Achtung Baby by U2
Achtung Baby is the seventh studio album by Irish rock band U2. It was produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and was released on 19 November 1991 on Island Records. Stung by the criticism of their 1988 release Rattle and Hum, U2 shifted their musical direction to incorporate alternative rock, industrial, and electronic dance music influences into their sound. Thematically, the album is darker, more introspective, and at times more flippant than their previous work. Achtung Baby and the subsequent multimedia-intensive Zoo TV Tour were central to the group's 1990s reinvention, which replaced their earnest public image with a more lighthearted and self-deprecating one. Seeking inspiration on the eve of German reunification, U2 began recording Achtung Baby at Berlin's Hansa Studios in October 1990. The sessions were fraught with conflict, as the band argued over their musical direction and the quality of their material. After tensions and slow progress nearly prompted the group to break up, they made a breakthrough with the improvised writing of the song "One". Morale and productivity improved during subsequent recording sessions in Dublin, where the album was completed in 1991. To confound the public's expectations of the band and their music, U2 chose the record's facetious title and colourful multi-image sleeve. Achtung Baby is one of U2's most successful records. It received favourable reviews and debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 Top Albums, while topping the charts in many other countries. Five songs were released as commercial singles, all of which were chart successes, including "One", "Mysterious Ways", and "The Fly". The album has sold 18 million copies worldwide and won a Grammy Award in 1993 for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. One of the most acclaimed records of the 1990s, Achtung Baby has regularly been featured on critics' lists of the greatest albums of all time. The record was reissued in October 2011 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its original release.
U2’s most transformative album—the one that would re-jigger the band’s sound, re-energise its members and win over even the band’s fiercest critics—began with a vague promise from Bono. On December 30, 1989, during a homecoming performance in Ireland, the U2 frontman bid farewell to the ’80s by declaring that his world-conquering band was taking a sabbatical from stardom. “We have to go away,” Bono announced, “and just dream it all up again.” The hasty retreat made sense, given the response to 1988’s highly hyped <i>Rattle and Hum</i>, an ambitious double album (and documentary film) that found U2 travelling through America in search of new sounds—and, to some observers, wallowing in self-seriousness. The band had always prompted its fair share of eye-rolling, but <i>Rattle and Hum</i> gave the group’s detractors even more ammo: Gospel choirs? Folk songs? <i>Just who do these U2 guys think they are?</i> The band members were wondering the same thing. So in 1990, they decamped to Germany, hoping the recent fall of the Berlin Wall could be the backdrop for a future-focused burst of creativity. Instead, the four band members—Bono, guitarist the Edge, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton—began sparring in the studio, torn over what the ’90s version of U2 should sound like. The Edge, in particular, was fascinated by the noisy new wave of industrial artists like Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM—acts whose menace and aggression were far removed from U2’s brand of guitar-starred anthems. Not everyone was sold on the idea of a more aggro, less earnest version of U2. But the push and pull of the <i>Achtung Baby</i> sessions—which were later continued in Dublin—would result in 12 tracks of buzzsaw rock that sound as though they’d been created by a different band altogether. The album’s lead single, “The Fly”, is a grimy dance-floor come-on anchored by Clayton and Mullen’s strange new rhythms. And on “Mysterious Ways”, the Edge trades in his familiar clean-lined guitar-jangle for a hazy funk that sounds like it’s being played through a dial-up modem. As for Bono: He’s never been as loose as he is here—nor as libidinous. On both the kaleidoscopic “Until the End of the World'' and the clanging “Zoo Station”, he adopts a winking, playfully skeevy persona—the perfect guise for the ironic ’90s. Yet the clear-eyed bluntness that propelled U2 to infamy in the ’80s was still intact, most notably on “One”, a soulful ode to reconciliation that would become one of the biggest songs of U2’s career. Less than two years after U2 vowed to “dream it all up again”, <i>Achtung Baby</i> delivered on that big promise—maintaining all the vigour and fervour of the band’s early years, while flirting with sounds that would soon define radio: trip-hop, shoegaze, electro-pop. This album wasn’t <i>Rattle and Hum</i>—it was pure <i>Sturm und Drang</i>. And for once, the group’s most loyal fans—as well as its most exhausted critics—could agree: This souped-up, super-improved U2 2.0 was even better than the real thing.
