Way back in the far distant year of 1988, the music scene was at a climactic point as rock and pop were once again clashing to see who would reign supreme at the 1988 Grammy Awards, with alternative rock and its innumerable subgenres.

Personally, I only have the vaguest memories of the 1988 Grammys myself, since my mom didn't go into labor with me until about a week after the ceremony. Yet the '88 Grammys may have had even more tension over the Album of The Year than the 67th Grammys this past year did.

There were plenty of contenders for the award in 1988, namely Michael Jackson's smash hit Bad, Whitney Houston's self-titled second album Whitney, Prince's genre-defying Sign o' the Times, the country collaboration Trio from Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, and a single rock album: The Joshua Tree, the fifth studio album from acclaimed Irish rockers U2. Despite significant buzz around all the entries, and the Grammys' several-year streak of giving Album of The Year to a pop record, the 1988 awards bucked the trend completely.

U2's The Joshua Tree Won Album Of The Year At The 1988 Grammy Awards

U2's victory with The Joshua Tree was a huge surprise, especially given its position against not just Whitney Houston, whose album Whitney had seen its four singles all debut at the top of the charts, but also Michael Jackson's Bad, which saw the Bad failed to net Jackson any awards, unlike just four years before, when he won eight Grammys in a clean sweep with Thriller.

Called "hunuvat chi'ya" or "humwichawa" by the indigenous Cahuilla tribe, whose home is now part of Southern California, the Joshua tree, or yucca bevifolia, got its common English name in the mid-19th century, possibly from Mormon settlers. It grows in the deserts in southern California and Arizona, and western New Mexico, within a narrow band of elevation, and continues to be at risk from climate change.

The Joshua Tree's success at the Grammys was also rightly seen as a fluke; it would be nearly another decade until another rock album (Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill in 1996) would win Album of The Year. U2 did snag a Grammy the following year, though, winning the 1989 ceremony's Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal with "Desire," the lead single off of The Joshua Tree's follow-up, the ambitious live/studio hybrid album Rattle and Hum.

The Competition Was Tough, But The Joshua Tree Deserved Its Win

While U2's competition for Album of The Year in 1988 was legendary, the win was genuinely well-deserved. A Grammy isn't just a popularity contest, or a reflection of an album's sales – the Album of The Year is selected because it's something that stands out as an artistic masterpiece. In the years since, Whitney and Bad may have outsold The Joshua Tree, but neither of them come close to the same degree of artistic accomplishment as U2's album.

While Whitney was full of fantastic, still-relevant pop hits, and Bad was considered the most anticipated album in history in the months leading up to its release, The Joshua Tree is a specific, intentional artistic journey. U2, inspired by their time spent touring America after their previous album, 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, wanted to create something that spoke of the major cognitive disconnect between the aspirational myth of the American Dream with the cruel reality of mid-80s America – a flawed and broken country struggling with economic recession, rabid nationalism, and political recalcitrance.

Let me be clear – Bad and Whitney deserve plenty of acclaim, even almost 40 years later, for being phenomenal releases from incredible artists. Similarly, Prince's Sign o' the Times, although a commercial underperformer, was an equally brilliant album that saw the artist experiment with sound and genre in ways that were genuinely groundbreaking. Yet The Joshua Tree was more than that; it was a snapshot of a gnarled tree amidst a beautifully harsh wilderness. As Bono said in an interview with now-defunct U2 fan magazine Propaganda, shortly before the album's release:

I love being there, I love America, I love the feeling of the wide open spaces, I love the deserts, I love the mountain ranges, I even love the cities. So having fallen in love with America over the years that we've been there on tour, I then had to 'deal with' America and the way it was affecting me, because America's having such an effect on the world at the moment. On this record I had to deal with it on a political level for the first time, if in a subtle way.