It
won the Album of the Year award from the Grammy Awards of 1988. It continues
the sonic experimentation of The Unforgettable Fire. For instance, the album opener, "Where the Streets Have No Name", begins
with a soft organ fade-in over which The Edge plays a simple echo-laden arpeggio, ringing each note out twice, an elegant
effect that gives the band a deceptively detailed sound. "With or Without You", the album's first single and one of the band's
most well known songs, uses a technique called "infinite guitar", developed by Michael Brook, to distort the notes into an
eerie wail.
It
also picks up where the political themes of War left off. "Bullet the Blue Sky" is a fierce attack on the United States'
policy of arming rebels in El Salvador. The song has a martial
drum beat, thundering bassline, and wailing guitar reminiscent of falling bombs. Bono reportedly told Edge to "put El
Salvador through your amplifier". "Mothers of the Disappeared" is an understated lament for
the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the thousands of "disappeared"--people who opposed the Videla and Galtieri
coup d'état that overtook Argentina in 1976, who were kidnapped and never seen again.
In
addition to the political matter, there are many personal songs, including "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", a
song about Bono's inner struggles with faith and temptation, and "One Tree Hill", an elegy written for a friend of the band,
Greg Caroll (for whom the album is dedicated), who died in 1986.
Musically,
the band began to incorporate American folk and blues influences into their songwriting, most evident on "Running To Stand
Still", a rustic ballad about heroin addiction, and "Trip Through Your Wires", a harmonica-filled blues romp. Rattle and Hum
(1988) would examine these influences in greater depth.
The
Joshua Tree is not only widely considered one of the band's best albums, it is often considered one of the greatest albums
ever recorded. It was named by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the band's "three masterpieces" (alongside Achtung Baby and
All That You Can't Leave Behind), as well as appearing at #26 on the magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album
has sold over 10 million copies in the USA alone and remains
the band's best-selling album. It was followed by a successful world tour.
Themes
Water
and Desert
Numerous
aspects of the album emphasize water and the desert. To begin with, the cover photograph is a black-and-white photo of the
band at Joshua Tree National Park in the desert of California,
taken by the band's longtime photographer Anton Corbijn. Throughout the album, there are numerous explicit lyrical references
to water and desert. Specifically, there are 46 references to the words rain, raining, rainin', rainfall, flood, water, well,
sea, ocean, and river. Also, there are 17 references to desert, dry, plain, heat, dust, sunlight, and the sun. Water and desert,
poetic equivalents of life and death, loss and redemption, and other diametrically opposed but uniquely linked forces, are
thus used for a variety of purposes (which are further explained later):
1.
Reconciling Greg Carroll's death.
2.
Analogizing the duality of American spirit and its oft-ruthless foreign policy.
3.
Setting a tone of the American Southwest, providing a cinematic backdrop for the music.
4.
Creating tone of rusticism, purity, earthiness, piety, rootsiness, and complementing the bluesy/country vibe. As Bono has
said, a canvas on which to paint.
America
In
the initial Joshua Tree writing sessions, the band began mentioning books they were reading at the time--short stories by
Raymond Carver, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, and others--as well as talking about the idea of America and what
it means. They also talked in detail with producer Brian Eno about the idea of music as cinematic - that music can evoke a
location in the listener's mind - and began to place the setting for many of their musical explorations on this album in America's
desert southwest. What is more, the band were beginning to investigate America's musical traditions, such as blues, gospel,
soul, rhythm and blues, and country music, genres they felt they had ignored up to that point in their lives. From these initial
forays into all things American (its music, literature, and geography), the band realized it had decidedly contradictory feelings
about the country. They at once found it liberating and oppressive. Liberating as an idea and perhaps a place to live, but
oppressive in its power, influence, and controversial foreign policy. A draft title to the album was The Two Americas, influenced
by this fascination and deep skepticism with America, and
also by Bono's trip to El Salvador where he witnessed American-backed
bombings.
Loss
Many
of the songs have a pronounced ache to them. Bono has commented that the album abounds with the ache of the Irish, but not
in obvious ways. A cursory review of the general, explicit content of all of the songs reveals that each song generally deals
with the notion of loss or absence, be it a person, place, or thing. Bono's lyrics, notoriously ambiguous, contribute to this
feeling of absence of something. Album co-producer Daniel Lanois has also said that Bono's sings at the top of his range on
much of the album--a characteristic the Quebecois says is emotionally compelling and very "Aretha Franklin-like"--and it is
quite noticeable that Bono's vocals are huskier and have slowed down compared to earlier albums. In essence, Bono's talents
coalesce on this album. What is more, one of The Edge's stylistic troupes is to avoid playing the third of each chord. The
third is what gives each chord its gender (major or minor sound), and without it there is a feeling of uncertainty, ambiguity,
and absence. As well, the rhythm section's subtlety creates a blank slate of a musical statement. Each of these aspects of
the band's sound--Bono's ambiguous lyrics and belting vocals, Edge's tenuous and ethereal playing, and Adam and Larry's austere
rhythm section create an emotionally irresolute landscape rife with mystery, ambiguity, and uncertainty. And as most listeners
have noted, there is a highness to these songs, a soaring, anthemic, grand quality--the same quality that became the root
of most criticism the band endured after they released and toured for this album.
Greg
Carroll
Greg
Carroll was Bono's personal assistant and close friend, and can be seen in videos during the Unforgettable Fire European tour,
in the video to "Bad," and figures prominently on the band's Live Aid set. Carroll was a Maori from New
Zealand the band met while kicking off their Unforgettable Fire tour, and was invited to
join the band's touring entourage. After the tour, Carroll relocated to Ireland
and assisted the band during the recording of the album. Tragically, Carroll was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was
running errands for the band. Carroll's death is yet another event or emotion from which the music takes its sonic ancestry.
Appropriately, the album is dedicated to the memory of Greg Carroll.
The
Joshua Tree
Crystallizing
this musical journey, as the band jokingly says in the film Rattle and Hum, the album name The Joshua Tree is not without
implicit meaning. The Hebrew name "Joshua" translated into Greek means "Jesus," which provides a Biblical connotation for
the album content. What is more, the actual tree's shape reminds some of the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross. Also,
in the Old Testament, Joshua was leading the Hebrews in their follow-up victory at Ai, and he hanged their king on a tree
until sunset. These images resonate with the themes of the album by evoking an image of a man suffering a great loss or making
a great sacrifice, and either calling on something greater for assistance, or simply drawing on catharsis to reconcile what
has been lost.
Summary
Each
of these major themes can be viewed independently of or interconnected with one another. At the smallest level, the album
deals with reconciling the death of Bono's close friend, Greg Carroll. At a larger level, the album both implicitly and explicitly
praises and criticizes America as an idea and tyrant. And
at the largest level, the album can be seen as a meditation on loss and redemption. But as Brian Eno says, the result is a
rich and densely interconnected stretched envelope, called an album.
1. "Where the Streets Have No Name" (5:37)
2. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" (4:37)
3. "With or Without You" (4:56)
4. "Bullet the Blue Sky" (4:32)
5. "Running To Stand Still" (4:18)
6. "Red Hill
Mining Town" (4:52)
7. "In God's Country" (2:57)
8. "Trip Through Your Wires" (3:32)
9. "One Tree Hill" (5:23)
10. "Exit" (4:13)
11. "Mothers of the Disappeared" (5:14)
