ACHTUNG BABY (1991)
TRACKLIST
1: Zoo Station
2: Even Better Than The Real Thing
3: One
4: Until The End Of The World
5: Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses
6: So Cruel
7: The Fly
8: Mysterious Ways
9: Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around The World
10: Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
11: Acrobat
12: Love Is Blindness
NOTES on ACHTUNG BABY
At the end of the touring for RATTLE AND HUM, U2 announced that they would be disappearing for a while to "dream it all up again". ACHTUNG BABY was that dream. Influenced by breakout acts such as Massive Attack, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, and others, ACHTUNG reinvented U2 as the ultimate rock-star farce, ironically portraying them as glamorous and decadent celebrities wallowing in vast pools of information. A satire of the high-speed, high-tech culture that we live in, the high-speed high-tech music of ACHTUNG smacked the world upside the head with a completely new U2. To date, ACHTUNG BABY has sold 9 million copies worldwide.
ACHTUNG BABY is arguably U2 at their absolute pinnacle. The album, produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, combines the savvy songwriting of THE JOSHUA TREE with the sonic experimentation of THE UNFORGETTABLE FIRE. Accompanied by what was at the time the most ambitious stadium tour ever-- ZOOTV-- Achtung blew away every image of U2 as a hopelessly earnest and ridiculously open rock band of the '80s and thrust them headlong into the budding alternative scene of the '90s. Recorded at Hansa Studios in Berlin and U2's perennial Windmill Lane Dublin studio, the album captured the curious zeitgeist of the German reunification and the sweeping changes that were rocking eastern Europe throughout the early '90s. Simultaneously, the information culture was dawning; U2 harnessed its spirit with electronic recording and mixing techniques previously unheard of in mainstream rock. The sonic overload neatly compliments the album's "storyline," a sort of homage to James Joyce's ULYSSES, in which the protagonist finds himself drawn into the seductive world of "Nighttown," then spinning back out into a "real world" where his romance/marriage is falling apart as a result of his journeys. Spawning five hit singles and giving a lagging career one potent shot in the arm, ACHTUNG represents U2 at their most innovative and vital, illustrating an almost phoenix-like ability to rise from the ashes.
In an interesting sidenote, the Hansa recording sessions were released to the public in an illegal bootleg-- origins unknown-- entitled SALOME: THE AXTUNG BEIBI SESSIONS. The band and Island Records were less than pleased by this turn of events; however, the sessions do provide U2 fans with a chance to hear the creative process that spawns a U2 record, as well as several near-finished tracks that never made the final cut.
