The 60s marked the buckling of the ancien régime, the inception of an identifiable rock’n’roll youth culture, and the rise of radically new, thrusting, disruptive, basically optimistic acts like the Beatles and the Who. The 70s saw the retreat of this revolutionary and somewhat utopian spirit in the face of widespread disillusionment and decay and, thus, the birth of glam; an obscene celebration of artifice, theatrically, and deviance, which manifested in the trashy bombast of Bowie and Queen. In the 80s, vigour was restored to the ‘free world’ through aggressive neoliberalism but, this time, the idealistic social conscience of the 60s was conspicuous by its absence, replaced by coldly detached greed and opulence – hence the swaggering, slightly inhuman synthrock of Duran Duran, and the massive, megabucks, dopamine-inducing pop of Michael Jackson and Prince.
The 90s, however, represent a unique moment in the postwar history of the West. The decade began properly not in 1990 but in 1989, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The central geopolitical narrative of the preceding forty years – the superpower rivalry – was thereby abruptly terminated. With the Cold War won, capitalist liberalism seemed triumphant, and a unipolar American moment was inaugurated. At long last, the world had been made “safe for democracy”. In retrospect, this brief window between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 seems garishly idyllic, a gaudy landscape of ostensibly unideological consumerism, the apparently terminal ascendancy of the celebratory nihilism of MTV, Beavis and Butthead, the Simpsons, and Jerry Springer. The problems of the past (superpower rivalry and Mutually Assured Destruction) had been vanquished, while those of the future (environmental catastrophe, terrorism, mass migration, and a new superpower rivalry with an emerging China) were yet to emerge. In the West, at least, it was party time.
In my opinion, no record more completely captures this brief moment, this “end of history”, than Achtung Baby, U2’s seventh album and – also in my opinion – their finest hour, and one of the greatest albums in the history of rock. It’s no coincidence that much of it was recorded in Berlin, the city which, more than any other, had symbolised the ideological stalemate of the Cold War, and which, through its unification, seemingly marked a new, more celebratory moment in world history. Equally crucial to the album’s serendipity was U2’s own evolution from po faced, somewhat messianic purveyors of quasi-Christian rock to sexy, strutting, leather-bound deviants, who gleefully ditched their acoustic guitars and unexpectedly began to dabble in underground European electronica. “The Fly”, the first single from the album, borders on Skinny Puppy-esque industrial metal, its playful, sinister, confrontational mien so far removed from the earnest and good-natured Americana of “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” that it may as well be the work of a different band. As Bono once put it, it’s the sound of four men trying to “chop down the Joshua Tree”.
“The Fly” is indeed one of Achtung Baby’s key moments, because it instructively captures the album’s defining air of dark, Dionysian revelry. This is the soundtrack to a chaotic, inebriated, but life-affirming night on the town, an evening of joyous, but occasionally emotionally devastating, drunken revelry in the underground nightclubs of Berlin, newly invigorated by the abeyance of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The lyrics to “The Fly” apparently narrate a “phone call from hell”, a repentant (but still mischievous) sinner sharing his hard-won wisdom that a “conscience can sometimes be a pest”. It sounds like Trent Reznor on happy pills – dingy, but jubilant and melodic industrial rock.
But Achtung Baby’s essential Bacchanalian spirit, and the historical context that gave birth to it, are perhaps most perfectly captured on its opener, “Zoo Station”, a miasma of distorted guitars, cybernetic sound effects, metallic vocals, and lyrics which declare “I’m glad to be alive”. The darkly cynical “Until the End of the World” represents a moment of morbid intoxication on this ill-fated bender, with Bono (or perhaps the Fly) lamenting the fact that, despite “drowning my sorrows, my sorrows have learned to swim”. By the time of “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World”, “it’s 6 O’clock in the morning”, the party is very much over, and our protagonist is stumbling home drunk, with only his own sentimental rambling for company.
But although these anthems for dark, disastrous, delicious piss-ups provide the essential backbone of Achtung Baby, most of the album is in fact comprised of love songs, including three of its five singles. Some commentators have suggested that tracks like “Mysterious Ways” and “One” are about Bono’s faith or his relationship to the divine, but I prefer to believe that they’re inspired by Edge’s disintegrating marriage, or that they are, at least, about a man’s troubled connection to a beguiling femme fatale. “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and “Mysterious Ways” are euphoric, fast-paced radio hits; the jagged guitars and ecstatic, but strangely haunting, vocals of the former signpost Achtung Baby’s celebratory foretelling of the coming digitalised artificiality of the 90s, the band’s (and the world’s) newfound willingness to “slide down the surface of things”. “Mysterious Ways”, meanwhile, is one of the album’s highlights, channelling the sensual funkiness of drug-addled Madchester dance acts like the Happy Mondays or the Charlatans.
