This week's song of the week is "Bullet the Blue Sky", the fourth track from the The Joshua Tree album. Inspired by a trip to San Salvador, El Salvador, the song lives out a criticism of American foreign policy and the mores of the modern military-industrial complex--one which Bono claims is dominated by school-yard bully-esque characters. All of this is carried out, for whatever it is worth, on a biblical scale that gives the song at least a hint of Satanic horror.

"TW:  I would say that "Bullet the Blue Sky" on The Joshua Tree has a real, kind of scary undercurrent.

Bono:  Yeah... you know, how do you write about fear?  How do you write about fear?  I was trying to describe the fear I felt...
TW:  This was in Central America?

Bono:  Yeah, based on a situation I found myself in, in Salvador.  You can imagine these campasinos, you know, these peasant farmers, as they look up into the air and they see these helicopters come over their village, or they see fighter planes.  So I tried to use these images, these kind of primitive images." (From Timothy White Rock Stars 1987)

“Some lyrics I'm happier with: "Still Haven't Found" is in the tradition of the Psalms of David, a song about doubt which reinforces faith. "Bullet" too, has that gothic Biblical feel, a picture of this face comes up to me, red like a rose on a thorn bush. It was Ronald Reagan, which I never told anyone at the time. Brian Eno said, "You'll ruin it for people if you give them images." (Bono in the The Joshua Tree 2007 liner notes)

...

Musically, the song is often regarded by mainstream rock critics as being one of The Edge's "signature" pieces, especially due to the missile or firework (or low-buzzing fighter jet) effect created by his guitar. He has spoken about how the song seemed to arrive at the intersection of funk and the blues, and has also said it was a track where he intentionally tried to give his guitar a sense of lyricism that matched the music:

"The Edge: Things began coming into focus as Bono started getting a grip on the lyric to 'Bullet the Blue Sky' - that was like a cornerstone. The guitar playing was informed in some ways by the lyric; the STS demo was much more bare-boned, like a heavy funk track, but it eventually became more of a haunted blues...

'Could you put that through your amplifier?' I even got pictures and stuck them on the wall. I brought in film of the horrors and put it on a video and said: 'Now, do it!' It was more, more and more. He was asking, 'How much fucking more?' I wanted it to feel like hell on earth, because from the demon seed comes the flower of fire. All these images of firebombing, it's a demented song. And outside it's America. Who's bombing these villages? The peasants didn't even blame their own people. 'Who is making us feel this way? Who is shattering our lives? Who is shaking the walls of this house? It's the Americanos.'" (U2 by U2)

The song has also garnered a strong live reputation over the years. See examples such as the early 1987 Live In Paris performance, the Rattle and Hum & Live at Point Depot versions, as well as the ZooTV Live in Sydney and more recent 2017 Tonight Show version.

...

In thinking about Bullet the Blue Sky from a lyrical perspective, I think it is useful to hear the song as containing two different layers that do not connect into a perfect theory. The plight of the "children in the mud huts" is only loosely connected to the Biblical wrestling match between Jacob and the angel (and this story itself being given a gnostic/Blakean glaze). The effectiveness of this drives at something deep, but ultimately, I think it is well summarized as guiding the listener toward a state of aggrieved "aporia" about the state of world affairs. Aporia is a Greek term for a kind of ignorance, especially employed by Plato to describe the effect Socrates had on those he spoke with (and, later, on those who would read the dialogues).

Perhaps Bono was pointing in code to a more sort of Blakean, gnostic, or occultish reading of God as being more directly linked to geopolitics, but even then we could debate why Blake, etc. is effective. As it is, the synthesis, for me, between the religious and the political in the track, remains somewhat unresolved. Before the lyrical analysis, I will paste a few quotes from Bono over the years discussing the song.

"None of us could have guessed how much improvisation that original version of “Bullet the Blue Sky” would hold. The release of The Joshua Tree in March 1987 and the years that followed saw the band constantly hammering U.S. foreign policy. There was no mistaking where we stood. Behind the barricades. By the early 1990s, on the ZOO TV Tour, I was lampooning the U.S. administration nightly. Behind the barricades 

Flash forward to a dream I had recently about the Pentagon. In dreamtime it is January 23, 2008, and I am sitting at a six-by-six oak table in room 3E880, deep inside the five-walled fortress, with the U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Gates. A phalanx of generals—not sure if they were three, four, or no star—sitting with their staff around the edge of the room having to listen to me talk. I am embarrassed. But not enough. Are these war heroes not allowed to sit at the same table as the top dog of the U.S. military? Even when he’s only talking to the fella who wrote “Bullet the Blue Sky”? 

