Watch U2 Turn ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’ Into an Anti-Trump Song
In an appearance last night on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, U2, who are still on their 30th anniversary tour for The Joshua Tree, performed "Bullet the Blue Sky," a track from that album —with updated anti-Donald Trump lyrics. You can watch the video above.
Bono changed the spoken section of the 30-year-old song to reference the president: "Suit and tie comes up to me / Face orange as a rose on a thorn bush / Skin as thin as orange crush. After the part about the payoff and seeing the fighter planes, he says, "WMD in their veins."
That's followed by, "Ground shakes but the children can’t weep / Vaporized in a single tweet / The emperor rises from his golden throne / Never knowing, never being known / The lights are on the president's home / Oh my god I’ve never felt so alone." You can read the new words in full on their website.
They also performed the single "You're the Best Thing About Me," from Songs of Experience, which you can watch below. The long-awaited record, a counterpart to 2014's Songs of Innocence, was put on hold after the election when they noticed parallels between the present and the era in which The Joshua Tree was written.
"It feels like we’re right back there in a way," the Edge said back in January. "I don’t think any of our work has ever come full circle to that extent. It just felt like, ‘Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn’t have three years ago, four years ago.’ And so it was kind of serendipitous, really, just the realization that we needed to put the album on ice for a minute just to really think about it one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say.”
Watch "You're the Best Thing About Me"
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