The Alternative Number Ones: U2’s “Desire”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

If you've ever been alternative, then you'll always be alternative. Theoretically, alternative rock radio existed, at least once upon a time, to shed light on cutting-edge bands who were pushing rock 'n' roll in fresh directions. But even in these early days of looking into the Billboard Modern Rock charts, I can tell you that this has never been the case. Alternative radio programmers have always loved their sure-bet mainstays, which is why we will see the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters in this column approximately one million times. Even in the early days of the format, anyone who'd ever been loosely associated with punk rock could not get too commercial for alternative radio. It simply wasn't possible. Consider U2.

Were U2 ever an alternative rock band? It's a question with no answer. To come up with a response, we'd have to have a workable definition for the term "alternative rock," and we've never had one of those. Unlike the other three bands that have appeared in this column, U2 don't come from London, and they weren't direct participants in the late-'70s punk explosion. But U2 were close enough to receive the shockwaves, and punk was an early inspiration. So maybe they're post-punk? But that feels wrong.

If you think of U2 as a post-punk band, their credentials are in place. The band recorded 1980's "11 O'Clock Tick Tock," their first Island Records single, with Buzzcocks/Joy Division producer Martin Hannett. They made their first three albums with Steve Lillywhite, who also produced Siouxsie And The Banshees and the Psychedelic Furs. When they got bigger, U2 worked with art-rock eminence Brian Eno. When they started playing stadiums, they brought along opening acts who they admired: the Pretenders, Lou Reed, the Pogues, Big Audio Dynamite.

But still, U2 were playing stadiums. From the very beginning, U2 brought a sense of pomp and passion that their post-punk peers lacked. As early as 1981, U2's grandiosity was suspicious enough to inspire a diss track from the Replacements, a band who will eventually appear in this column. When the Billboard Modern Rock tracks started, U2 were full-on stadium rock superstars. They'd done Under A Blood Red Sky. They'd done Live Aid. And most importantly, they'd made The Joshua Tree.

The Joshua Tree is one of those albums that you just absorb through cultural osmosis. Even if you've never owned a copy, you know every song on that record, singles and deep cuts alike. In 1987, The Joshua Tree was the #6 seller of the year -- right behind Janet Jackson's Control, right ahead of Huey Lewis And The News' Fore! The album sent two consecutive singles, "With Or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," to #1 on the Hot 100. By the time U2 released Rattle And Hum, The Joshua Tree was quintuple platinum. It's since gone diamond. U2 might've still been getting play on alt-rock radio, but they were in a completely different realm than every other who was in rotation on those stations.

On the grand spectrum of late-'80s popular culture, U2 were way closer to Springsteen than they were to Siouxsie, and that's before you even get to Rattle And Hum. The entire Rattle And Hum enterprise -- both the 1988 rockumentary and the companion-piece album -- has gone down as a relative embarrassment in the canonical history of U2. It's the moment when the band got too puffed up, when they took themselves too seriously, when they started to do really embarrassing shit. This is mostly justified.

It's tough to watch Rattle And Hum without cringing once or twice -- this band of Irish prophet types nodding thoughtfully at blues buskers on a Harlem sidewalk or staring reverently at the dining room in Graceland. Both album and movie open with the same grand proclamation from Bono: "This is a song that Charles Manson stole from the Beatles! We're stealin' it back!" (This leads, naturally, into U2's cover of "Helter Skelter.") An hour later, we get to watch Bono making awkward conversation with BB King. It's rough.

On the other hand, Rattle And Hum also has "Desire," which happened to become U2's first #1 hit on the newly launched Modern Rock charts. And "Desire" is a fucking banger.

According to the members of U2, The Joshua Tree was the band's album about America, the one where they really took influence from blues and country and Bob Dylan. Fortunately, you can't really hear any of that on The Joshua Tree, beyond something like the vague gospel undertones on "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." The band's sound and dynamic were too defined, so those influences really come through just as textures in a vast and layered sonic tapestry. It's not always good when bands get too adventurous in their listening. Nobody needs to hear U2 make a blues record in the same way that nobody needs to hear Belle And Sebastian getting really into Chicago drill. Sometimes, you just have to understand your own skillset.

