U2 Achtung Album
Kahlil Algya
Achtung Baby (/ˈktʊŋ/)[1] is the seventh studio album by Irish rock band U2. It was produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and was released on 18 November 1991 on Island Records. After criticism of their 1988 release Rattle and Hum, U2 shifted their direction to incorporate influences from alternative rock, industrial music, and electronic dance music into their sound. Thematically, Achtung Baby is darker, more introspective, and at times more flippant than their previous work. The album and the subsequent multimedia-intensive Zoo TV Tour were central to the group's 1990s reinvention, by which they abandoned their earnest public image for a more lighthearted and self-deprecating one.
Seeking inspiration from German reunification, U2 began recording Achtung Baby at Berlin's Hansa Studios in October 1990. The sessions were fraught with conflict, as the band argued over their musical direction and the quality of their material. After tension and slow progress nearly prompted the group to disband, they made a breakthrough with the improvised writing of the song "One". Morale and productivity improved during subsequent recording sessions in Dublin, where the album was completed in 1991. To confound the public's expectations of the band and their music, U2 chose the record's facetious title and colourful multi-image sleeve.
Achtung Baby is one of U2's most successful records; it received favourable reviews and debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 Top Albums, while topping the charts in many other countries. Five songs were released as commercial singles, all of which were chart successes, including "One", "Mysterious Ways", and "The Fly". The album has sold 18 million copies worldwide and won a Grammy Award in 1993 for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
After U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree and the supporting Joshua Tree Tour brought them critical acclaim and commercial success,[2] their 1988 album and film Rattle and Hum precipitated a critical backlash.[3] Although the record sold 14 million copies and performed well on music charts,[4] critics were dismissive of it and the film, labelling the band's exploration of early American music as "pretentious"[5] and "misguided and bombastic".[6] U2's high exposure and their reputation for being overly serious led to accusations of grandiosity and self-righteousness.[3][5]
Despite their commercial popularity, the group were dissatisfied creatively; lead vocalist Bono believed they were musically unprepared for their success, while drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. said, "We were the biggest, but we weren't the best."[3] By the band's 1989 Lovetown Tour, they had become bored with playing their greatest hits.[7] U2 believe that audiences misunderstood the group's collaboration with blues musician B. B. King on Rattle and Hum and the Lovetown Tour, and they described it as "an excursion down a dead-end street".[8][9] Bono said that, in retrospect, listening to black music enabled the group to create a work such as Achtung Baby, while their experiences with folk music helped him to develop as a lyricist.[9] During a 30 December 1989 show near the end of the Lovetown Tour, Bono said on stage to the hometown crowd in Dublin that it was "the end of something for U2", and that "we have to go away and ... dream it all up again".[10] Following the tour, the group began what was at the time their longest break from public performances and album releases.[11]
Reacting to their own sense of musical stagnation and to their critics, U2 searched for new musical ground.[3][12] They had written "God Part II" from Rattle and Hum after realising they had excessively pursued nostalgia in their songwriting. The song had a more contemporary feel that Bono said was closer to Achtung Baby's direction.[13] Further indications of change were two recordings they made in 1990: the first was a cover version of "Night and Day" for the first Red Hot + Blue release, in which U2 used electronic dance beats and hip hop elements for the first time; the second indication of change was contributions made by Bono and guitarist the Edge to the original score of A Clockwork Orange's stage adaptation. Much of the material they wrote was experimental, and according to Bono, "prepar[ed] the ground for Achtung Baby". Ideas deemed inappropriate for the play were put aside for the band's use.[14] During this period, Bono and the Edge began increasingly writing songs together without Mullen or bassist Adam Clayton.[14]
In mid-1990, Bono reviewed material he had written in Australia on the Lovetown Tour, and the group recorded demos at STS Studios in Dublin.[15][16] The demos later evolved into the songs "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses", "Until the End of the World", "Even Better Than the Real Thing", and "Mysterious Ways".[16] After their time at STS Studios, Bono and the Edge were tasked with continuing to work on lyrics and melodies until the group reconvened.[17] Going into the album sessions, U2 wanted the record to completely deviate from their past work, but they were unsure how to accomplish it.[18] The emergence of the Madchester scene in the UK left them confused about how they would fit into any particular musical scene.[16]
