Through the Walls You Hear the City Groan
Where is “Bullet the Blue Sky” set? I always assumed the United States–mostly because of the way Bono keeps saying “Outside is America.” But just recently I tracked on the lyric in Bono’s rap:
You take the staircase to the first floor
And thought it was an amusing Irish mistake–here in the U.S.A., pal, we walk through the front door right into the first floor, the way the founding fathers intended! But if I’m being fair to Bono (which I suppose I should be, since it’s a leap year), the song is about the heavy weight of America in an impoverished country; e.g., “across the mud huts where the children sleep.” (Apparently, it was inspired by a trip Bono took to El Salvador.) America is outside, but it’s not inside–so the song may describe a tesseract.
posted 22 March 2012 in Tasty Bits and tagged U2, Unlikely Lyrics. 2 comments
March 23rd, 2012 at 7:51 am
Madeline L’Engle reference FTW.
I always assumed the staircase lyric was Bono doing an homage to the McCartney bridge in Lennon’s “A Day in the Life.”
March 28th, 2012 at 11:44 am
I seem to recall that the first floor and the ground floor in European buildings are two separate things. Could that be the case in El Salvador, too?