History
The song was originally written about the United States' military intervention during the 1980s in the El Salvador Civil War. Bono told The Edge to "put El Salvador through an amplifier". The song is a combination of The Edge's guitar slides, Adam Clayton's laid back bassline, Larry Mullen Jr.'s cold drumming and Bono's aggressive and growly vocals during the verses, and a spoken word section during the bridge. Bono was thinking of American President Ronald Reagan as he sang "This guy 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 peeling off those dollar bills / Slapping them down / 100! / 200!"
Read more about this topic: Bullet The Blue Sky
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
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“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)