Perched literally in the middle of historic liberation, U2 were meant to find inspiration in the world events around them and turn that spark into a new version of the band for a new decade. And Hansa is located near the Berlin Wall, which had only recently been breached when U2 set up there in the fall of 1990. This was the location that played host to David Bowie and Iggy Pop's electronic-inspired masterworks Low and The Idiot. Take the album's much-ballyhooed place of origin, Berlin's Hansa Studios. This new era was conveniently spelled-out on Achtung's first single "The Fly" with the Edge's metallic skronk and Bono's conspiratorial, effected whisper of lines like, "It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest/ It's no secret that ambition bites the nails of success." And just as the album goes lengths to both fulfill and upend rock'n'roll myths with thorny tales of deep betrayal, questioned fidelity, and ambiguous artifice, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it, too. In TV-news parlance, their attitude switched from "60 Minutes" to "The Colbert Report". But the way they went about projecting those core tenets flipped. They were still ethically minded and interested in the real-life connection between living beings. And yet, at their core, the band's values remained constant. All of a sudden, they were funny, sexy, a bit dangerous- three things few would've associated with U2 in the 80s.
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But they also changed their attitude, their demeanor, their look, their ideas on how to deal with celebrity. Sure, U2 changed their sound from chiming melodics to lurching, distorted rhythm. So they went away and tried to come up with a new way to seek some truth.Īchtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. And while that might seem like an aptly derisive opinion of today's incarnation of U2, it's important to remember that these guys originally came out of the cacophony of rule-breaking post-punk, a realm where bloated arena rock was the enemy. "We looked like a big, overblown rock band running amok," says Bono in an excellent new documentary called From the Sky Down that chronicles the band's pivotal turn-of-the-decade moment. The resulting critical backlash caused these open-hearted Irishmen to reflect, and they weren't crazy about what they saw in the mirror. Famously, they didn't find it.īut the quest was thrilling- at least until 1988's album and film Rattle and Hum, which found the group looking and sounding spectacularly self-serious while gawkily paying tribute to some of their American heroes like Elvis Presley and B.B. "That's assuming we know the truth- 'truth' is one of those words that's lost its meaning." In the 80s, U2 seemed endlessly in search of a definite truth, whether in peace or god or love or some ambiguous combination of the three. "Sometimes you can get far closer to the truth of what you're trying to say by highlighting what it isn't as if it were true," said the Edge on "Naked City".
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And in Nirvana's final video, for "Heart-Shaped Box", Cobain could be seen making wild eyes in front of one.Īchtung Baby and its accompanying Zoo TV tour lived within the slippage between perception and reality. A year after Bono's casual quip about pop stars dying on a cross, Kurt Cobain killed himself. They were making fun of themselves and their own humorless, slate-faced 80s reputation. In the early 1990s, U2 were sending up the idea of a "rock'n'roll star." They were offering themselves as an ironic, postmodern band for similarly confused times. If they don't die on a cross by 33, I'd ask for your money back." Like many of the knowingly audacious quotes from the singer and his U2 mates during this period, it's a little tough to deduce the exact level of sincerity involved. "If you give a pop star a shit pile of dough and he refuses to self-destruct, I think it is a bit wet," said a smoking, slicked-back, black-sunglasses-clad Bono in a 1993 interview on the UK music show "Naked City".
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