With Rattle And Hum, though, U2 really did attempt to make a blues record. The album is half live and half in-studio experimentation. In theory, that's a low-stakes way to follow up an album as momentous as The Joshua Tree. In practice, that means we get U2 throwing on cowboy hats and heading into Sun Studios to record a song about Billie Holiday called "Angel Of Harlem" with the Memphis Horns, and the resulting footage is almost too embarrassing for words. ("Angel Of Harlem" peaked at #3 on the Modern Rock charts. It's a 3.)

We have that footage because U2 decided to make a movie. While touring behind The Joshua Tree, U2 hired Three O'Clock High director Phil Joanou to film their journeys in America. The band financed the documentary themselves, and they intended to release it independently, but the budget got too high, and Paramount Pictures got involved. Rattle And Hum is about half concert film and half travelogue, and it's full of scenes of U2 giggling at interview questions or saying sincere things about their own widely lampooned sincerity. It happens to catch them at the moment when the American roots-music undertones turned into overtones -- when, for instance, they went up to Harlem to rehearse a version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" with an actual gospel choir, the kind of hoary rock cliché that most of the band's alt-rock-radio peers studiously avoided.

Even with all the goofiness, Rattle And Hum, which I'd never seen in full until last night, is mostly not an excruciating watch. It's always fun to watch superstars be superstars, and it helps that all four guys in U2 were remarkably foxy in the late '80s. That is a band full of strong jawlines, and even the Edge, the least Tiger Beat-ready of them, has at least a little bit of a serene young-Chuck-Norris thing going for him.

The live footage, unsurprisingly, is the best thing in there. I didn't see U2 for myself until more than 20 years after Rattle And Hum came out, and when I finally saw them, I was genuinely shocked at the electricity in the air. I knew about U2's reputation as a live act, but experiencing them for myself was a different thing. None of the many live documentations of U2 have really captured the feeling of that show, but the sweaty and expertly shot Rattle And Hum footage comes closer than most.

U2 never perform "Desire" live in concert in Rattle And Hum. Early in the movie, though, we do get the band playing the song in Dublin -- either recording it or just busting it out for the camera. It's pretty sick. The three musicians almost fuse into one to bang out that pounding track while Bono -- looming over everyone on some kind of riser, hanging from his mic stand like a vulture -- howls over all of it. In that scene, you get some sense of the kind of alchemy that can come from a great band playing together, where all the musicians have figured out how to breathe as one.

"Desire" is a bluesy song, but it's not bluesy in the same obvious way as some of those other Rattle And Hum tracks. Instead, it's the band discovering the eternal power of the Bo Diddley beat -- the shuffling shave-and-a-haircut lurch that had already been part of the sonic language of rock 'n' roll for decades. It's basically impossible to make a song with the Bo Diddley beat that I don't like at least a little bit. It's a cheat code. U2 have claimed that their version is based on the example of "1969," the deadpan gutter-groove that the Stooges released in the titular year.

"1969" is an immaculately bored fuck-you song, with Iggy Pop panting over his band's animalistic churn, dismissing one of the 20th century's most culturally convulsive moments as "another year with nothin' to do." (Iggy's highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1990's "Home," peaked at #2. It's an 8.) Even at his most transgressive, Bono could never do bored fuck-you music, and his "Desire" lyrics are way more messianic than anything that Iggy would ever attempt. Given the title, it's tempting to tie "Desire" to George Michael's "Faith," another song that rode the Bo Diddley beat to massive success around the same time, but I don't think that's what Bono was going for. Maybe there was just something in the air.

You've got to figure that Bono's relationship with the entire concept of desire is a complicated one. This is, after all, an openly Christian guy -- an Irishman, no less -- who found full-on rock stardom in the '80s. That combination of things would be enough to give anyone tortured, fucked-up feelings about their own urges. "Desire" is a sexual song -- Bono sometimes sings the line about "the fever when I'm beside her" as "the feeling when I'm inside her" -- but it's not fully about sex. It's also about addiction and need, with its lines about "the needle and the spoon." It's about the false promise of political deliverance, as in the bit about "the year of election." And it's about a preacher stealin' hearts at the traveling show, for the love of money money money.

