As the years pass, I realize more and more that #1 may be as close as an album can come to perfection. Let’s start with the production. This is the best produced rock record I’ve ever heard. The soundscapes they create are as open and full of mystery and promise as the American western desert that they feature in the artwork. Once again, producers Daniel Lenois and Brian Eno are as important as the four band members.
It opens with a 1-2-3 punch of Muhammad Ali proportions: “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With Or Without You.” I mean…What The F*ck??? They could have gone home right there and the record would still have made my Top 100. What do you do after that? Well, you then deliver the hardest rocker you’ve ever recorded, the blistering “Bullet the Blue Sky,” and then you close the side with a haunting, minimalist masterpiece, “Running To Stand Still.” And that’s just the first side, rock fans. Let’s break it down even more. If #1 has any imperfections at all, they all come in the second half. Side One of The Joshua Tree is absolutely, undeniably, unequivocably…perfection. Even on great records, you can nitpick small details. This song could have been a little longer, that line could have been better, the solo could have been done a little differently…whatever. On Side One of The Joshua Tree, there is NOTHING that could be improved upon.
The majestic opening of “Where the Streets Have No Name” is the culmination of Edge’s atmospheric guitar playing that he started working with in earnest on the previous The Unforgettable Fire. The song continues to be the highlight of most of their shows, the very definition of anthemic. If “Where the Streets…” is the culmination of the band musically up to this point, then “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is the culmination of Bono’s lyric writing through the 1980’s. Ever since their debut in 1980, U2 never hid the fact that they were spiritual travelers. As the frontman and source of most of their lyrics, Bono even more so than the others expressed this spiritual journey and unrest:
“I have climbed highest mountain, I have run through the fields
Only to be with You, only to be with You
I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, these city walls
Only to be with You
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips
It burned like fire, this burning desire
I have spoke with the tongue of angels, I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night, I was cold as a stone
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
I believe in the kingdom come, then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one, well yes I'm still running
You broke the bonds and You, loosed the chains, carried the cross
Of my shame, of my shame, you know I believed it
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...”
This is a song directed straight to God, simultaneously a prayer of thanks and an admission of still feeling lost in many ways. From there we move to the secular “With Or Without You,” their biggest hit and the most perfectly paced song from a musical standpoint that I’ve ever come across. It is one long crescendo of passion, and when the band finally explodes near the end, it is a well earned release. Then we move to the political with the searing “Bullet the Blue Sky” (based on a trip to El Salvador that Bono took in the turbulent late 80’s). Here Edge dispenses with the atmospherics and makes his guitar sound like dive bombing airplanes. When recording this song, Bono is alleged to have instructed Edge to “put the war through your amplifier.” Edge did just that, creating a sonic maelstrom worthy of Hendrix. Finally, after the dust of the bombast of that song settles comes one of the most delicate and devastating tunes in their repertoire, the drug casualty song “Running To Stand Still”:
“And so she woke up, woke up from where she was lying still
Said ‘I gotta do something, about where we're going
Step on a steam train, step out of the driving rain, maybe
Run from the darkness in the night’
Singing ha, ah la la la de day…
Sweet the sin, bitter taste in my mouth
I see seven towers, but I only see one way out
You got to cry without weeping, talk without speaking, scream without raising your voice
You know I took the poison, from the poison stream
Then I floated out of here
Singing...ha la la la de day…
She runs through the streets, with her eyes painted red
Under black belly of cloud in the rain
In through a doorway she brings me, white gold and pearls stolen from the sea
She is raging, she is raging, and the storm blows up in her eyes
She will suffer the needle chill
She's running to stand still”
ABOVE: "Running To Stand Still" (live, 1988). Warning: Bono in full earnest mode.
The album tapers off only slightly in the second half (I mean, how long can you sustain perfection?), but you’ve still got the great working class tale of “Red Hill Mining Town,” the glorious forgotten gem “In God’s Country,” the slight misstep but still catchy noble attempt at sounding like an American band with “Trip Through Your Wires,” the lovely “One Tree Hill,” the brooding “Exit” and finally the bitter jab at Pinochet’s Chile in the atmospheric closer “Mothers of the Disappeared.” If you buy the latest Super Duper Special Deluxe Edition Whatever of #1 (the one in the expensive box with two CD’s, a DVD of a 1987 concert in Paris and a book about the record), you find on that second CD evidence that even their leftovers and B-Sides from the period could have fit comfortably next to what made the cut for the record. “Luminous Times,” “Walk To the Water,” “Silver and Gold,” “Sweetest Thing,” “Wave of Sorrow,” “Desert of Our Love,” “Rise Up”…this record would still have been my #1 had any of these great songs replaced some of the songs in the second half. Imagine this mofo as a double record? It could have been with these great leftovers and B-Sides.
