The Joshua Tree

I recently purchased the CD version of U2's 1987 classic The Joshua Tree. I bought the vinyl version the day it became available 20 years ago. I was 17 and already a fan of U2, so I was not coming to it cold. But I don't think this album has ever been surpassed in all their catalogue.

It has what the truly great albums have, and that is a thematic and musical continuity. What I mean is that you have to listen to the songs as a collection of songs: they inform one another, echo back of each other. U2 badly wanted for this in The Unforgettable Fire 1984, but spoiled it by overdone production and a couple of their lamest tracks ever ('Elvis Presley in America', 'Indian Summer Sky'). The missed again with Rattle and Hum, a tediously long album with at times all their tendency to self-righteousness and pomposity on display ('Silver and Gold').

None of that is here, though there are 'issues' and 'issue songs'. America is the theme, but so are death and loss and grief. The people in the songs expressing longing and don't yet see the way to answer it. The ambiguity of faith and doubt in 'I Still haven't Found What I'm Looking For' is matched by the love-hate of 'With or Without You'. And so on. Morever it is an album with a landscape: it seems to refer to places so often...

Anyhow - here are 8 album highlights for me:

1 - Bono's hope of meeting his dead friend again 'when the stars fall from the sky' in 'One Tree Hill'. Here is a man in his mid-twenties realising he is mortal. It hurts. But here is a song with an eschatology. A song about grief in a major key.

2- Edge's major 7th note in the guitar part of 'I still haven't found what I am looking for' - this ONE note sums up the whole song.

3 - the Helicopter drums in 'Where the Streets have no name'.

4 - bass line in 'Bullet the Blue Sky', my favourite all time U2 song.

5 - 'fighter planes' guitar effects, same song.

6 - 'Running to a Stand Still' - how can something so sweet be made of so few components.

7 - The major key and brightness of 'Red Hill Mining Town' which is talking about the end of generations of working in the same place. There IS something left to hold on to...

8 - Bono's talking in 'Bullet the Blue Sky'. The cheesiest moment on the album perhaps? But it works.

Bach as theologian

David Bentley Hart writes:

Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite. It is in Bach's music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a them can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition. p. 282-3

Choosing Bach of course presents Hart with fewer difficulties than Barth's choosing of Mozart: Barth had to admit that Mozart was not a good man, and probably not a very firm believer. So, he had to seperate the music from the man. Here, no such problem: the composer could not, would not have composed as he did apart from the knowledge of God that he clearly had.

I find it interesting that Hart the Eastern Orthodox exults Bach the Protestant when Hart is so anti-Protestant in general. And yet there is a Protestant plainness to Bach, even when he is writing music for Masses. This aesthetic, far from being evidence of a dour disposition, is I think one of Protestantisms great strength: it is in better taste than the alternatives within Christianity (think the saccharine ornateness of much Catholic and Orthodox art...). At least, that is a Hartian argument!