U2's fifth studio album was about to be released, produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno on Island Records. What a year.
After many years of research, a new drug as discovered for the treatment of AIDS. The stock market did a nose dive around the world. Baby M case. A New Jersey court declares the First Case in an American court ruling on the validity of Surrogacy over custody rights of "Baby M" re a surrogacy agreement with Mary Beth Whitehead.
Terry Waite Kidnapping, FOX network born, creating the 4th network on U.S airwaves and the Simpsons appeared on TV for the first time. Prozac debuts, Regan Years, Wall Street, Dirty Dancing and yet in all of that noise a band for Dublin awakens the American spirit to drive hate into the darkness.
“I love being there, I love America, I love the feeling of the wide open spaces, I love the deserts, I love the mountain ranges, I even love the cities. So having fallen in love with America over the years that we’ve been there on tour, I then had to ‘deal with’ America and the way it was affecting me, because America’s having such an effect on the world at the moment. On this record I had to deal with it on a political level for the first time, if in a subtle way.”
1987 was a year filled with promise, despair, tears and joy and U2 took over the airwaves of Rock, Pop stations across America with the band aimed for a harder-hitting sound within the limitation of conventional song structures on The Joshua Tree.
The album is influenced by American and Irish roots music, and depicts the band's love–hate relationship with the United States, using socially and politically conscious lyrics embellished with spiritual imagery. The album received critical acclaim with chart-topping songs:
"With or Without You," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," and "Where the Streets Have No Name," the first two of which became the group's only number-one singles in the US.
The Boys won a few Grammy's for Album of the Year and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1988. Hitting the road in 1987 with a record breaking tour, selling out venues around the world.
Critics could no longer ignore the boys from Dublin, placing them on the list of one of the greatest albums of all time, with over 25 million copies sold.
The boys released a remastered edition to push the album forward into a digital age, and in 2014 it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the US Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry.
"Outside its America"