1980s – Jason Hensel

The Rewind Button is a group blogging project that I’m participating in. We’re taking on Rolling Stone‘s Top 40 albums of all time and writing our own reviews of them.

Much like their two-syllable name, there are two sides to U2. On one side is the bombastic rock stars who crave the applause from hundreds of thousands of people on their feet in an arena. On the other side is an Irish band happy to sing songs of the people and be rewarded with nothing more than free drinks for the night.

It’s with The Joshua Tree that U2 finally managed to integrate these two sides into a fully formed artistic achievement. The album on a whole is very representative of their goal to capture the spirit of America, primarily its open lands. On the album’s first side (and I encourage you to listen to it on vinyl), U2 belts the listener with brashness and bravado. But it’s the album’s second side that interests me the most, because it sounds more tame, more introspective. When one goes to the desert, thoughts of chest puffing don’t come to mind. The thoughts are more inward, philosophical and based in survival.

I haven’t listened to this album in years before reviewing it for this project. I’m happy to say that I still feel the same way I did in 1987, that the album’s second side has more cohesion and captures the album’s goal better than the first side. That said, I will never turn off “With or Without You” when it plays on the radio, and I will always recite alongside Bono when he says “One hundred, two hundred…” from “Bullet the Blue Sky.” But give me “Red Hill Mining Town” over “Where the Streets Have No Name” any day.

I’m looking forward to the end of this project when I can rearrange the top 40 list to my liking. The Joshua Tree will definitively be in the top 15, maybe even the top 10.

Please visit these other blogs participating in The Rewind Button project:

Betty Livin

Love As A Verb

Life Doesn’t Have to Suck

Renée Sylvestre-Williams

Sara Bynoe

Musicqwest
Be a River With Me

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The Rewind Button is a group blogging project that I’m participating in. We’re taking on Rolling Stone‘s Top 40 albums of all time and writing our own reviews of them.

Michael Jackson’s Thriller album brings up so many memories that an objective critique of it is impossible. So, instead of a proper review, I thought I’d list some of those memories.

I named my pet Siberian Husky dog Thriller, because of the album. He was a good dog who had a love of eating toads. I buried him in my backyard.

I begged my grandparents to buy me a faux red-leather Michael Jackson jacket (the kind he wore in the video for “Thriller”) at J.C. Penney. I wore it a handful of times, and it still hangs in a closet at my grandfather’s house.

I stayed glued to MTV to watch the “Thriller” video, the short movie version. It was an event that proved music videos could be much more than people standing around singing in a studio.

To this day, the moonwalk is one of my better (maybe only) dance moves. Though, I can do the leg shake thing kind of well, too.

“P.Y.T.” was a track that my friends Jonathan and Hank and I use to sing along to all the time in a field out behind my house.

My friend, Matt, played me Weird Al Yankovic’s parody “Eat It” for me on a blue cassette tape. You mean you can get blue cassette tapes?! My middle school mind was blown.

To this day, I still like to say “I’m a lover, not a fighter” from the single “The Girl is Mine.”

On my own Rolling Stone list, Thriller is a Top 10 album. Any album that can generate so many memories for you should always be in your top list.