Musings Often in Stereo

Regardless of your feelings on Bono’s recent Messianic complex, you have to respect the fact that U2′s The Joshua Tree is the best album released in the 1980s.

Period.

After The Unforgettable Fire, which saw the band moving away from its protest-punk roots, they realized they were lost in space.  They had no real influences, no sound they were copying, yet they came to a grand realization about the power of America as an idea.  Bono became obsessed with America as he toured it incessantly, namely the Statue of Liberty as a metaphor for what our country stood for and had turned into.  You can hear that through songs like “Pride” and “MLK” that decry the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This existential crisis, however, hit the music in a different way.  As they changed their identity to one rooted in Americana, their befriending of giants like Dylan and Keith Richards turned their eyes to soul, blues, and American folk.  That, mixed with the Edge’s trademark guitar parts copped from Irish music, set the tone for one of rock’s great sonic masterpieces.

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The Joshua Tree is a testament to the importance of sequencing.  Legend has it that Kirsty MacCool, an Irish songstress who had befriended Bono, picked her favorite songs in order, birthing a track list that explodes with “Where The Streets Have No Name.”  “Streets,” like Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” is what God had in mind when He came up with the beginning.  It’s a romantic (almost to a fault) anthem about the promise of America.  Bono paints this country as Zion, the promised land, the morning sun after an eternal night, and pleads to be allowed in.

As the album progresses, Bono continues this argument about what America is, from the inflicter of destruction in “Bullet The Blue Sky” to the continued beacon of “One Tree Hill.”  All the time, however, he adds this second thread, one of argument with God.  “With or Without You” typifies this.  On the surface, it seems like a backhanded love song; he essentially says that whomever he can’t live without is the one that torments him.  Then you realize, “Bono is a Catholic.  Isn’t this a song about Catholic guilt running wild?”  “With or Without You” then becomes the most powerful song ever written about Christian living.  “You give it all/Yet I want more/And I wait for you/…I can’t live/With or without you,” Bono cries.  “My hands are tied/My body bruised/She got me with nothing to win/And nothing left to lose.”  He’s left with nothing but the ability to come back to his savior and tormentor.  This nadir point and eventual salvation typifies the Christian experience, and Bono was able to meld it into one of the catchiest love songs ever written.

When you meld the ideas of the American ideal and the Christian struggle together, you get an even cooler metaphor: America is both the angel and devil on the shoulder.  Think about it: the two sides of America, the lighthouse of “Streets” and the black hole of “Bullet,” the romantic pessimism of “Red Hill Mining Town,” and the messed up deliverance of “Mothers of the Disappeared,” and you see this scary picture of everything America is and ought to be.

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What moves me the most, however, is the interplay between this message and the music.  Bono submits one of the most stirring vocal performances of the 20th century throughout the album, using a soaring tenor and falsetto inflected with pain, joy, and soul befitting James Brown to truly convey the album’s lyrical heart.  The Edge’s signature delay ring melds the best of American rock with Irish folk, taking the low drones and making them bass notes for some of the best melodic rhythm soloing anyone’s ever heard.  Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen provide pounding, sensitive, and explosive back-beats on every track.  The production team of Eno and Lanois arrange every song to the edge of sanity, never crossing too far either way.  No note sounds out of place; every accidental is intentional, every minor plays a major storytelling role, and every song is brilliantly pieced together.

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Simply calling it a triumph of the 1980s, however, is worthless.  The Joshua Tree is no album about Reaganism, nor is it a song cycle on the fall of Communism.  It’s neither flashy nor understated.  It doesn’t sing of individual problems that plagued the decade, but systemic ones that haunt us today.  The only way it is a triumph of the 1980s is that it, in some sense, follows the personal battle that the world went through.  Its greatness, however, is outside of that.

The Joshua Tree is a work of philosophy, of existential nightmare, and of great beauty.  It’s one man attempting to understand what he and his world means, realizing that there is no true answer.  In the end, Bono, in the closing track, “Mothers of the Disappeared,” finds a near solace in this two-faced view of what perfection is.  He decides that there is an ability to turn the sadness of loss into a major key, not admitting either way whether good or evil prevails in America.  That is the message of the album: Nothing can overshadow the ideal of a beacon of freedom like America, but nothing can overshadow what that beacon occasionally does to hurt.  God and America giveth.  God and America taketh away.

It’s a long-standing fact that Canada cannot put out good music.  Canadian music either falls into a category inhabited by artists like Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne, Anne Murray, and Nickelback; or into one exemplified by Neil Young, John Samson of the Weakerthans, et al.  Canadian music, essentially, is either is a synonym for terrible or for perfection.

Enter Tegan and Sara Quin, a pair of Toronto twins schooled on the better school of Canadian rock laced with a healthy dose of Bruce Springsteen (see their tender rendition of “Dancing In The Dark” for an example).  Add the fact that they’re both lesbians and you create a stew of passionate, beautiful, and occasionally subversive anger.  Their 2007 effort, The Con, may be the best exposition of their style, as well as their myriad of quirks.

One quirk is their seemingly disparate sounds.  Twins are said to have near ESP from their DNA being nearly identical (particularly identical ones like the Quins), yet Tegan and Sara both write vastly different songs.  Tegan’s are usually more straight-forward pop anthems typified by “Nineteen,” possibly the best song about the chemistry between love and sexual frustration released this year.  Sara, on the other hand, writes more obtuse and dissonant song-scapes that mess with the harmonic quirks between their mainly similar voices.  “Floorplan” is the prime example of this phenomena, with lush layers of acoustic guitar mixed with offbeat rhythms and constant minor keying.

However, the ESP aspect creates an intriguing thread throughout the album, tying a sort of angst and emotion from their shared experiences through musically different songs.  The themes usually center around problems with relationships, including infidelity (“Back in Your Head” and, to a non-superficial extent, the title track) and the eventual breakup (the oddly touching “Call It Off”).  Possibly due to their shared sexuality or simply through the ability to identify with family best, each song seems like each girl felt the exact same as her counterpart.  It’s equal parts beautiful and unsettling.

The girls banked on this ability to make beauty out of pain and, in the process, have made a set of songs that rank up there as some of the catchiest of the year.  “Nineteen,” “The Con,” and “Back in Your Head” will end up scoring your life for an eternity simply because you will be unable to think of any other songs.  The problem, however, is the sequencing.  Because of the sonic disparity between Tegan and Sara, you find yourself jumping from jarring, arrhythmic minor masterpieces to soaring pop anthems without breaks or interludes.  As a set of EPs with Tegan on one and Sara on the other, The Con would be a genuine masterpiece.  As a disjoint LP, it suffers.