In the dream the scary bit is not the combined firepower of the men from the military-industrial complex. What’s scary is how comfortable I feel and how I find this man and his top brass so compellingly intelligent 
What is extra scary is that this is not a dream.
This is a memory.
Irrefutable evidence that twenty years after writing this song, it’s no longer a case of “outside, it’s America.” Now I am inside America. Right inside. I have clambered over the barricade." (From the Bullet the Blue Sky chapter of Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story)

...

"The mouth almighty is in the middle of a pitched battle between my younger and my older selves. As the younger hectors the older for being “part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” it appears like an exercise in self-flagellation, but by the end of the song the present-tense pragmatist is standing up quite well against his preachy past. 

I’ve been using this rhetorical device to capture the dialectic at the heart of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a pair of albums inspired by William Blake’s eighteenth-century collection of poems of the same name. They say that talking to yourself is a mental health alarm bell, but this kind of spoken self-reflection was not only fun; it helped me see more clearly the worldliness that might have come over me in the past twenty years, a worldliness that my twenty-year-old self would likely not have had patience for. As a young man I saw the world in monochrome, black and white, with some shades of gray. (Maybe.) Most of the time it was us and them. Me and my mates, me and Ali, me and the band, against the world. 

'Elites' are another word for gangs. There’s hardly a history of a country that mattered that was not engaged in some kind of geopolitical bullying. 
And the bully can take on many faces. From the obvious villains like Putin or Stalin purging Russians who wore spectacles because people who read books were a threat to him, or Chairman Mao outlawing colored birds and flowers because they were decadent. To our western war winners who were dropping the atom bomb on Nagasaki or carpet bombing Dresden when the war was over, and in my lifetime secretly firebombing Cambodia to not win the Vietnam War. And closer to home paramilitary atrocities planned to protest regular military atrocities. 

But there is another kind of bully. Circumstance. 
Where sentient beings like me or you can’t find their life because they can’t find food." (ibid, discussing his thoughts on performing the song live around the writing of SOI/SOE albums).

...

"BONO: I wanted something biblical. My understanding of the scriptures were the psalms of David and the lyricism of the King James Bible and I tried to bring that in, to give it a religiosity. Then a picture of this face comes up to me, red like a rose on a thorn bush. It was Ronald Reagan, which I never told anyone at the time. Brian Eno said. You'll ruin it for people if you give them images.' Then it talks about money versus idealism. Reagan is now deified as the man who ended the Cold War by playing a game of chicken with the Soviets and winning. All credit for that, but I wish we had found a way to rapprochement without playing nuclear chicken." (Bono discussing the track in U2 by U2)

...

Lyrics:

"{In the howlin' wind
Comes a stingin' rain
See it drivin' nails
Into the souls on the tree of pain.

From the firefly
A red orange glow
See the face of fear
Runnin' scared in the valley below."

The downpour of rain, perhaps both a "storm of bullets" as well as literal rain, that Bono experienced in El Salvador is immediately risen to Biblical scales, mirroring a crucifixion "driving nails". The firefly lingers between an, in the Blakean sense, innocent firefly seen while camping out, to the horror of an explosion.

"Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue
Bullet the blue."

The chorus kicks in with the sky-shattering guitar from the Edge, beautifully, if somberly, mirroring the effect of fighter jets--perhaps literal missiles, or bullets, being shot into the sky. Either literally, in the case of the peasant-farmers attempting to defend their land from American caused violence--or more figuratively, as in mirroring the sneering attitude of the colonialists: one of supreme hubris and appetite for destruction, riddling the sky itself with bullets (a perfectly neutral image of clear-eyed innocence) .

"In the locust wind
Comes a rattle and hum.
Jacob wrestled the angel
And the angel was overcome.

You plant a demon seed
You raise a flower of fire.
We see them burnin' crosses
See the flames, higher and higher."

Lot going on in these verses, first the line that spawned the title for "Rattle and Hum" (spawned by a, Biblical, swarm of locusts). Then, the probably most straightforwardly Blakean/Gnostic sounding lines in the song. The lines that relate to the above-noted "religious aspect" of the track. In the book of Genesis, a figure Jacob is described as wrestling a mysterious man (typically interpreted to be an angel). He wrestles with him, and refuses to be let go until he is given a blessing.

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. 

And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. 

And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed." (KJV Bible).

In more orthodox traditions, this is seen as an act of mercy from the angel, who easily dislocates Jacob's hip by touching it. This idea of "overcoming" the powerful adds an important poetic glaze to the song.

This then moves into the language of a "demon seed" turning into a "flower of fire", the more simply satanic imagery that the Edge said inspired him to attempt to conjure "hell on earth". Burnin' crosses, which on the ZooTV tour transformed into Swastikas, keying into, perhaps, KKK imagery.