Bono once discussed what they were trying to accomplish with The Joshua Tree, and the always verbose Irishman is worth quoting at length here: “We weren’t interested in America the landmass or the body politic, but America the mythic idea. I always say that America is not just a country, it’s an idea, and we were looking at how that idea expressed itself in the 1980’s…We had this sense that people were parched of the idealism they’d had in the sixties…”, hence the prominent desert imagery in the album art and in some of the songs. Bono continues, “America had colonized all our imaginations, the force of its culture, its pop, its movies…was so powerful that the only way to describe this American century was to enter the belly of the beast. And that’s what we did – with our Irish point of view. Irish people always loved America, it was sort of a promised land. And if I was enraged by the sermonizing of the televangelists, I still loved the poetry of the scriptures they quoted, and I loved the poetry of the country’s geography…Two Americas, the mythic America and the real America – harsh reality alongside the dream. It was prosperous and it was parched and I began to see this era as a spiritual drought. I started thinking about the desert…So in the midst of this are all these personal songs, love songs, faith songs, songs about claustrophobia and songs about wide open spaces…And a picture emerges from these disparate pieces, a kind of mosaic of the personal and the political, with melancholy, with rage, with tenderness – and these ideas and images coalesced in a single geographic location, a single focus in that desert, the image of the Joshua Tree.”
One of those rare records that is so good it creates its own world, a record that gives you hope for the human condition. If four Irish lads are capable of creating such artistic greatness, then what else can we accomplish as a species?
13 comments:
So I have no real problem with this. Lord knows I wore this tape out when I first got it. But answer my qualification question: Is it in your car right now and do you pull it out to listen to it while driving?
Absolutely.
I do listen to it regularly. The other day, in fact, and it still sounds fresh and exciting. But I still say that that is not a legitimate qualification to make an all time list. It's an all time list, not a "this week" list.
This is a good, even a great album, impossible to fault. I actually prefer Achtung Baby, but I'm in a huge minority there. Probably I'm just tired of the major hits on JTree, despite their unquestionable brilliance.
Pocky asks a question I myself have been contemplating for a while now.
The process of reading your list (and JW's) has given me the idea for my own list: "Rock CDs I Still Listen To." It will be, I hate to say, a very small list.
And this is sort of what I wonder. How many of the CDs you list do you ever listen to? (Independent of making this list, or of making mixes). Have you ever, in the last five years, decided to go put on a Doors CD? Or a ZZ Top CD? Or even "Abbey Road?" I haven't. To take my favorite band that aren't Bowie: Zeppelin, Dylan, Beatles, U2, Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac, The Who....probably some others.... How many of these do I ever listen to by choice? Yes, I'm always happy to hear "Misty Mountain Hop" on the radio. Yes, sometimes I find myself singing the words to "Mean Mr. Mustard." But do I ever chose to listen to them? I do not. In my car I listen to The Teaching Company OR New Stuff (on which, more later). In the gym I listen to workout music (Underworld for aerobic, various stuff for weights). At home, I usually only listen to music while cooking dinner, and it's rarely rock. It's either jazz, classical, or techno/ambient.
Rock is exhaustible, I've come to think, and I've exhausted it. I've heard it all too many times. After the 1000th listen, even the greatest song gets old. That's why when I do listen to Rock I listen to New Stuff--CDs I download or buy because a friend recommends it or because I hear a song on TV and check it out. I've found out about some good bands that way, but none of those albums ever last longer than a few months. Well, none but a very very few (The Hold Steady, The Streets. Yanni.)
I don't know. Maybe it's just me. But I kind of feel like I'm too old now for Rock. Which is sad. But then its emotions are those of high schoolers, mostly--lust, alienation, ambition. And it lacks the complexity of form to provide essentially endless pleasure. (As opposed to, say, The Well Tempered Clavier, whose depths I know I will never fully, or even mostly, plumb).
