Friday, December 07, 2007
your weekly youtube installment
"Where the Streets Have No Name" is more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP, because it's a sketch - I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a spiritual location, maybe a romantic location.
I was trying to sketch a feeling. I often feel very claustrophobic in a city, a feeling of wanting to break out of that city and a feeling of wanting to go somewhere where the values of the city and the values of our society don't hold you down.
An interesting story that someone told me once is that in Belfast, by what street someone lives on you can tell not only their religion but tell how much money they're making - literally by which side of the road they live on, because the further up the hill the more expensive the houses become.
That said something to me, and so I started writing about a place "where the streets have no name."
- Bono from Propaganda 5, 1987
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I listened to "The Joshua Tree" obsessively when I was pregnant. During the last month of my pregnancy, I had to have weekly non-stress tests, where they were monitor Clara Jane's heart rate and movement to make sure they were in harmony. Right as the first test began, "Where the Streets Have No Name" came on. For the entire six minutes of the song, she moved in time with the music, which we could see on the printout as she did it.
After the song ended, she promptly fell asleep and stayed that way for the remaining 24 minutes of the test.
That was the moment when she became real to me, when she was able to respond to music in such an assertive, all-encompassing manner. Needless to say, even though I've loved this song for 20 years, for the past four years it's made me sob every time I've heard it.
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