‘Acrobat’: the U2 song that was written in the “tradition” of John Lennon
By 1991, U2 weren’t exactly keen on looking to the past. Their heart-on-sleeves approach of the 1980s was coming to an end, and the sound of the future included industrial beats, funk rhythms, and a hefty helping of irony. While their outside appearance and musical tools changed, the band’s focus on the human condition remained intact. While they put on a glib guise, U2 were still focused on battling adversity and following love on Achtung Baby tracks like ‘Acrobat’.
“[‘Acrobat’] is a song about your own spleen,” Bono explained in the band’s book U2 on U2. “Your own hypocrisy, your own ability to change shape and take on the colors of whatever environment you’re in, like a chameleon. ‘I must be an acrobat, to talk like this and act like that.'”
For Bono, the inspiration was clear: American poet Delmore Schwartz, whose collection of poems titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was quote in the song’s final verse. “[Schwartz] was on my mind when I was writing the words,” Bono claimed to the NME in 1992. “It’s hard to wrap the book up in a few lines, but Delmore Schwartz is kind of a formalist… I’m the opposite. I’m in the mud as a writer, so I could do with a bit of [Schwartz], and that’s why I enjoy him.”
According to guitarist The Edge, however, there was another notable influence on the writing of the song. “In amongst the dark romance, ‘Acrobat’ has a bit of venom about it,” The Edge explained in U2 on U2. “It’s in the bitter, John Lennon tradition of ‘Working Class Hero,’ slightly snarling and cynical.”
That cynicism certainly proved to be an essential element of Achtung Baby. The band were going for a purposefully disorienting sound that was completely different from their past sound. Even for close collaborators like co-producer Daniel Lanois, the change was radical. “Daniel had such a hard time on that,” Bono later claimed. “He was trying to get us to play to our strengths and I didn’t want to. I wanted to play to our weaknesses. I wanted to experiment.”
The experimentation proved to be vital for U2’s survival. Instead of getting lost in the tricky transition between the 1980s and 1990s, U2 hopped ahead of the curve and remained one of the biggest bands in the world. They wouldn’t always handle changing times with such grace, but U2 were ahead of the game on Achtung Baby, even if songs like ‘Acrobat’ came from the same place as their past songs.
Check out ‘Acrobat’ down below.