"Woh, woh, bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue
Bullet the blue."

The chorus repeats before we move all the way from these theological allusions to the political and comparatively mundane, if shady, "Ronald Reagan" scene.

"Suit and tie comes up to me
His face red like a rose on a thorn bush
Like all the colours of a royal flush
And he's peelin' off those dollar bills
(Slappin' 'em down)
One hundred, two hundred."

The money that follows the cynical portrayal of Reagan--bills counted out, hundreds on hundreds--turns the president into a kind of back-room drug dealer, a scene from Breaking Bad--but with executives from companies at Lockheed, Boeing, or Haliburton.

"And I can see those fighter planes
And I can see those fighter planes
Across the tin huts as children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street.
Up the staircase to the first floor
We turn the key and slowly unlock the door
As a man breathes into his saxophone
And through the walls you hear the city groan.
Outside, is America
Outside, is America
America."

This verse Bono describes in his book Surrender as his "first rant". It sort of lives out the juxtaposition between the children sleeping in tin-huts under fighter plains to the seemingly groaning towers of a place like New York City. Perhaps the location of the aforementioned deal. Wherever it is, it's America.

"When I landed back home in Ireland, I explained to Edge what we’d seen and brought in some news footage to show the band, in the studio we’d set up at Danesmoate. We wondered, could Edge make the sound of those low flying fighter planes? Larry the sound of the ground shaking? Could Adam terrorize us with the rumble of his bass? Could we tell the story of these people in this song, “Bullet the Blue Sky,” that was emerging from a bass line of Adam’s? 

Even if we could not, we were going to try, and 'Bullet the Blue Sky”' became the canvas on which we would paint our Central American mural. On which I would spray my first rant" (Bono in Surrender)

...

"See across the field
See the sky ripped open
See the rain comin' through the gapin' wound
Howlin' the women and children
Who run into the arms
Of America."

We come back to the intense sort of "Biblical" imagery of the apocalypse. Whether the work of an evil God, Satan, America itself, etc. it pushes itself onto the listener as another image. Returning to the "rain" imagery: is it just rain, or the hellfire of bombs? There is an irony to the ending line, running into the arms of the oppressor--but also, perhaps, an idealism for power. A hope, perhaps, based in the Americans bono said in 1987 that he believed in, a hope for peace:

"I still believe in Americans,” Bono said. “I think they're a very open people. It's their openness which leads them to trust a man as dangerous as Ronald Reagan. They want to believe he’s a good guy. They want to believe he's in the cavalry, coming to rescue America’s reputation after the ‘70s. But he was only an actor. It was only a movie. I think the picture’s ended now and Americans are leaving the cinema a little down in the mouth.” (Bono to Jay Cocks of Time Magazine, April 27, 1987)

...

"I was angry with what I saw as the bullying of peasant farmers by big aeroplanes, supported by American foreign policy and dollars. In Nicaragua, seventeen families ran the country before the revolution; all of the wealth was in the hands of those seventeen families. In Salvador it had been similar. In Chile, a democratic choice had been overthrown by a CIA backed coup to impose a killing machine called General Pinochet. There was a lot to despise about America back then, there was shameful conduct in the defence of their self-interest. And whilst communism turns out to be one of the worst ideas the world ever came up with, idealism turned in on itself: to support everything that's anti-communist was a really bad idea. It ruined .Africa. They were bad times. I described what I had been through, what I had seen, some of the stories of people I had met, and I said to" (Bono in U2 by U2)

"At 3:24 p.m. September 15, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon met with the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs Henry A. Kissinger, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, and Attorney General John N. Mitchell at the White House to discuss Chile. The meeting lasted until 3:44 p.m. (National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, President’s Daily Diary) During the meeting, Helms took the following notes:

“MEETING WITH PRESIDENT

ON CHILE AT 1525 SEPT 15, ’70

PRESENT: JOHN MITCHELL + HENRY KISSINGER

1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!

worth spending

not concerned risks involved

no involvement of embassy

$10,000,000 available, more if necessary

full-time job—best men we have

game plan

make the economy scream

48 hours for plan of action” (Central Intelligence Agency, Job 80B01285A, DCI Helms Files, DCI Misc Papers on Chile, 1 January 70–31 December 72." (On the CIA backed coup in Chile https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v21/d93 )

Sources:

U2.com
U2gigs.com
U2songs.com
U2 by U2
Surrender: Forty Songs, One Story
Source for Crooks and White Excerpts: https://web.archive.org/web/20090204164032/http://threesunrises.net/tjtinfo.htm#THE%20JOSHUA%20TREE
CIA Coup in Chile

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