Albums
Rattle and Hum
By the late ’80s, U2 had climbed the highest mountains of rock success, having racked up sold-out stadium shows, multiple magazine covers, and a chart-topping album in The Joshua Tree. Bono and the boys had officially become the World’s Biggest Band—and now, they had to come up with an appropriately massive follow-up project. Should they make an indulgent double album? A lightning-capturing live album? What about a worshipful rock-doc? With the extravagant Rattle and Hum, U2 chose all three. A mix of new studio cuts and onstage highlights from the Joshua Tree tour, the album chronicles the US’s love for U2—and vice versa. A trip to historic Sun Studio yields “Angel of Harlem,” a swinging, horn-heavy ode to Billie Holiday that became an unlikely radio hit. It’s just one of several cuts that lets U2 dig deep into America’s musical past: The group teams with B.B. King for the wailing “When Love Comes to Town”; adopts a Bo Diddley shuffle on the grabby “Desire”; and collaborates with Bob Dylan for the languid ballad “Love Rescue Me.” Those in-studio moments—which also includes the stirring, straightforward love song “All I Want Is You”—are interspersed with a handful of tracks recorded during U2’s 1987 tear through America, and chronicled for the 1988 Rattle and Hum documentary. Those live moments find the band working overtime to match their fans’ arena-sized expectations: Bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. march in a lockstep groove to Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” while the Edge lets rip on a fiery solo on “Bullet the Blue Sky.” And while Rattle and Hum’s concert tracks feature a few typically indulgent Bono bon mots—he opens a cover of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” by name-dropping Charles Manson—all is forgiven when Harlem’s New Voices of Freedom gospel choir shows up for a joyous rendition of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” If that all sounds a bit all over the place…well, at the t...