Bono later wrote that "Desire" is at least partially about the strange religious component of his line of work: "On one level, I’m criticizing the lunatic fringe preachers 'stealing hearts at a travelling show,’ but I’m also starting to realize there’s a real parallel between what I am doing and what they do." None of that comes through clearly, and none of it should come through clearly. Bono isn't writing a senior thesis; he's singing a rock song. And "Desire" stands as one of the great testaments to Bono's ability to lose himself in the moment, to wail and pant and preen without self-consciousness. You might get embarrassed for Bono if you watch him in Rattle And Hum, but Bono himself will never be embarrassed for any reason. That's the quality that allows him, every once in a while, to find transcendence.

Musically, U2 do everything in their power to push Bono toward transcendence on "Desire." The band's version of the Bo Diddley beat isn't as frantically id-driven as what the Stooges did on "1969," but it's not a studied pastiche, either. Edge's guitar rings and sputters and flares. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen find a primordial groove that's nearly as melodic as it is rhythmic. The sounds all bleed into one another, and even Bono's harmonica bleats at the end of the song fall in with the booming shimmy. (I love Edge's backing vocals, too. Bono's "des-i-i-i-re" means a whole lot more with Edge's harmonies in there.) U2 are actually rocking out on that song, and you can get lost in that chiming majesty.

U2 didn't record the Rattle And Hum studio tracks with their regular collaborators. Instead, they brought in Jimmy Iovine as a collaborator. Iovine was still a couple of years away from founding Interscope Records, but he'd already produced huge records for people like Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty. Iovine had also worked with Patti Smith, which probably endeared him to U2, but he was about as corporate-rock as it got. Still, U2 didn't release the version of "Desire" that they made with Iovine. Instead, the version on the album is the original demo that they laid down back home in Dublin. You can tell. It's got teeth.

If anything, "Desire" brings just a slight hint of punk back to U2's grand-gesture stadium-rock. If more of Rattle And Hum had that kind of energy, U2 might've been able to sell it as a back-to-basics record. The song was a genuine smash on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, "Desire" was U2's first-ever #1 hit. On the Hot 100, it reached #3; U2 haven't charted that high again since then. The Rattle And Hum movie was a total flop that didn't even make $10 million in theaters, but the album topped charts, and it's since gone quintuple platinum.

Modern rock radio kept playing U2, even as they got sillier and sillier. None of the other Rattle And Hum singles reached #1, but all of them charted. Before the album even came out, U2 reached #9 with their version of "Jesus Christ," recorded for the Woody Guthrie tribute compilation A Vision Shared. (It's a 6.) Later on, they got to #10 with their goofball BB King duet "When Love Comes To Town." (That one is a 4.)

Despite the album's success, though, Rattle And Hum got a whole lot of skeptical reviews, and U2 soon pulled back and hit the reset button. When they finally returned with their first real studio album after The Joshua Tree, U2 ditched all the roots-rock trappings and synced up with the sounds of the moment. That adjustment might've earned them another decade of relevance.

It's funny to talk about Rattle And Hum in the context of this column. In its day, that album was almost certainly the least alternative thing that U2 had ever done. It might've been the least alternative thing that they ever did until All That You Can't Leave Behind, or maybe until the moment when their album showed up uninvited on everyone's Apple devices. Even then, U2 were still in the mix on alt-rock radio. Whether or not they meant to do it, though, U2 would soon reclaim the alternative mantle. We'll see a whole lot more of them in this column.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: "Desire" soundtracked some truly sick montage action on a 1988 episode of Miami Vice. Every time I pull up a Miami Vice scene as a bonus beat, I get the feeling that I need to just dive in and watch the whole series, though god knows when I'll get the time. Here's that propulsive bit of filmmaking:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's fan footage of Hanson, a band that I've covered in the other column, playing "Desire" at a 2007 live show:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's U2 bringing out Noel Gallagher and playing "Desire" with him at a 2019 show in Mumbai:

(The only song from Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds that's ever made the Alternative chart is 2011's "If I Had A Gun...," which peaked at #25. Oasis will eventually appear in this column.)

THE NUMBER TWOS: Cocteau Twins' fluttering churn "Carolyn's Fingers" peaked at #2 behind "Desire." It's an 8.

Siouxsie And The Banshees' ritualistic, starry-eyed sparkle-flare "The Killing Jar" also peaked at #2 behind "Desire." It's a 9.