U2’s ‘Achtung Baby’ Sounded Like the Future

Ibought Achtung Baby on vinyl a few weeks ago. I also owned the cassette and CD versions at some point. I can’t say that I listen to a lot of U2 anymore, but there was a while in the late 1980s and early 1990s when they were in my top three, and I couldn’t get enough.

I remember, on the first listen, thinking that it sounded familiar, yet like nothing else was going on at the time. And certainly like nothing else that they’d ever done up until that point. The world was changing fast. 80s rock was about to be left behind, and if its purveyors weren’t ready to do something new as well, they’d disappear.

Simple Minds and INXS, if you were wondering.

It was the edge of history, they told us at the time. The Berlin Wall had come down, and the Cold War that it symbolized was breathing its last gasps. Fascism had been (mostly) defeated long ago, and now Communism was down for the count, and Capitalist Liberal Democracy was the last man standing. Things — and history — had been decided.

Well, not so fast, Francis Fukuyama.

Bono, the Edge, and the two without nicknames, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton, went to Berlin to record an album and…

It mirrored the state of the band at the time, too. As a result of the 25 million selling The Joshua Tree in 1987, they were probably the biggest band in the world, but they knew they had to change direction. The reaction to Rattle and Hum that followed it up in 1988 wasn’t overwhelmingly great, and they wanted to shed some of the overwrought earnestness, seriousness, and bleakness of their first six albums of their first decade.