So why is U2’s Achtung Baby on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
If you weren’t around at the time and at least semi-tuned into what was going on with rock music, it’s hard to explain how much of a departure Achtung Baby was from all of the music that U2 had produced before it.
While I was somewhat aware of U2 in my early childhood – particularly songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which saw a lot of action on MTV during its earliest years – the U2 of The Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum dominated my junior high and early high school years. And by dominate, I mean they were an important band in my life and even represented an escape hatch of sorts – along with R.E.M. – into a world of college rock and alternative rock that I didn’t have a great deal of access to during those pre-Internet streaming days.*
* Growing up on Long Island, New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s meant lots of hair metal, lots of metal-y power ballads, lots of cheesy metal, and above all else: lots of METAL metal.
So the release of Achtung Baby in November of 1991 came as something of a shock. I believe “The Fly” was the first single released off the album, and it’s the first song from the new record that I recall hearing.
Gone was the U2 of earnest and yearning explorations of America – including its blues and soul traditions – and gone too was the U2 of political declarations. Instead, here we had this very European dance music-inspired sound, including electronica infused into the core U2 sensibilities. And we also had songs that were strikingly personal.
And, you know what? It was good. It was very good, indeed.
“One” remains one of the best U2 songs of all time, and it’s an incredibly rare tune that consistently makes me feel something whenever I listen to it.
The lyrics are both specific and universal at the same time, somehow, in the way the best songwriting and the best poetry tends to be, I suppose.
Did I disappoint you
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
And it’s just a deeply beautiful song that builds and builds, with Bono never having sounded better.
Meanwhile, “Mysterious Ways” and “Even Better Than The Real Thing” are about as danceable as U2 ever gets – both are catchy, memorable, and fun. And The Edge’s guitar part during the “Even Better Than The Real Thing” never fails to make me happy.
I discussed recently, in the best 1,000 albums ever piece on R.E.M.’s Reveal (#220) that seeing the band live at the Hollywood Bowl made me completely reassess the song “I’ve Been High.” With U2 and Achtung Baby, the same is true of “Love Is Blindness,” the album closer.
I’ve seen U2 live in concert just once – on the Zooropa tour in the mid-1990s, at what was then called the Meadowlands in northern New Jersey, just outside of New York City. I went with my man Larry, and we had a great time, though I always tie the experience back to the very first time I recall ever experiencing the comedy of David Spade.
Spade was on a “young comedian’s special” on HBO back in the 1980s. One of his bits was about seeing U2 live in concert, but being so far away from the stage that the band appeared to be the size of ants or some such.
This was true in my experience as well, but when the music is that good sometimes stuff like that doesn’t even matter.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to U2’s Achtung Baby
I only put it together when writing this piece that Nirvana’s Nevermind was released less than two months before Achtung Baby in late 1991. The two events – and iconic albums – are mostly related in the sense that the music world and culture was changing rapidly, and I suppose it’s fair to say that each band did its part to help bring what we now think of The 1990s more fully into focus.
Some stats & info about U2 – Achtung Baby
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Album Rock, Contemporary Rock, Dance Music
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #124
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was Achtung Baby released? 1991
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #216 out of 1,000
U2’s Achtung’s Baby on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from U2’s Achtung’s Baby that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
One love, one blood, one life, you got to do what you should.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.