On the Zoo TV Tour - this, mind you, was a U2 styled in distance and irony - it was just as impassioned, leading into the emphatic drumbeat of Pride in one of the greatest live transitions you'll ever hear. Streets opened shows on their original Joshua Tree tour in 1987, urgent and strident and bursting out the gate. Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started. It's just asking people: Do you want to go on this journey together to that place of soul, place of imagination, the place where the streets have no name - that other place?" "It means stepping outside yourself, imagining the possibilities. "We play Where the Streets Have No Name whenever we need God to walk through the room," Bono once said in one of those NFL specials before the Super Bowl. It reaches for the heavens and somehow grabs them. But the end of Where the Streets Have No Name actually gets there. U2 has habitually reached for the highest highs a band can reach it is both the reason for their spectacular success and why they frequently inspire such ridicule. It really does feel like sunlight on your face.
It is the atmospheric crest of a nearly five-minute build, the release you feel after tearing down the walls that hold you inside. Everything about it is everything music should be. Those final 45 seconds, from the time Bono howls, "It's alllll I can do!" to the sparkling echoes of the Edge's infinite guitar. Depending on the day, it might not even be my favorite U2 song.īut that outro. The lyrics are vague and anodyne Bono's singing could use more polish. It is among U2's most beloved songs, but it might not be their greatest, even on Joshua Tree's loaded Side 1 - it was the album's third single, following With or Without You and I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.
We can imagine this in the sentence “I want to reach out and touch the flame where the street have no name” and it is all he can do and wants to do.As a full song, Streets is not perfect. And now the death affects the singer so much that he wants to kill himself to join his lover to the place “where streets have no name” which is the Heaven. Like oxygen break down iron, judgement destroy the couple by destroying the life of the soulmate. And with the wave of hate, the soulmate died and the “love turns to rust”. Also, he says “I want to take shelter from poison rain”, maybe the poison rain was all the bad words, behaviors or judgments that other people have toward the couple. And maybe the lover killed itself because of the harassment of one’s who doesn’t approve the relation. The people would be represented by the wind. Through the sentence “We’re beaten and blown by the wind”, it make me believe that the couple was roughed up because some people doesn’t want them to be together. Before the death, the two soulmates try to maintain their relationship despite reluctance. He expresses his will through the first lyric “I want to run, to hide, tear down the wall”. He wants to escape this situation of sadness and suffering in which he is stuck. After the death of the person, the singer is devastated. In summary, at the first listening, it's easy to think it's about the hard end of a love story but when you listen again you realize it's really more than that, even if 1987 covid didn't exist, the link is easy to make today.īy listening the song of U2, I think that this song can be related to the death of a soulmate. When he says "And our love turns to rust", I imagine he wants to show that when they are a problem (covid for instance) relationship are wholly affected, during lockdown we can't see your friends and that had affected many friendships or relationships. Storm could be a metaphor of effects of covid on the entire world. He uses the lexical field of storm to call to mind. Moreover, he says "the poison rain", that could be the virus which spreads everywhere as rain. If we make a parallel with current situation, the world where the streets have no name could be a paradise without covid 19. I think Bono want to escape the real world, that is for why he doesn't want to give names to streets because a name can remember you something. Therefore he let you create your own place. In my point of view this song let you imagine where it is because Bono doesn't mention any city or street's name ( it's normal they don't have).