FIND IT AT :
"If you give a pop star a shit pile of dough and he refuses to self-destruct, I think it is a bit wet," said a smoking, slicked-back, black-sunglasses-clad Bono in a 1993 interview on the UK music show "Naked City". "I think it's part of the deal. If they don't die on a cross by 33, I'd ask for your money back." Like many of the knowingly audacious quotes from the singer and his U2 mates during this period, it's a little tough to deduce the exact level of sincerity involved. And that was the whole idea. In the early 1990s, U2 were sending up the idea of a "rock'n'roll star." They were offering themselves as an ironic, postmodern band for similarly confused times. They were making fun of themselves and their own humorless, slate-faced 80s reputation. A year after Bono's casual quip about pop stars dying on a cross, Kurt Cobain killed himself. And in Nirvana's final video, for "Heart-Shaped Box", Cobain could be seen making wild eyes in front of one.
Achtung Baby and its accompanying Zoo TV tour lived within the slippage between perception and reality. "Sometimes you can get far closer to the truth of what you're trying to say by highlighting what it isn't as if it were true," said the Edge on "Naked City". "That's assuming we know the truth-- 'truth' is one of those words that's lost its meaning." In the 80s, U2 seemed endlessly in search of a definite truth, whether in peace or god or love or some ambiguous combination of the three. Famously, they didn't find it.
But the quest was thrilling-- at least until 1988's album and film Rattle and Hum, which found the group looking and sounding spectacularly self-serious while gawkily paying tribute to some of their American heroes like Elvis Presley and B.B. King. The resulting critical backlash caused these open-hearted Irishmen to reflect, and they weren't crazy about what they saw in the mirror. "We looked like a big, overblown rock band running amok," says Bono in an excellent new documentary called From the Sky Down that chronicles the band's pivotal turn-of-the-decade moment. And while that might seem like an aptly derisive opinion of today's incarnation of U2, it's important to remember that these guys originally came out of the cacophony of rule-breaking post-punk, a realm where bloated arena rock was the enemy. So they went away and tried to come up with a new way to seek some truth.
Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. Sure, U2 changed their sound from chiming melodics to lurching, distorted rhythm. But they also changed their attitude, their demeanor, their look, their ideas on how to deal with celebrity. All of a sudden, they were funny, sexy, a bit dangerous-- three things few would've associated with U2 in the 80s. And yet, at their core, the band's values remained constant. They were still ethically minded and interested in the real-life connection between living beings. But the way they went about projecting those core tenets flipped. In TV-news parlance, their attitude switched from "60 Minutes" to "The Colbert Report".
This new era was conveniently spelled-out on Achtung's first single "The Fly" with the Edge's metallic skronk and Bono's conspiratorial, effected whisper of lines like, "It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest/ It's no secret that ambition bites the nails of success." And just as the album goes lengths to both fulfill and upend rock'n'roll myths with thorny tales of deep betrayal, questioned fidelity, and ambiguous artifice, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it, too.
Take the album's much-ballyhooed place of origin, Berlin's Hansa Studios. This was the location that played host to David Bowie and Iggy Pop's electronic-inspired masterworks Low and The Idiot. And Hansa is located near the Berlin Wall, which had only recently been breached when U2 set up there in the fall of 1990. Perched literally in the middle of historic liberation, U2 were meant to find inspiration in the world events around them and turn that spark into a new version of the band for a new decade. It's a great backdrop for a great story. But it didn't really go down that way. "We're there, and greatness has left the building," Bono recalls in From the Sky Down, which features the band returning to Hansa earlier this year in preparation for their headlining set at Glastonbury.
While Berlin did inspire bits of the record-- "Zoo Station" was named after one of its prominent train terminals-- it hardly lived up to its lofty reputation. This serves as a lesson for U2, a band that shamelessly worships past rock heroes, to move past such naïve mythologizing. "Berlin was a baptism of fire," says bassist Adam Clayton in the documentary. "It was something we had to go through to realize what we were trying to get to was not something you could find physically, outside of ourselves, in some other city-- that there was not magic to it and that we actually had to put the work in and figure out the ideas and hone those ideas down." This newfound pragmatism would help them to move past their fantasies about the sanctity of rock. So while Berlin played a part on Achtung Baby, it did so in surprising ways; though "One" was mostly written in a burst of inspiration in Hansa, most of the album truly came together once the group went back home to Dublin.
