U2

Holding the vinyl of “Achtung Baby” in your hands is like looking at your own reflection inside a short film. Anton Corbijn’s snapshots capture a brand new world, emerging from the faintly blurred black-and-white backdrop of a carnival night in Tenerife and the garish brushstrokes on the bodywork of a Trabant weaving through the streets of a newborn Berlin. And then there are Moroccan traders, children on the beach, a cart of tomatoes. Bono dons the matador’s garb far from the arena, stripped of cape, muleta and estoque, while Adam Clayton strips down himself. It’s the photographic diary of a journey linking Santa Cruz, Berlin, Tenerife and Fez. Private excursions that U2 undertook at the dawn of the 1990s to reunite fire and earth, the two key elements of a career that had, up to that point, been as untamed as a bull at Las Ventas or a Lamborghini Islero: take your pick.

Thirty-two shots, then, lined up to fill the sleeves of both sides of an album that is, above all, detachment, abrasion, defiance. The Dublin band, having soared above the clouds with “The Joshua Tree“, was by 1991 chasing antipodes, flashes, upheavals. The idea was to start over from the walls that had come down two years earlier, in what turns out to be a useful litmus test for charting an unprecedented geography of sounds and words: out go the cacti of Death Valley, in come raw metal, rust, the ultrasounds of the Berlin zoo. Hansa, the famous studios where David Bowie recorded the “Berlin Trilogy“, welcomed a revitalized Brian Eno, Mark Ellis and the trusted Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite. The dream team was complete.

With these premises, "Achtung Baby" slides its way into the history of the four Irishmen. More than an album, it's a complete about-face. An authentic slaughter of everything that came before. Starting with the lyrics of "Zoo Station" and a filthy, unfaithful music, so battered it sounds like it's coming from the stage of some underground club. The collapse is staged right from the opening. It starts from disintegration, from a rhythmic stumble that introduces a long-sought equilibrium.

I'm ready

Ready for the laughing gas

I'm ready

Ready for what's next

Ready to duck

Ready to dive

Ready to say

I'm glad to be alive

I'm ready

Ready for the push

U2 are swept up in an Orwellian urgency, because "Achtung Baby" feeds on disillusionment and ends up critiquing the pay-per-view spectacle of a West imprisoned by its television screens. "Even Better Than The Real Thing" is right there, underlining it every time it plays. The album was released on October 18, 1991. Sixteen weeks later, in Lakeland, Florida, the spectacular ZooTV world tour kicked off. From the giant screens, Bono dishes out phone calls, "calling" up powerful figures and stars of every kind live on stage, voicing his reservations about everything with sword drawn, mostly with the sarcasm of a seasoned showman.

The shift in direction in the studio, however, isn't pyrotechnic but incisive. There's a hunger to emerge from the chaos of a mutation that's not only political and social, but musical too. The annus mirabilis, that 1991 endlessly cited as a watershed for 20th-century popular music, absorbs U2 as actors in an unexpected yet sought-after script, sniffed out since the street celebrations of a finally reunited Berlin. The German capital is the suddenly open space in which to move about, drawing vital energy and savoring a style that unites art rock and grand romantic ballads, the ghosts of Wim Wenders, joined together in "Until The End Of The World", and the new feeling, to put it in the words of Franco Battiato, emerging from various angles. The manifesto, after all, is as clear as day: "We're one, but we're not the same". "One" is the instant classic born by mistake, or rather by chance, out of a rehearsal session built on the chords of "Mysterious Ways". It's an ambiguous declaration of love: it exalts uniqueness and the endurance that becomes necessary both to rise above and to annihilate guilt at the same time.

Have you come here for forgiveness

Have you come to raise the dead

Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head

Did I ask too much, more than a lot

You gave me nothing, now it's all I got

"The Fly" goes even further: it captures the fiery spirit of "Mysterious Ways" and the proclamations of "Zoo Station" and grinds them into gunpowder. Bono sings of crawling men, flies on the wall, cannibal artists, thieving poets. Meanwhile The Edge strips down his guitar and pulls out one of the most visceral riffs of his career. While at the same moment grunge, baggy, and even trip-hop bands come out into the open by fusing past and present, reshuffling the deck through various forms of intimism, U2 head in the opposite direction: they step down from their chartered jet only to take unexpected refuge inside a tunnel, guided by a Brian Eno who is Cicero on paper and Charon in practice.

There are countless clashes, artistic ones, that is, within the band. Having graced the covers of half the world, U2 hide away in the "doghouse" only to find themselves, perhaps for the first time, going their separate ways. It's a potentially dangerous mismatch of intentions, turned into gold by Eno, who sifts through every pebble caught in the shoes of the four musicians. "Achtung Baby has ended up being a place where incongruities are allowed to intertwine, and where a probably disjointed image (but ultimately an absolutely European one) is allowed to emerge": Eno's own words on the matter. And so we get Nell Catchpole's violin on the merciless "So Cruel", Lanois's drums added to the Maori dance of "Until The End Of The World", the one moment where Bono almost stops singing to look Christ and Judas in the face, on the title track that lends its name to the soundtrack of Wenders's film of the same name.

"Achtung Baby", for all its miraculous cohesion, also holds missed opportunities that will forever remain suspended halfway, between regret for a potential hit and awareness of a deliberate choice. "Acrobat" is perhaps the album's least appreciated moment among fans, as its live reception clearly shows, but it's also its black swan. Bono aims none-too-cryptic words at his fiercest critics: "So don't let the bastards grind you down". These are the hidden urges of a primadonna that the other three will struggle to rein in down the line, when the ground beneath Bono's feet — borrowed from Salman Rushdie on the eve of the new millennium — will end up being smoke and mirrors, while the substance will point to a bundle of contradictions: a poultice for elderly wives, a flight to the Cayman Islands, and another to see the Pope.

"Achtung Baby" would be followed two years later by "Zooropa": its glossier and often underrated counterpart, featuring the first batches of Hewson's megalomania, ballads still worthy of note such as "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)", and surefire tools for climbing the charts and MTV playlists like "Numb". Then came "Pop" in 1997: the last laser beam before an inexorable and total decline. An album that would give the Dublin band a layered, expansive sound, thanks above all to the ideas Howie B brought to the mixing desk, plus the blinding lights of a monstrous tour circling the globe.

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26/02/2023