The lyrics to these songs are positively worshipful, comparing the object of Bono’s affections to a deity, romantic love to a religion (“If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel”). “One” and “Ultraviolet” are more pensive, but their lyrics are shot through with a similar level of devotion to the divine feminine. “One” was recorded in Berlin and was apparently a breakthrough moment for the band, in that its obvious brilliance reassured them that they were heading in the right direction after their risky abscondence from the musical template that had delivered so much success on The Joshua Tree. German reunification is clearly knitted into lyrics about “one love, one blood”, and there’s an explicit religiosity to lines such as “love is a temple, love the higher law”. Ultimately, however, it’s best viewed as a conciliatory meditation on a fraught relationship between two people who, whatever their differences, need each other. The rolling drums and ethereal vocals of “Ultra Violet” are riven with a more profound distress; our narrator is deeply lost (“sometimes I feel like checking out”) with only his schatzilein to guide and redeem him (“feel like trash, you make me feel clean”).
Despite its sadness and self-loathing, “Ultra Violet” still posits love as a saviour, a source of guidance in a cruel world. Other songs on Achtung Baby, however, offer more damning accounts of the experience of romantic love, with women presented not so much as heavenly saviours who “move in mysterious ways” or “light my way”, but rather as dark, devilish femme fatales who lead men to ruin. At the heart of the album lies the mournful “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” and the resigned, defeated “So Cruel”, both of which narrate a man’s grief and disorientation over the loss of a tempestuous but addictive and exciting lover, “an accident waiting to happen, a piece of glass left there on the beach”. This Lady Lazarus-like figure eats men like air, and our narrator is clearly one of her past victims (“The men who love you, you hate the most / they pass right through you like a ghost”).
Not entirely unexpectedly, given this tumultuous background, the end of Achtung Baby descends into full-blown depression and self-loathing. If other tracks on the album merely tip their hats to the industrial metal of Nine Inch Nails and Sonic Youth, then “The Acrobat” is positively drenched in it, its scuzzy guitars and discordant drumbeat soundtracking some uncharacteristically self-lacerating lyrics. Bono mordantly concedes that he “must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that” – perhaps a reflection on the inevitable self-prostitution and hypocrisy that come with being a world-bestriding rockstar. His lamentation that “I’d break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in” hints at the dark side of U2’s newfound flirtation with glammy artifice and irony which, though liberating, leave the individual unmoored and bewildered, bereft of the kind of spiritual certainties which informed The Joshua Tree. The baleful consequences of this loss of faith come fully into view on the album’s closer, the funereal “Love is Blindness”, which represents Achtung Baby’s conclusive descent into darkness. Unusually for a U2 song, it is utterly bereft of hope, which is replaced by a macabre death wish, a call to “wrap the night around me”.
Achtung Baby, then, is an emotional rollercoaster. It contrasts moments of swaggering, life-affirming revelry (“Zoo Station”, “The Fly”) with desperate devotion (“Ultra Violet”) and, ultimately, profound loss and suffering (“Love is Blindness”). This makes for a gloriously messy, intense, convulsive, celebratory, devastating listen, enormously evocative not just of the chaotic, jubilant, haunted city in which it was conceived, but of the Western world at the start of the 90s – flushed with victory, ready to let its hair down, but also tiptoeing somewhat anxiously into a new age devoid of the predictabilities of the Cold War.
Like U2, the West didn’t really know what to do with its victory, and so – also like U2 – it dived headlong into a consumerist orgy of television screens, irony, technological experimentation, and instant gratification. The West was finally awoken from this fever dream on September 11th 2001 and, at around the very same time, U2 left the experimental weirdness of the 90s behind, in favour of the more staid and conventional dadrock of “Beautiful Day”, ushering in the last phase of their career. But that’s beside the point – with Achtung Baby they basically reinvented themselves while casually providing the rock soundtrack to a seminal moment in 20th century history.
10/10
Highlights: “The Fly”, “Mysterious Ways”, “Love is Blindness”