The album that The Edge said was U2 “treading water”
If you’re a younger person whose first direct interaction with U2 involved angrily deleting their 2014 album Songs of Devotion off your iPhone after Apple gifted it to you against your will, it may be heard to conceptualise just how enormously popular this band was at the height of their powers in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
The Joshua Tree, widely considered the group’s finest collection of songs, was also the fastest-selling album in UK history upon its release in 1987, going platinum in just two days. Its standout singles – ’I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, ‘With or Without You’, and ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ – were ubiquitous, and anticipation was sky-high for whatever came next.
That’s where Bono and the boys faced a dilemma. When you’re the biggest band in the world, what do you do as an encore? How can you possibly go anywhere but down?
And so, what U2 settled on was a workaround of sorts. This follow-up album wouldn’t stand entirely on its own as a new statement, but instead would serve as a sort of bonus extension of The Joshua Tree experience, tied in with a documentary concert film made during their world tour for that album. This was the Rattle & Hum era.
Part soundtrack, part live album, and part studio experimentation, the Rattle and Hum album feels very much like a victory lap, as the road-weary Irishmen pay homage to the American roots music they loved in a sort of loose, travelogue format, dipping into the mythology of Elvis, Sun Studios, Billie Holiday, and gospel choirs. And whereas the documentary film version of Rattle and Hum sometimes felt like young pretenders Photoshopping themselves into American iconography, the album version served more as a suitable musical scrapbook of that moment—careening between bombastic live covers of Bob Dylan and The Beatles to collaborations with BB King (‘When Love Comes to Town’), and a few brand new originals of considerable note, including the number one UK single ‘Desire’. If nothing else, it gave U2 a much-needed reprieve from the crushing expectations that would have accompanied a proper sequel to The Joshua Tree.
“As a big group we feel it’s our responsibility to fuck up the charts as much as possible,” guitarist The Edge told Spin at the time. “This album, to be honest, is just treading water. I mean, I like the songs, but this is only a fraction of what we can do. It’s like a little Polaroid of U2.”
“What we could have done is not put out this record and waited another year and a half, and that would have been the end of what we are now,” added bassist Adam Copeland. “We wanted something more immediate.”
If these comments don’t exactly sound like ringing praise for Rattle & Hum from the men who made it, it might reflect more on how exhausted U2 had become and how disillusioned they were with the expense and irritation of living 24/7 with a documentary film crew. Better days, they seemed to know, were in front of them, as their next album, 1991’s Achtung Baby!, would succeed at establishing a creative and adventurous new direction for the band.
As Bono prophetically warned the readers of Spin in 1989, however, “We’re going to keep releasing record after record until everyone’ll be sick of us.”