The band believed that "domesticity [w]as the enemy of rock 'n' roll" and that to work on the album, they needed to remove themselves from their normal family-oriented routines. With a "New Europe" emerging at the end of the Cold War, they chose Berlin, in the centre of the reuniting continent, as a source of inspiration for a more European musical aesthetic.[3][19][26] They chose to record at Hansa Studios in West Berlin, near the recently opened Berlin Wall. Several acclaimed records were made at Hansa, including two from David Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy" with Eno, and Iggy Pop's Lust for Life.[16] U2 arrived on 3 October 1990 on the last flight into East Berlin on the eve of German reunification.[16] While looking for public celebrations, they mistakenly ended up joining an anti-unification protest by Communists.[16][27] Expecting to be inspired in Berlin, U2 instead found the city to be depressing and gloomy. The collapse of the Berlin Wall had resulted in a state of malaise in Germany. The band found their East Berlin hotel to be dismal and the winter inhospitable,[18] while the location of Hansa's Studio 2 in a former SS ballroom, the Meistersaal,[28] added to the "bad vibe".[18] Complicating matters, the studios had been neglected for years, forcing Eno and Lanois to import recording equipment.[17]
Morale worsened once the sessions commenced, as the band worked long days but could not agree on a musical direction.[17][29] The Edge had been listening to electronic dance music and to industrial bands like Einstrzende Neubauten, Nine Inch Nails, the Young Gods, and KMFDM. He and Bono advocated new musical directions along these lines. In contrast, Mullen was listening to classic rock acts such as Blind Faith, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix, and he was learning how to "play around the beat".[3][14] Like Clayton, he was more comfortable with a sound similar to U2's previous work and was resistant to the proposed innovations.[3][18] Further, the Edge's interest in dance club mixes and drum machines made Mullen feel that his contributions as a drummer were being diminished.[18] Lanois was expecting the "textural and emotional and cinematic U2" of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, and he did not understand the "throwaway, trashy kinds of things" on which Bono and the Edge were working.[3] Compounding the divisions between the two camps was a change in the band's songwriting relationship; Bono and the Edge were working more closely together, writing material without the rest of the group.[14][26][30]
Staffing schedules led to the band having a surplus of engineers at one point, and as a result, they split recording between Elsinore and the Edge's home studio to increase productivity. Engineer Robbie Adams said the approach raised morale and activity levels: "There was always something different to listen to, always something exciting happening." The band's desire to record everything they played in the studio posed a challenge to the production team. A conventional setup with their equipment would have restricted them to 24 tracks of audio; to capture multiple overdubs and takes for different arrangement possibilities, the engineers utilised a technique they called "fatting", which allowed them to achieve more than 48 tracks of audio by using an Otari MTR100 24-track recorder, a Fostex D20 timecode-capable DAT recorder, and an Adams Smith Zeta Three synchroniser. The focus on capturing the band's material and encouraging the best performances meant that little attention was paid to combating audio spill, aside from placing the Edge's and Clayton's amplifiers in separate rooms.[24] In issue 14 of U2's fan magazine Propaganda, Lanois said that he believed some of the in-progress songs would become worldwide hits, despite lyrics and vocal takes being unfinished.[48]
During the Dublin sessions, Eno was sent tapes of the previous two months' work, which he called a "total disaster". Joining U2 in the studio, he stripped away what he thought to be excessive overdubbing. The group believes his intervention saved the album.[49] Eno theorised that the band was too close to their music, explaining: "if you know a piece of music terribly well and the mix changes and the bass guitar goes very quiet, you still hear the bass. You're so accustomed to it being there that you compensate and remake it in your mind."[22] Eno also assisted them through a crisis point one month before the recording deadline; he recalled that "everything seemed like a mess", and he insisted the band take a two-week holiday. The break gave them a clearer perspective and added decisiveness.[50]
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