Most of the audio bonuses in this set are unfortunately superfluous, and don't offer much in terms of insight. There are two CDs filled with dance remixes, and while U2 were at the vanguard of big time rock bands embracing the notion of the remix, even the most devout rave nostalgist would have little use for six remakes of "Mysterious Ways". The disc of bonus material and B-sides is disappointingly slight, and another filled with early versions of every song on Achtung offers a few revelations-- an Irish gig-style version of "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" has an easy charm, but generally, it's easy to see why these attempts were improved upon later. Achtung's even more electronic and weirder follow-up, 1993's Zooropa-- which was recorded in a creative frenzy during a break in the Zoo TV tour-- is also included, though it's generally (and somewhat unfairly) glossed over in all the accompanying materials.
The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual. There's Anton Corbijn's gorgeous and colorful photography that covers its case, as well as a big, sturdy 84-page book. And then the four discs of video: It Might Get Loud director Davis Guggenheim's new 90-minute doc From the Sky Down, every video from the era, a full live gig taped in Australia in 1993, interview shows (like "Naked City"), and, best of all, a playfully subversive TV special from 1992 that includes live footage from the Zoo TV tour as well as goofy interludes that play up the surrealism and insanity of the whole project. Moments like the "Even Better Than the Real Thing" video, with the band playing in a glass case while fans look on outside, successfully tie in all the pomo flourishes U2 were chasing. The group was at the forefront of bringing huge video screens into the live arena, and some of the tricks they pull off-- Bono "dueting" with a static-y Lou Reed or flipping channels to live local stations-- still look impressive. And for all the technical wizardry of the stage setup, the band still uses it to complement the music rather than overshadow it. Even 20 years on, the tour looks like something to behold, a singularly inventive experience that no band-- including U2 itself-- has been able to really expound upon in a meaningful way.
In the Zoo TV special, which originally aired during Thanksgiving weekend in 1992, a "news commentator" covering the show dubs it "the most significant and exciting TV event since the Gulf War." Some of the ideas behind Zoo TV and Achtung Baby were inspired by the television coverage of that initial Gulf War in 1991, and the bizarre reality of being able to switch channels from home shopping to MTV to the bombing of Baghdad. U2 recognized the dangers of this idea, when war turned into just more filler for the burgeoning 24-hour TV-news cycle. And instead of preaching against it in a high and mighty fashion, they embraced that chaos in an effort to expose it. Of course, our collective information overload has been upped exponentially since thanks to the internet, making the flashes of words and slogans that backed U2 during their live campaign seem eerily prophetic. Talking about the Zoo TV audience in the "Naked City" interview, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. says, "They're coming to a rock'n'roll show and watching television, what more can you ask for?" He's joking, but as we go to arenas and see singers on big screens through our cellphone cameras, the question begins to answer itself.
Achtung Baby and its accompanying Zoo TV tour lived within the slippage between perception and reality. "Sometimes you can get far closer to the truth of what you're trying to say by highlighting what it isn't as if it were true," said the Edge on "Naked City". "That's assuming we know the truth-- 'truth' is one of those words that's lost its meaning." In the 80s, U2 seemed endlessly in search of a definite truth, whether in peace or god or love or some ambiguous combination of the three. Famously, they didn't find it.
But the quest was thrilling-- at least until 1988's album and film Rattle and Hum, which found the group looking and sounding spectacularly self-serious while gawkily paying tribute to some of their American heroes like Elvis Presley and B.B. King. The resulting critical backlash caused these open-hearted Irishmen to reflect, and they weren't crazy about what they saw in the mirror. "We looked like a big, overblown rock band running amok," says Bono in an excellent new documentary called From the Sky Down that chronicles the band's pivotal turn-of-the-decade moment. And while that might seem like an aptly derisive opinion of today's incarnation of U2, it's important to remember that these guys originally came out of the cacophony of rule-breaking post-punk, a realm where bloated arena rock was the enemy. So they went away and tried to come up with a new way to seek some truth.
Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. Sure, U2 changed their sound from chiming melodics to lurching, distorted rhythm. But they also changed their attitude, their demeanor, their look, their ideas on how to deal with celebrity. All of a sudden, they were funny, sexy, a bit dangerous-- three things few would've associated with U2 in the 80s. And yet, at their core, the band's values remained constant. They were still ethically minded and interested in the real-life connection between living beings. But the way they went about projecting those core tenets flipped. In TV-news parlance, their attitude switched from "60 Minutes" to "The Colbert Report".
