(recording, 1987)
What happens when a famous rock band from Ireland reflects on their love/hate relationship with the United States? You get an album that glories in the beauties of even the harshest of American landscapes (the desert); that celebrates the American musical traditions of rock, folk, and blues; that explores the vicissitudes of the spiritual life; and that raises pointed questions about America’s place in the world order. You get U2’s The Joshua Tree.
In the late 1980s the Irish rock band U2 decided that they wanted to make an album inspired by their experiences in America: its literature, its landscape, its politics, and its spiritual yearnings. What emerged from their recording sessions was a record that today is widely considered one of the best rock albums of all time, as well as being one of the bestselling with over twenty-five million copies sold worldwide. The Joshua Tree also fostered a series of hit singles that helped establish U2 as what magazine covers were calling “the biggest band in the world.”
Coming off their previous album, The Unforgettable Fire, U2 decided to largely forgo the atmospheric and impressionistic soundscapes of that album and to create something “more straightforward, focused, and concise.” From the chiming guitar tones of the opening song, “Where the Streets Have No Name” (likely a reference to heaven), the listener is invited into a muscular, unflinching musical and lyrical experience, a place where struggle, exhilaration, and indignation meet and interact. Here lead singer Bono unleashes his full vocal arsenal of sighs, moans, grunts, exhalations, and a voice that cracks with emotion. Such mannerisms are effectively deployed throughout the record. While “Streets” is uplifting, the second song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” strikes a more uncertain tone, and honest reflection bridges clearly expressed belief in “The Kingdom Come” with the nagging sense that even with the comforts of faith there must be more to this life than what the singer has experienced. This theme drives much of the record. “With or Without You,” which musically moves from a quiet simmer to a full boil, can be interpreted either as a love song or as an expression of spiritual longing and struggle. “Bullet the Blue Sky” is a scathing (both lyrically and sonically) indictment of an American foreign policy driven more by greed than by idealism, and “In God’s Country” explores the myth of America as promised land, a promise many find unfulfilled.
Though America is the big theme of the album, this does not keep U2 from exploring other themes closer to home, as in “Running to Stand Still,” which mourns the damage done by an epidemic of heroin use in their hometown of Dublin, “Red Hill Mining Town,” a protest song in the cause of a UK miner’s strike, and the haunting “Mothers of the Disappeared,” written to honor a group of mothers whose children had been victims of the civil war in El Salvador. One of the most moving songs on the album is “One Tree Hill,” a memorial to a close friend who had died in a motorcycle accident. The song describes the thoughts that drifted through Bono’s mind at the funeral of his lost comrade.
While the music on The Joshua Tree has an anthemic energy and punch, it traverses a bleak and harsh landscape of emotions and experiences; it is a record of U2’s spiritual pilgrimage through this dark territory. The fact that so many people have so readily embraced the album perhaps speaks to the universality of such a pilgrimage and attests to the way that U2 could bring such beauty and meaning into the bleakness of a fallen world.
U2 grew out of a notice on the Mount Temple High School bulletin board, placed there by Larry Mullen Jr., who was looking for students interested in making music together. A band grew out of those who responded, and went through several changes in personnel and band names before settling on the moniker “U2” and narrowing their membership to Larry Mullen Jr., Paul “Bono” Hewson, David “The Edge” Evans, and Adam Clayton. When the fledgling band won a talent show whose prize included the opportunity to record a demo in a studio, their slow ascent toward fame began. Their debut album, Boy (1980), gathered positive reviews and modest sales, and included their first song to chart in the States, “I Will Follow.”
The group almost disbanded during the recording of their second album, October (1981), due to Bono and The Edge’s concerns about whether a rock-and-roll lifestyle could accommodate their seriously held Christian commitments. They had both become members of a church called Shalom Fellowship, which emphasized radical discipleship. After much wrestling with the question, they decided that they could be both Christians and rock musicians, and the songs on October reflect their spiritual concerns, as would much of their music thereafter.
Their breakthrough album artistically was War (1983), which contains several songs with explicitly Christian lyrical statements, including “40,” their paraphrase of Psalm 40: “I waited patiently for the Lord / He inclined and heard my cry.” The record’s unique sound, driven by an insistent rhythm section and The Edge’s chopping guitar work, was different from almost anything else being created by other bands, and the lyrics on the record showed a continued growth in maturity and depth. Its follow-up, Under a Blood Red Sky (1983), was a live album and concert film that showed how effectively U2 could engage an audience.
