I tried posting mine, but it wouldn't take it right now for some reason. But here's what I wrote.
My #1 Album Of All Time: The Joshua Tree
My Reasoning:
By making the Joshua Tree, U2 took a huge risk. Bono himself declared in 1987 "that the thought of people waiting for The Joshua Tree is ridiculous. It sounds as though it'll sell three copies." I can see his point. At the time, it sounded like nothing on mainstream radio. Instead, you had an album that sounded like it was derived from some kind of mystical fall-out. No other album I've ever heard has the total embodiment of both an earthiness and, yet also, the other-worldliness through which The Joshua Tree has been woven. It's as though the album understands and replicates, in an organic sense, the line Bono would pen years later on Achtung Baby, in the song 'So Cruel': "Head in heaven, fingers in the mire." On The Joshua Tree, there is a sense that, despite it being "so cruel," life is worth "holding onto," as is conveyed in the song, 'Red Hill Mining Town'. (Perhaps the themes of Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby aren't so different afterall?) From the opening hymn-like organ intro of 'Where The Streets Have No Name' -- as it glides effortlessly into a tidal-wave of relentless explosion -- to the sublime beauty of songs like 'One Tree Hill', there is nothing but perfection; a musically cinematic perfection of an imperfect world striving past the pain and desperation felt throughout this album, and into the metaphysical sense of joy. Bono's falsetto, for example, has never sounded the same before or since The Joshua Tree. There is a mystical quality about it, as though it has traveled for miles and miles through the wide open desserts and dense political jungles and forests throughout this album. The listener is carried through the real life images of American foreign policy ('Bullet The Blue Sky'), the desperation of drug addiction ('Running To Stand Still'), and the very real emptiness behind suicide ('Exit'); yet despite it all, in many of the very same songs you will find an undying, underlying hope, an urge to transcend the very darkness of this album into the silver light found on 'Streets'. Even a nasty little love song such as 'With or Without You' comes from somewhere else completely, the pain of it feeding the very need to reach past the flesh of this album. Nothing on The Joshua Tree sounds commercial, yet it is one of the most commercially successful albums of all time. Somewhere back in 1987, U2 found the very breath of their ability and filled their lungs with it. The Joshua Tree is the sound of the exhale, the consequence of their risk -- the fallout of the mystical -- scattered across miles of terrain. And, on this disc, we are lucky enough to breath it all in again -- to go, to quote Van Morrison, back "into the mystic" -- and to actually take that breath back to where it came from. That's the paradox of The Joshua Tree, and also why it's the greatest album of all time.
I think I'll make a Joshua Tree appreciation thread out of this!
Mine was similar. Had Harvest by Neil Young in it, though, and Revolver by the Beatles.
