The Joshua Tree

U2

album cover

"Tear Down the Walls That Hold Me Inside"

U2 started out in 1976 as a zealot's idea of a great rock band. Furious about bloodshed in Ireland and racism everywhere, the Irish four-piece charged full-speed-ahead toward the power grid, fueled by self-righteousness and a razorsharp rhythm guitar spearing holes in the upper atmosphere. They were true believers, and their stirring sound made not just the cause du jour, but belief itself, infectious: Being in a crowd when U2 was rattling off "Sunday Bloody Sunday" or "New Year's Day," you felt like you stood for something.

And then, fame happened. After spending years cultivating that scrappy underdog image, suddenly Bono and his pals were rock stars. This had uncomfortable implications—who wants to crusade alongside a self-righteous billionaire? As Bono acknowledged later in interviews, the band sensed that its tone had to change. And it did: The Joshua Tree is U2's vision quest, a tear through the vast open spaces of mythic America in search of illumination, if not personal truth. There's doubt in these songs with youthful idealism replaced by a slightly wary sense of the world.

Shifting the focus from outrage at external forces to frustration at internal vexations, U2 redirected its crusade: This is an album about turning inward, confronting that existential void, and living to tell about it. The refrains remind that fame and fortune isn't everything ("I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"), and how the search for understanding can be overwhelming (the album opens with "Where the Streets Have No Name," and after a two-minute instrumental surge that is one of the great crescen-dos in rock, the first words are "I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside").

That's one giant-sized statement of intention and it serves as a kind of mission statement: Every phrase uttered by Bono the bell-ringer embodies a touch of that restlessness. Every pummeling, military-march backbeat—and this album, which was produced by sound-sculpting experts Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, is full of them—is aimed at breaking the chains, bursting out of the old patterns, finding new clarity. Some great rock affirms life as it is. This sweeping, majestic album is concerned with possibilities and ideals not yet glimpsed. It doesn't tear down the walls for you, but it does provide the impetus, and maybe even some of the tools, for doing the demolition yourself.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1987, Island
Key Tracks: "Where the Streets Have No Name," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "With or Without You," "Running to Stand Still"
Catalog Choice: The Unforgettable Fire; How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Next Stop: Peter Gabriel: So
After That: Midnight Oil: Diesel and Dust
Book Pages: 798–799