The Unforgettable Fire (1984) finds the band experimenting with a new sound, an arty, atmospheric, ambient vibe that was influenced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. The song, “Pride (In the Name of Love),” which name-checked both Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus, became their first big hit song in the States. When they performed a mesmerizing fourteen-minute version of their song “Bad” for the televised Live Aid, and Bono leapt off the stage to dance with a fan, the world was given notice that U2 had fully arrived.
Subsequent albums explored their musical roots and a variety of sonic experiments: a tip of the hat to their musical forebearers in Rattle and Hum (1988), the highly introspective and musically inventive Achtung Baby (1991), which they playfully described as “four men chopping down the Joshua Tree,” Zooropa (1993), and Pop (1997). During this period they specialized in elaborate stage tours that emphasized sensory overload, oversize props (a wall of televisions and a gigantic, glittering mirror-ball lemon), and over-the-top characterizations (Bono as “MacPhisto” and “The Fly”). The music of this period gave evidence of the personal spiritual struggles that Bono and other band members were undergoing at the time.
With All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000), How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004), No Line On the Horizon (2006), and Songs of Innocence (2014), there is a return to the sound that had once made them the world’s biggest band. That sound highlights the expressive, deeply emotive vocals of Bono, the chopping, chiming, echoing guitar chords of The Edge, and the often-underappreciated rhythmic backdrop provided by Clayton and Mullen. When fused together, the U2 sound can descend to a place where emotional darkness can be probed, or ascend to musical ecstasy with an exhilaration that echoes the gospel music Bono so dearly loves.
U2’s lyrics are often embellished with biblical and spiritual imagery—for example, on songs such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “Pride (In the Name of Love),” “Silver and Gold,” and “Running to Stand Still.” Such songs are often filled with direct references from the Bible. One critic has enumerated more than fifty scriptural quotations in U2’s lyrics, sometimes used in songs that are not particularly focused on religious subject matter. They commonly tackle issues like racism, the Irish troubles, war, drug addiction, and social injustice—in the midst of which they posit a hope that arises from a connection to God.
But U2 has not settled for just singing about the problems of the world. The band, especially Bono, has been outspoken about such issues as poverty, AIDS, the third world, and social injustice. Their A Conspiracy of Hope tour raised awareness and a great deal of money for Amnesty International. Bono has paid personal visits to Africa in his campaign for the fight against world hunger and the cancelation of crippling third-world debt. “There is nothing worse than a rock star with a cause,”1 admits Bono, but he has spent the currency of his celebrity status to increase awareness for a lot of important issues.
Three of the four members of the band have long self-identified as Christians, and the status of the fourth is at very least that of a passionate spiritual seeker. But all of them evidence a distrust of institutionalized religion. Bono has said:
I’m not a very religious person. I’m uncomfortable in churches because the Christ I love and read about in the Gospels is often not in the churches. Remember, I come from Ireland and I’ve seen the damage of religious warfare. I am a believer. I don’t wear the badge on the outside but on the inside.2
However, despite being uncomfortable with religion, and recognizing that he is often “not a very good advertisement for God,” Bono understands his personal need for grace. As he told one interviewer: “The thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma.”3 He explains,
At the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. . . . And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that. . . . Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I have done a lot of stupid stuff.4
Grace, Bono says, is not an excuse for stupid actions, but he is “holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the cross.”5 And Bono also believes that honestly reflecting upon his personal faith struggles is part of his calling as an artist, just as it was for ancient Israel’s King David. “What’s so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as their being Gospel and songs of praise, they are also the blues. It’s very important to be honest with God.”6 The doubt and uncertainty sometimes found in the songs only make their spirituality all the more convincing.
It is this mixture of heartfelt trust in God’s grace with honesty about the struggle of living out the spiritual life that has made U2’s songs so important to so many listeners. Whether revealing the intensity of their own struggles (“With or Without You,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “Wake Up Dead Man”) or celebrating the joy and hope of God’s kingdom (“Gloria,” “40,” “Yahweh”), U2 writes and performs songs that are passionate, authentic, and unforgettable.