U2
The Joshua Tree

The Joshua Tree is an evocative name, powerful, strongly recognizable everywhere. Few other albums have titles (and symbols) so evocative supported by such profound content, consider: "Dark Side Of The Moon," "Exile on Main Street," "Nevermind," "Born to Run," etc...
"The Joshua Tree" represents an era and a milestone in Rock music to become synonymous with it, evoking in U2 fans a feeling of well-being that is difficult to describe; for all other people not part of the fan circle, it nonetheless conveys admiration and respect.
The Joshua Tree was supposed to be called "The Two Americas" and was meant to be a double album, with two faces, like America, the good and the bad, the rich and the poor.
A term also in the common imagination that represents and symbolizes something mythical, unattainable, a destination to reach so much that the expression "you found America" does not exist by chance.
Yet America, as it is understood by many, has always had a dual face.
Side A and Side B, which Bono and company realized in their travels and decided to put into music, and which still exists today.

The same cover is white or black, it's a tree in the middle of the desert.
Water and desert, life and death, black and white, darkness and light, this is The Joshua Tree, this is the most evocative album of this two-letter band, two, like the faces of America, two opposites here as well: a letter and a number.
And yet extremely tied and connected to each other that they cannot be separated and especially cannot live one without the other: With or Without You.
The Joshua Tree from the cover is an album of "extremes," so far yet so close. A lone tree, in the middle of the Death Valley desert, not a tree among many, but a tree in the middle of the desert... what is more opposite than a tree that usually sinks its roots into fertile ground with a desert where there is little that is fertile?
Yet The Joshua Tree talks about this, of white (Where the Streets Have No Name) and black (Exit), of the good and the bad...

And here returns the inseparable dichotomy of this wonderful album: in The Joshua Tree, we talk about rain, water, ocean, rivers, and floods but at the same time, we also talk about deserts, aridness, mountains, and plains, life and death... water in the desert. Is there anything more opposite than water in a desert? A bullet in the blue sky, the stunning image of a blue sky contrasted by the terror of bombs and warplanes.
And it's not just the alternation of landscapes and contrasting nature, but also of attitudes: talking with angels and shaking hands with the devil, a "warm hand in the night" (usually colder than the day), cold as a stone (when the human body is warm): life and death, light and darkness, contradiction makes The Joshua Tree the rarest pearl.

Yet division is not a limit, it is an advantage and this advantage becomes clearer as we think about it. There can be no day without night, no darkness without light and light without darkness, no good without evil, yin and yang, on and off, zero and one, life and death.

With or Without You, this is what U2 teaches us with The Joshua Tree, that yes, there are extremes, but in between there are billions of nuances and we are this and we cannot choose one extreme or another; U2 is this, a band of contradictions, a band that initially may divide but in the end unites because in the history of U2 there is the entire range of the universe's nuances, and yes, we are included too.

Angel or devil
I was thirsty
And you wet my lips

Happy Birthday to The Joshua Tree