36: U2 release their groundbreaking album Joshua Tree
The Joshua Tree was the fifth studio album by U2 and released on March 9, 1987. Produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois the album is considered to be their magnum opus and was massively successful. Winning the Album of The Year Grammy in 1998 critics and fans alike assert this is U2’s best album.
Everything about The Joshua Tree was big - big hit singles, big videos, big stadium tours – and deservedly so. The album incorporated U2’s arena rock hugeness with musical savvy and cultural and political introspection. U2 interrupted their 1986 album sessions for the album to serve as a headline act on Amnesty International’s A Conspiracy of Hope Tour. Rather than being a distraction, the tour added extra intensity and power to their new music, providing extra focus on what they wanted to say. In his 1986 travels to San Salvador and Nicaragua, Bono saw first hand the distress of peasants bullied in internal conflicts, and this was a central influence on the album, most noticeably on “Bullet the Blue Sky” and “Mothers of the Disappeared”. The album juxtaposes antipathy towards America, including anger at American foreign policy in Central America, against the band’s deep fascination with the country, its open spaces, freedom and what it stood for. The band wanted music with a sense of location, a ‘cinematic’ quality; its music and lyrics drew on imagery created by American writers the band had been reading, and they more than succeeded.
Songs like “Where The Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “With or Without You, “Bullet The Blue Sky,” “In God’s Country,” “Trip Through Your Wires,” remain the best in the important work of the Irish quarter.