There is hope – ‘I believe in the kingdom come / then all the colors will bleed into one’ – but with the boldness and honesty to admit uncertainty – ‘Yes, I’m still running / I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’. But they are songs of seeking, of tension between faith and doubt, of longing and desire that may remain unrealized. The popular singles, “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, and “With or Without You”, are essential pieces in the U2 catalog, with their soaring melodies, Bono’s passionate vocals, and The Edge’s iconic delayed arpeggios. One has to wonder, given the “evangelical” quest for a sympathetic pop culture icon, how Christians missed the opportunity to capitalize on the world’s biggest rock band.īlame the art. Their faith was still prominent enough by the conclusion of The Joshua Tree that it defined them. But U2’s faith was on display from their earliest albums, including most of October and explicitly on the beloved tracks “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “40” from War. As Rolling Stone put it at the time, the album release and subsequent tour was U2’s “all-but-official coronation as the World’s Biggest Rock Band.”Īlso at that time, Rolling Stone described U2 as “Christians”, or more specifically “three young Christians and the token nonbeliever”, something that would make many current artists cringe, or at least fear for their careers. It won the Grammy for 1987’s Album of the Year, and in 2014, the US Library of Congress chose it for the National Recording Registry, a collection of the most culturally significant works in audio recording.
#U2 live bullet the blue sky first time in years full
But The Joshua Tree was the number one album in 20 different countries at a time when full albums mattered. Living as we do in a fog of digital music that measures success in subscriptions, singles, and streams, it is easy to take this for granted. The Joshua Tree is U2’s crowning achievement, a fixture on nearly every critic’s “Best of” album list, and one of the certified best-selling albums of all time with over 25 million copies sold. Seeing that it is the 30 th anniversary of this classic, some appreciation is in order. That moment was the day a friend shared The Joshua Tree by U2 with me. As I approached adolescence, I had one of the essential music moments in my life, one that I think any music lover can share: hearing an album for the first time that is like an awakening, opening your eyes to what music can be, changing the way you listen from that point on.
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Little did I know that though they were far away, they were still so close. I grew up in a Christian home and went to a Christian school during the heyday of MTV, so I was nowhere near U2 while they were establishing themselves as one of the biggest bands on Earth. Thursday, Febru"The Joshua Tree" at 30 - A Reflection
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