‘Achtung Baby’: how U2 got away with selling out
The idea of a band selling out might be considered a bad word, but is that really accurate? There are many ways that bands work around their craft and make something purely to make money, but if the music is still good, it’s hardly a bad thing, right? And even for a band like U2, who had been one of the biggest darlings of rock and roll in the 1980s, seeing them cynically cash in on Achtung Baby may have been one of the best moves they could have made during their career.
But when listening to Achtung Baby for the first time, the idea of them embracing irony makes absolutely no sense. Bono never seemed like someone who had a single inauthentic bone in his body, and even if that led to him being more than a little bit pretentious when making Rattle and Hum, the band still managed to sell a tonne of records to people who genuinely believed that they were going to change the world.
That’s not where the kids were by 1991. The order of the day all involved stripping things down and making everyone see the people behind the instruments. U2 had hit their peak at the same time that bands like Winger were storming up the charts, and while they were never going to go down the route of hair metal, the massive jump to becoming post-ironic rockstars would not be easy, either.
While Achtung Baby does the first thing right by having great songs, a lot of what makes them great comes from how Bono delivers everything. Which is almost counterintuitive in some ways. Considering ‘The Fly’ was the first single the band released for the album, it should have feasibly killed them where they stood, with Bono having his massive glasses and playing himself up as someone so far up their own ass they could give themselves their own prostate exam.
That was never going to fly in the age of Nirvana, but Bono was never looking to be that kind of rockstar from the beginning. He knew his limitations in that arena, and this was him intentionally playing a caricature of what a rockstar was supposed to be, complete with glitchy beats inherited from the beginnings of industrial rock. While this album firmly planted a stake through the heart of The Joshua Tree, the reason why it has endured is because it never lost its heart either.
Many people may not have been fans of U2’s chest-pounding redemption songs, so this was Bono actually getting honest for the first time. There had been moments where he seemed to be speaking for the man on the street, but this was the first time that most people saw this kind of macho rockstar have feelings, like the cry for help on ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’ or the sad lament of ‘Love is Blindness’. The glasses were still on, but they were only there to mask the pain.
Although U2 could have sunk like a stone the minute this album came out, the reason why they worked so well was because of how they viewed themselves. They were far more interested in stealing from people like David Bowie than they were from Led Zeppelin, and when they actually managed to reinvent themselves, many people realised that they may have been taking the biggest band in the world for granted all this time.
Because, really, Achtung Baby wasn’t simply an album made to cash in on the trends of the time. It was a legitimate piece of art, and while U2 would eventually go into full-on sell-out territory on Pop a few years down the road, fans were more than willing to listen to whatever ‘The Fly’ had to say when he had the microphone in his hand.