This new era was conveniently spelled-out on Achtung's first single "The Fly" with the Edge's metallic skronk and Bono's conspiratorial, effected whisper of lines like, "It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest/ It's no secret that ambition bites the nails of success." And just as the album goes lengths to both fulfill and upend rock'n'roll myths with thorny tales of deep betrayal, questioned fidelity, and ambiguous artifice, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it, too.
Take the album's much-ballyhooed place of origin, Berlin's Hansa Studios. This was the location that played host to David Bowie and Iggy Pop's electronic-inspired masterworks Low and The Idiot. And Hansa is located near the Berlin Wall, which had only recently been breached when U2 set up there in the fall of 1990. Perched literally in the middle of historic liberation, U2 were meant to find inspiration in the world events around them and turn that spark into a new version of the band for a new decade. It's a great backdrop for a great story. But it didn't really go down that way. "We're there, and greatness has left the building," Bono recalls in From the Sky Down, which features the band returning to Hansa earlier this year in preparation for their headlining set at Glastonbury.
While Berlin did inspire bits of the record-- "Zoo Station" was named after one of its prominent train terminals-- it hardly lived up to its lofty reputation. This serves as a lesson for U2, a band that shamelessly worships past rock heroes, to move past such naïve mythologizing. "Berlin was a baptism of fire," says bassist Adam Clayton in the documentary. "It was something we had to go through to realize what we were trying to get to was not something you could find physically, outside of ourselves, in some other city-- that there was not magic to it and that we actually had to put the work in and figure out the ideas and hone those ideas down." This newfound pragmatism would help them to move past their fantasies about the sanctity of rock. So while Berlin played a part on Achtung Baby, it did so in surprising ways; though "One" was mostly written in a burst of inspiration in Hansa, most of the album truly came together once the group went back home to Dublin.
Most of the audio bonuses in this set are unfortunately superfluous, and don't offer much in terms of insight. There are two CDs filled with dance remixes, and while U2 were at the vanguard of big time rock bands embracing the notion of the remix, even the most devout rave nostalgist would have little use for six remakes of "Mysterious Ways". The disc of bonus material and B-sides is disappointingly slight, and another filled with early versions of every song on Achtung offers a few revelations-- an Irish gig-style version of "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" has an easy charm, but generally, it's easy to see why these attempts were improved upon later. Achtung's even more electronic and weirder follow-up, 1993's Zooropa-- which was recorded in a creative frenzy during a break in the Zoo TV tour-- is also included, though it's generally (and somewhat unfairly) glossed over in all the accompanying materials.
The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual. There's Anton Corbijn's gorgeous and colorful photography that covers its case, as well as a big, sturdy 84-page book. And then the four discs of video: It Might Get Loud director Davis Guggenheim's new 90-minute doc From the Sky Down, every video from the era, a full live gig taped in Australia in 1993, interview shows (like "Naked City"), and, best of all, a playfully subversive TV special from 1992 that includes live footage from the Zoo TV tour as well as goofy interludes that play up the surrealism and insanity of the whole project. Moments like the "Even Better Than the Real Thing" video, with the band playing in a glass case while fans look on outside, successfully tie in all the pomo flourishes U2 were chasing. The group was at the forefront of bringing huge video screens into the live arena, and some of the tricks they pull off-- Bono "dueting" with a static-y Lou Reed or flipping channels to live local stations-- still look impressive. And for all the technical wizardry of the stage setup, the band still uses it to complement the music rather than overshadow it. Even 20 years on, the tour looks like something to behold, a singularly inventive experience that no band-- including U2 itself-- has been able to really expound upon in a meaningful way.
In the Zoo TV special, which originally aired during Thanksgiving weekend in 1992, a "news commentator" covering the show dubs it "the most significant and exciting TV event since the Gulf War." Some of the ideas behind Zoo TV and Achtung Baby were inspired by the television coverage of that initial Gulf War in 1991, and the bizarre reality of being able to switch channels from home shopping to MTV to the bombing of Baghdad. U2 recognized the dangers of this idea, when war turned into just more filler for the burgeoning 24-hour TV-news cycle. And instead of preaching against it in a high and mighty fashion, they embraced that chaos in an effort to expose it. Of course, our collective information overload has been upped exponentially since thanks to the internet, making the flashes of words and slogans that backed U2 during their live campaign seem eerily prophetic. Talking about the Zoo TV audience in the "Naked City" interview, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. says, "They're coming to a rock'n'roll show and watching television, what more can you ask for?" He's joking, but as we go to arenas and see singers on big screens through our cellphone cameras, the question begins to answer itself.
