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U2: Achtung Baby
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U2 spent most of the 1990's trying to transform itself and stay up to date. On albums it fought its own penchant for grandeur, enveloping the music with electronic noise and dance-club rhythms and letting some lyrics turn oblique. Onstage it embraced the artifice of razzle-dazzle stadium productions. The tension between U2's reflexes and its ambitions sparked extraordinary work, particularly the 1991 album ''Achtung Baby'' and the Zoo TV tour that followed it.
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U2’s best work - which includes War (1983), The Joshua Tree (1987), Achtung Baby (1991) and All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000) - stand out as true classics in the rock canon. Bono’s high-profile work for causes like Third World debt relief and U2’s participation in such historic rock-for-charity events as Live Aid and Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope tour in have made them something of a beacon for positive change in the world of music.
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In November 1991, U2 released Achtung Baby. Hurt by criticism of Rattle and Hum, the band made a calculated change in musical and thematic direction, their most dramatic since The Unforgettable Fire.[70] Sonically, Achtung Baby incorporated dance, industrial, and alternative music influences of the time and the band referred to the album as the sound of "four men chopping down the Joshua Tree".[71] Thematically, it was a more inward-looking and personal record; it was darker, yet at times more flippant, than the band's previous work. Commercially and critically, it has been one of the band's most successful albums and a crucial part of the band's early 1990s reinvention.[72] Like The Joshua Tree, it is cited by Rolling Stone as one of rock's greatest.[62]
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Jars of Clay and Sixpence None the Richer stray the most from the originals, probably because these artists are most familiar with U2 and know the danger of trying to sound like the best band in the world. Jars does a bluesy version of "All I Want Is You," which seems to deflate the song of momentum. Sixpence tackles the forboding "Love is Blindness," but it misses the melancholy of the Achtung Baby original. Both bands attempted an experimental angle, but it didn't fly.
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Recorded in Berlin, Achtung Baby sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and set U2 on a course for the Nineties. It and the discs that followed - Zooropa (1993) and Pop (1997) - form a kind of triptych. The group embraced the messy state of the war-torn, media-saturated world with a grim sense of celebration, as Bono created a handful of devilish alter egos - including “The Fly” and “Mr. MacPhisto, the Last Rock Star” - for the stage. Zooropa, an adjunct and coda to Achtung Baby, was recorded in Dublin during a break between legs of the Zoo TV tour.
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Reinventions rarely come as thorough and effective as Achtung Baby, an album that completely changed U2's sound and style. The crashing, unrecognizable distorted guitars that open "Zoo Station" are a clear ...Read full review
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Achtung Baby