the American experience by offering an album in combination with another video production. Rattle and Hum, U2’s 1988 follow-up to The Joshua Tree, became an experiment for the band in two ways. First, the album featured live versions of its standard hits as well as covers of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” and Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” but it also included several new studio recordings. Defying the traditional notion that a rock band should immediately release a live album after a popular record, the group added original content, knowing it had to do more than just capitalize on previous successes. Second, while U2 had earlier dealt with social and political themes from the American context, on Rattle and Hum the band set out to be less controversial, choosing the American music scene as its subject of interest. On this record and companion film, U2 sought to venerate the folk, blues, gospel, and early rock ’n’ roll of the United States by honoring some of its icons, including Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Billie Holiday, and B. B. King. But the concept backfired. Critics thought U2 was taking its superstar status a bit too seriously, calling the band pretentious, supposing that the members of U2 were comparing themselves to and aligning themselves with the musical geniuses of America’s past. Panned as arrogant and bloated, U2 appeared shallow and superficial to many.
Produced by Jimmy Iovine, the album had intended to capture some of the most symbolic musical expressions of the American experience. The theatrical feature-length documentary, produced by Phil Joanou, showed the band recording at the historic Sun Studio in Memphis, singing with a black gospel choir in a church, strolling down the sidewalks of Harlem, and stopping traffic during an impromptu concert in San Francisco. The ambitious audio/video project featured live performances with Dylan and King and included a prerecorded clip of Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” Using black-and-white footage filmed at a sports arena in Denver, along with color material taken from a stadium in Tempe, Arizona, the documentary added candid shots of the band, including a reverent yet slightly disjointed visit to Elvis Presley’s Graceland. A daring musical and cinematic endeavor, Rattle and Hum presented a seemingly overconfident and somewhat cheeky U2 in America.
Though some accused U2 of getting lost inside its own celebrity, it did not forget its commitment to the theme of peace and justice. “Silver and Gold,” a song featured on both the Rattle and Hum record and film, demonstrated U2’s ongoing commitment to peacemaking. A commentary on South Africa’s system of racial segregation called “apartheid,” the song is a perfect intersection of politics, American foreign policy, African culture, and activism.
As U2 was ascending the ladder of superstardom in the 1980s, most countries in Africa were reeling from the effects of World War II colonialism and the Cold War. In the midst of gaining independence from the West, many African nations expressed their anti-imperialist proclivities by accepting Soviet aid, money, and military assistance. In response, the United States looked for its own allies, finding a partner in South Africa, a country considered strategic in the fight against Communism. But as was often the case throughout the Cold War, the US government turned a blind eye to a darker story of human rights abuse.
In South Africa, apartheid was a political system that constrained the civil rights of nonwhite ethnic groups through systematic isolation of the majority black culture. Harsh restrictions imposed by an all-white government forced black people into segregated neighborhoods and stripped them of citizenship and political representation, resulting in inferior education, medical care, and other services. Voices of dissention were not tolerated—those who demonstrated against the South African government were banned or imprisoned. One such antiapartheid leader was Nelson Mandela. As a young visionary in the African National Congress (ANC), Mandela worked as a lawyer, contesting the government-sanctioned system of discrimination. Though committed to nonviolence, he participated in a sabotage campaign against the state in 1961, was arrested, and then sentenced to life in prison. Desmond Tutu, an Anglican bishop of Lesotho in the mid-1970s and later archbishop of Cape Town, also rose to prominence as an outspoken voice of reform. Critical of the United States, Tutu opposed the Reagan administration’s passive approach to apartheid and advocated for disinvestment, a strategy meant to financially weaken the South African government via boycotts and reduced trade. Through the activism of Mandela and Tutu, the world began to take notice of South Africa’s archaic and unjust system of segregation.
The subsequent call for international sanctions hit the entertainment industry especially hard and had a direct effect on U2. Despite a cultural boycott imposed on the country by the United Nations, many British and American rock groups continued performing at Sun City, a luxurious resort, casino, and concert venue in South Africa. In protest, “Little Steven” Van Zandt, guitar player for Bruce Springsteen, assembled a group of musicians for the 1985 project Artists United against Apartheid. Bono joined the effort, along with other popular performers, to record the album Sun City and sang on the title track, “We’re rockers and rappers, united and strong / We’re here to talk about South Africa, we don’t like what’s going on . . . I ain’t gonna play Sun City.” Containing overt criticism of the Reagan administration and implicit condemnation of America’s support for the minority government, the album was a success across the globe, heightening awareness of apartheid and raising more than a million dollars for associated projects.
During the recording of Sun City, Bono penned another song, one that would eventually find a home on Rattle and Hum. “Silver and Gold,” a blues-inspired tale about a black prisoner suffering under the boot of the racist government, became an antiapartheid anthem for U2. During the live version that appears on the Rattle and Hum film, Bono recalls his inspiration for the song, saying it was the story of a man who was “ready to take up arms against his oppressor, a man who has lost faith in the peace makers of the West while they argue and while they fail to support a man like Bishop Tutu and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa” (U2: Rattle and Hum). Restricting the “silver and gold” of the country’s lucrative mineral mines and its prosperous economy was meant to be the punch that “hit where it hurts” (U2: Rattle and Hum).
Throughout the era of apartheid, U2 often used its expanding platform to inform audiences about the plight of South Africa, the imprisonment of Mandela, and the call for sanctions by Tutu. In 1990, soon after Rattle and Hum was issued, an international effort to secure Mandela’s release succeeded, and in 1994 the former activist and revolutionary was elected as the country’s first black president, marking the end of apartheid. Years later, U2 would honor this antiapartheid visionary, making him the subject of the 2014 Grammy-nominated hit, “Ordinary Love.” Throughout their career, the members of U2 have often revisited their two South African heroes, Mandela and Tutu, echoing a commitment to justice and reconciliation while finding new ways to amplify a message of love.
Though the Rattle and Hum soundtrack contained important themes and messages, it ultimately left U2 disappointed, selling a little more than half as many copies as The Joshua Tree. Accused of becoming the pompous Hollywood personalities they had previously crusaded against, the band bristled at its detractors’ claims of grandiose bravado and religious pretentiousness. Still, U2 continued to gain a strong following across the globe, though America—both the place and the idea—was where the band had invested itself most intentionally in the late 1980s. Stung by the criticism, U2 made its way back home to Ireland, unsure of what to do next and certainly unaware of the wild and uninhibited experiment that was coming.