So. I'm sort of thinking out loud. But what I mostly thought, when reading your list, was: "Yep. I used to listen to them." Used to, used to, used to....
I guess that sounds a bit grim. Oh well. To quote the one rock star I DO still listen to: "I'm already five years older, I'm already in my grave. I'm all ready."
I hear you, ANCIANT. For me, though, this stuff is still very present. To take your examples? I can recall, very recently, and not for the purposes of listmaking or mixmaking, listening to albums of Doors, ZZ Top, Zeppelin, the Mac, Who and my #1. Perhaps I have not moved on from my high school-level emotional state, but this stuff still really gets me going and I still enjoy exploring it.
Yet I do also explore newer stuff as well. But, the original thrill is less these days. I admit. Even with awesome newer bands like Hold Steady or Band of Horses, it does not match my thrill when I was younger when I discovered The Who or the Stones. It does not mean these bands create lesser work (I don't think they do), but it is akin to shooting heroin for the 10,000th time vs. the 3rd or 4th time. There is less thrill and more familiarity in general.
And as you know, I am a big jazz, blues, classical...whatever fan. My collection is impressive in non-rock categories too. But my interest in anything else but rock is, to a certain extent, forced. Not that I don't emotionally respond to Miles Davis or Mozart, but not the same way I (still) respond to THE JOSHUA TREE.
First things first: Is that last sentence a veiled knock on the Irish?
Can't argue with this choice. It's a really great record, and still to come on my list... The first three songs are just ridiculous. Easily the most impressive three-song stretch of any rock record, ever, in my opinion. I differ with you on "Bullet," which I think is kind of silly -- especially the "one hundred, two hundred" part, which annoys me no end. But "Running" and "Mining" and "God's Country" and "One Tree Hill"...yeah, what can I say, it's a sick album. I think you might make fun of someone else for saying some of what Bono says above, but that's a small (and irrelevant) complaint -- we all have our man-crushes. Overall, great pick.
Now, the conversation started by ANCIANT is very interesting. Rock definitely makes up a smaller percentage of my listening time than it used to. I also feel like the emotions (accurately) listed of lust, ambition, and alienation are maybe a little more often expressed in classic rock (Zep, ZZ, all the Z bands, really), which is far less a percentage of my list than Dezzz's. It's not that the emotions in the music I like most are better, they're just maybe different.
But to answer the question, I still listen to a lot of the stuff on my list. On any given day, I do tend to listen to newer stuff instead, but the nature of the list (which must be obeyed!) is all-time. I own a pretty good amount of classical and jazz, like Dez, and listen to it a lot more as I get older, so yes, maybe this whole enterprise (the list-making, I mean) is partly a futile effort to hold on to my ever-shrinking youth. But I also listen a lot more now to soul and country (smart country, I like to think), which is why I included them -- to keep it fresh for me, and to make it feel like the list partly reflects where my taste is heading. It's likely that there will be more and more of that stuff in the future.
Overall, I'd say I'm somewhere between Dez and ANCIANT. I'm not sure anyone could love rock music as much as Dez does, so I probably fall short there. But I do still explore it, and certainly seek out and fall in love with new stuff (alas, not nearly as much as I used to), and sometimes go through a phase where one of my all-time favorites grabs my attention again.
Mostly, I just want to say how glad I am. After so many years of reading so much that ANCIANT has written (so much of it great, all of it worthwhile), I feel like it was all building up to this one phrase: "Underworld for aerobic, various stuff for weights." That is awesome.
Another thought on ANCIANT's discussion above. It seems to me that rock and roll, at its core, is an emotional medium. While there are certainly some intellectual pleasures to be found in rock and roll (with Bowie, Gabriel, and many others), the majority of rock music is about energy and emotion. A wide range of emotion.
So, ANCIANT claims that "rock is exhaustible." But emotions do not seem to be exhaustible. I mean, you can feel happy, angry or depressed an infinite number of times, and each time feels rich and full of meaning. Even if you've been happy, angry or depressed many times before. So throwing in a great Stones record, even if you've heard it many times before, is all about that kick in the ass you get when Keith Richards throws off those riffs and Jagger spits his attitude at you through the speakers. How can you really "exhaust" that experience or (in my case) need?
I understand the desire for the new and unknown. Believe me, I still have that as well, which is why I still buy music on a regular basis.
Maybe that should be on Underworld's next album, as an endorsement ("Underworld for aerobic.")
