‘JOSHUA TREE’ REVISITED

As U2 marks the 30th anniversary of one of its signature albums, Chronicle music writers Andrew Dansby and Joey Guerra reflect on its meaning then and now.

NEW APPRECIATION: Vocals, music, cover art all speak to irony of big band looking inward

I have a long, labored history with “The Joshua Tree,” still U2’s defining recording and, at 30 years old, and the cause for the band’s current tour, which sets up Wednesday night in NRG.

Regardless of intentions, U2 singer Bono bugged me, especially between 2000 and 2003 when the band became omnipresent once again with “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” and its application to reapply for “best band in the world.”

I wasn’t crazy about U2 the first time around. And the resurgence struck me as being rooted in alternative history. Joey Ramone died, and his iconic punk band the Ramones became a recurring talking point for Bono. U2’s roots, he suggested, were as a little Ramones-inspired ragtag band.

At the time, that declaration sent my eyes into slot-machine mode: The Ramones weren’t much for stated ambitions. The U2 I avoided in my youth was antithetical to ’70s punk rock. There was no aimlessness. There was no sniffing glue. The band’s attention was held by passion — the spiritual kind — and politics.

But time can wear down the prejudices of youth. The slow arrival of affinity for this album has, strangely enough, enriched the listening experience for me. The militant rhythmic beat, the absence of showy guitar solos: Years after rolling my eyes, my ears detect some of those punk rudiments buried beneath the grander ambitions. The band sculpted a David around a chicken bone.

The guitar certainly bears further mention because in 1987 you couldn’t swing a mullet without hitting a mainstream-rock guitarist whose primary point of reference was the ostentatious style of Eddie Van Halen.

But the Edge’s playing on “The Joshua Tree” — and the band’s early recordings as well — was an interesting aberration for its era. He didn’t set out to play with all the candy colors in the crayon box, befitting an ’80s guitarist. He instead worked with every possible shade of gray, adding embellishment to the songs’ margins instead of fretting about carrying a song from a chorus to the bridge with a solo. He made his instrument sound like the whoosh of an airplane taking off on “Bullet the Blue Sky.” A bright little figure repeats and repeats on “In God’s Country,” about as close as the album gets to a solo.

His approach benefits from a rhythm section — drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton — capable of powering songs with a military march at heart. Theirs was music aware of space and spaciousness, visually underscored by the desert motif in the album’s cover art. And that art with the album title also complemented the thematic content of “The Joshua Tree.”

Hardly the first artists to riff on the desert, U2 nevertheless did so in a manner that felt novel. Remote locations can be threatening or welcoming, depending on one’s relationship to a crowd. And a desolate locale emphasizes even the smallest figure in positive space — like a Joshua tree, itself a rich visual, with sweeping contours and pointed spines.

The album wasn’t the work of a band setting fire to its past; that would happen a few years later. But “The Joshua Tree” certainly represented a different creative landscape.

Lyrically, too, the desert proved rich. The thematic content of “The Joshua Tree” hasn’t eroded over 30 years, which either speaks well of Bono’s observations back then or speaks poorly of global societal divisions that have mostly just shuffled spots in line over the years rather than disappeared.

And shifting from the global to the personal, the more internalized songs, “With or Without You” in particular, also convey an arid isolation. Being in a successful rock band, it turns out, is bad for relationships.

During a culturally coked-up era — the film “Wall Street” came out in 1987 — of excessive expression, U2 made an album with weighty aspirations that were, strange as it sounds, fueled by introspection. But albums, like books and films, aren’t locked in time, and a lot of pop-culture baggage can be shed over 30 years. Even the faith that runs through “The Joshua Tree” strikes me as refreshing now.

Mainstream rock would take a darker turn just a few years later. By the mid-’90s, it would settle into a simplistic complacency: Big Bands making Big Rock for Big Crowds. By the 2000s, the entire recording-industry system that birthed a band like U2 — nurturing a young talent with the goal of global renown — was shattered, and popular rock ’n’ roll became a niche game. I wouldn’t say the search for meaning among Big Bands is over. But the reach of the Arcade Fire — a band that shares with early U2 a stern earnestness — is modest compared to U2, particularly circa “Joshua Tree.”

So 30 years later, we’re in a Big Band desert, and there I’ve found some new appreciation for what U2 did. It admirably made the subtle and personal seem grand and relatable. No small feat for any band, even the “best band in the world.”