It was 20 years ago today: Achtung Baby at 20

Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you stranded at the station
Your face pressed up against the glass

Twenty years ago today, I was in Pirmasens, Germany. More significantly, from a music history standpoint, U2 released their masterpiece Achtung Baby, marking the beginning of a new phase for the Irish quartet.

You're honey, child, to a swarm of bees
Gonna blow right through you like a breeze
Give me one last dance
We'll slide down the surface of things

November 19, 1991 was a Tuesday, even in Germany. My journal entry for that day says I got a letter from a friend and my mother, and that I was going to be leading my first district meeting the next day. How 'bout that? I had to wait another 16 months before I heard the album, in March of '93. It was of course well worth the wait.

Did I ask too much - more than a lot
You gave me nothing - now it's all I got
We're one, but we're not the same
Well we hurt each other, then we do it again

As Wikipedia notes today, "Stung by the criticism of their 1988 release Rattle and Hum, U2 shifted their musical direction to incorporate influences from alternative rock, industrial music, and electronic dance music into their sound. Thematically, the album is darker, more introspective, and more flippant than their previous work. Recording began at Berlin's Hansa Studios in October 1990, but the sessions were fraught with conflict, as the band argued over the direction and quality of their music. After nearly breaking up, they made a breakthrough with the improvisation of the song 'One.' Morale improved during the subsequent recording sessions in Dublin in 1991."

In the garden I was playing the tart
I kissed your lips and broke your heart
You - you were acting like it was the end of the world

For whatever reason, I've always been intrigued by an album's first three tracks. Maybe I figure if the first three are solid, the album will be as well. Few albums can match Achtung's opening salvo of "Zoo Station" (with its references to Berlin's subway system), "Even Better Than the Real Thing" (great riff!), and the timeless "One."

I disappeared in you - you disappeared from me
I gave you everything you ever wanted
It wasn't what you wanted

I don't really care for "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," (I haven't even imported it into iTunes) but other than that track, I love everything about this album. Sure, The Joshua Tree is an all-time album, an historical achievement. Achtung Baby, on the other hand, is the sound of a band breaking free of all restraints and even the burden of previous successes and resulting expectations. Achtung Baby is the sound of a band entering its musical maturity and realizing what they are capable of. It is a beacon to everyone as proof that reinvention is gloriously possible. U2 has been accused of pretense before. Achtung Baby is refreshingly free of it.

It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest
It's no secret ambition bites the nails of success
Every artist is a cannibal - every poet is a thief
All kill their inspiration and sing about the grief

For someone like me coming home from two years away from rock and roll, Achtung Baby was the perfect reintroduction to what I had been missing. During Led Zeppelin's '75 tour, Robert Plant would frequently refer to the performed songs as "colors," that when combined together were like the colors reflected by a prism. In fact, the quote is, "Right, we're gonna start, what we intend to do tonight is to take you through some of the colors of um, if you regard music as being a prism, prism [emphasizing the word isn't "prison"], as in prism, a prism of colors, we've explored the prism and we've developed music along pattern of color. Some bright, some dark..." Achtung Baby has all the colors.

Johnny, take a dive with your sister in the rain
Let her talk about the things you can't explain
To touch is to heal - to hurt is to steal
If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel

The strings and piano on "So Cruel" will always give me goosebumps. The riff of "The End of the World" will always quicken my pulse. The farce and knowing wink of "Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World" will always make me smile. There's heartache, there's betrayal, there's irony, there's joy. There's belly dance music. :)

I dreamed that I saw Dali
With a supermarket trolley
He was trying to throw his arms around a girl
He took an open-top Beetle
Through the eye of a needle
He was trying to throw his arms around the world

Regarding Zeppelin, one of the greatest compliments I think anyone could give to their music is that it is "timeless." I hear Bon Jovi or Poison or Guns and Roses or Def Leppard, and all I can think of is "1980s." Zeppelin's music doesn't say '60s or '70s to me. U2's music is largely like that, too, and Achtung Baby is much more than "early '90s."


There is a silence that comes to our house when no-one can sleep
I guess it's the price of love - I know it's not cheap

According to Bono, "We had never allowed the band to use the word 'baby' in a lyric. It did not exist in the U2 vocabulary. It is on Achtung Baby twenty seven times [surely that omits "Acrobat," which seems to have it 50 times?], which is one of the reasons for the title." And, oh baby, what an album it is!

When I first met you, girl, you had fire in your soul
What happened? your face of melting snow
Now it looks like this

And now all that's left is for me to get back to work so I can earn a little cash and buy the Super Deluxe 20th Anniversary Edition of Achtung Baby.

A little death without mourning
No call and no warning
Baby, a dangerous idea that almost makes sense