They're a great band, though. Not just for exercising. I actually saw them at the Hollywood Bowl last year and loved it.
Emotions as we age become interwoven with ideas--not less powerful but less monolithic, more complex. I think more complex art is needed, therefore, to express and explore those emotions. Bach, for example, is (I think) highly emotionally charged. The emotions, though, are fused into the ideas.
...this is really funny...I'm writing this, and Johannes just called b/c he IS CURRENTLY READING MY EMAIL, and decided to call and commiserate...
Wow. Have to go talk to him.
More to come.
Well, I meant "post" not email, and that was me (ANCIANT) posting the last one, labeled Jordan.
I am a man of many masks.
Some of them those of women.
Anyway, J and I had a good if sad conversation about rock, and we sort of agreed.
I'm going to write more about this later. Won't that be fun!
ANCIANT
ANCIANT, I look forward to further of discussion of this topic here. But I can respond at least to what you have said so far.
I agree with you, as we age we become more complicated creatures. And my tastes have certainly expanded. I have gained appreciation for some classical music. I have become, I think, a knowledgable connoisseur of jazz music. That genre I have spent many years enjoying and exploring, and my jazz collection is quite extensive at this point. I've gone "the other way", too, exploring and becoming expert in genres even simpler and more direct than lots of rock and roll is (blues, soul, r&b).
Anyway, it is still unclear to me how you claim to have "exhausted" the emotions of good rock and roll. Please take a good rock example and go through the thinking with me. I know in the past you have claimed to have been a big STICKY FINGERS (Rolling Stones, highest Stones album on my list) fan. Take that great album and tell me how you have emotionally moved beyond what is there. I find that almost impossible to believe.
Have you also moved beyond other simpler forms of music as well? Does Otis Redding no longer hold any meaning for you? Is Aretha Franklin now too emotionally childish for you? Really??
Or, to put it another way, as we age are all HAL 9000 now?
Dez--
Yes, I think we are HAL like now. Soon I'll be going to Jupiter.
I should have said, maybe, that I've exhausted whatever pleasure that the form and delivery of rock songs can provide. The emotions are different. I still feel those emotions, I suppose, but in different ways. My alienation (such as it is) is not the alienation of an 18 year old any more. Etc. The songs on Sticky Fingers, to use your example, don't really speak to me--they don't seem very relevant.
Although a line of Steely Dan, and its corresponding emotion, has been going through my head of late: "Here come those Santa Ana winds again...."
Resignation, sorrow, fear--all those emotions are in those lines, but in the muted forms felt by adults, not the day-glo forms felt by teen-agers.
Understand, too, that I am not saying I'm glad to no longer feel much connection with rock music. I feel it is as a loss. I wish I could still get the same thrill out of Highway 61 Revisited as I got the first 100 times I heard it. But I can't. Most art loses its impact the more often we encounter it. Only the truly great gets better the more we know it.
I think anciant's analysis is a fair one. The more I think about it, the more I think that you can not distinguish a top 100 favorites list from a top 100 "best" list. I imagine that if dez was to make the top 100 "best" list, it would not differ too much from this current one. This is not to say that a top 100 "most influential" would look the same, but that is a different list.
A "best" album or song is one that you keep coming back to. You may not listen to it for a few years, but then you are rearranging your CD collection and then decide to put it back into the rotation. More recent releases can probably not make this list until they have had the chance to go through a couple of rounds of rotations. In fact, I may be listening to one of my most favorite albums of all time right now, but I would doubtfully put it on my list in deference to my future self who may look back ten years from now and think differently.
So I suppose what I am saying is that I can applaud Dez's #1 choice, since I imagine it has gone in and out of rotation a few times in the past 20 years. It is the level of consistency that makes it on this list.
Anciant's categorizing rock and roll as "exhaustible" has its merits. At least in it's purest form. Head banging three chord rock really does not do it for me, except maybe when I am working out, except even then it needs to be more sublime than simply just loud.
In my current stage in life, I really enjoy music that blends different elements that add some level of originality or innovation. I like music that pulls from Jazz, blues, classical, etc. This is why I am such a big fan of satellite radio. There is so much out there that I would otherwise never hear, or would not think to listen to. I have a couple of bluegrass, Celtic, electronic and KGSR-esque stations that I normally would not have sought out on my own.
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