Music critic Tim Sommer tries to explain that the Joshua Tree is not a great album.
The rest of the article is here:
U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’ Isn’t the Masterpiece You Remember | | Observer
Tim Sommer - The Observer
Just goes to show that not even what is arguably the greatest album of all time is not immune to criticism based on hidden contempt for the band in general.
U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’ Isn’t the Masterpiece You Remember
Alternately ecstatic and underwhelming, historic and histrionic, powerful and vague, The Joshua Tree is half a masterpiece.
U2’s The Joshua Tree turns 30 this week, an event to be celebrated by a tour, a series of commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint, and a newly discovered Irish moss to be named Polytrichum Piliferum Joshuam.
U2’s fifth studio album is a testimony to the churning, night-purple planetarium of starry majesty they could harness and wrap around the simplest frames, while at the same time exposing the band’s distressing and consistent habit of turning on autopilot halfway through an album.
The Joshua Tree is also a masterclass in the act of transparent but effective appropriation, something U2 have always been very, very good at. Like David Bowie (or Led Zeppelin and R.E.M.), the sheer weight of U2’s personality and charismatic energy allows them to get away with the most basic thievery: in their hands, it doesn’t feel like plagiarism, but like a redistribution of deserving and lesser-known art to the masses.
First, let’s talk about an absolutely integral aspect of The Joshua Tree: we’ll call this “The Phone Book Phenomenon.”
This is one of the truly remarkable things about The Joshua Tree—if you just listen to the first side, you’re fairly convinced that you’re hearing one of the greatest classic rock albums of all time; but once you hit the second side (beginning with track six, “Red Hill Mining Town”), U2 are playing the phone book.
The rest of the article is here:
U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’ Isn’t the Masterpiece You Remember | | Observer
Tim Sommer - The Observer
Just goes to show that not even what is arguably the greatest album of all time is not immune to criticism based on hidden contempt for the band in general.