U2's album Achtung Baby was reissued for its 20th anniversary just a little over a month ago in a variety of editions, including a ginormous Uber Deluxe set (with a price to match the heft - Amazon originally listed this at $659.04). While I haven't settled on which reissue to get, the original album embodies everything I think music - and even pop culture - should be. Before I explain, it helps to have a (not-so-brief) primer on Achtung Baby and its concepts.
I remember when I first heard the album. I was still in high school, was just beginning to explore music, and still had a cassette Walkman. I bought the tape while I was out with my parents one day and on the ride home, they popped it into the car's stereo. Within a few seconds, the opening track "Zoo Station" starts with a single repeating guitar riff sounding as if it's trying to break through some barrier. After a few bars, industrial drums kick in, an alarm is added low in the mix, followed by a distorted voice:
I'm ready
I'm ready for the laughing gas
I'm ready
I'm ready for what's next
I'm ready to duck, ready to dive, ready to say I'm glad to be alive
This was clearly not the U2 that built the albums with themes of yearning and exploring America as a concept. The music was immediately engaging, unlike previous material that required repeated listens to absorb the material. The next song, "Even Better Than The Real Thing," opens with an equally grabbing circular guitar, maraca shaking, and contains lyrics that are an ode to embracing artificiality. This is music with a danceable groove, a trait rarely seen on rock albums.
Even Achtung Baby's cover indicates a sense of being part of the nightlife scene. And the title itself is playful, coming from Mel Brook's The Producers. The inviting rhythms, effects laden guitars, and too-cool-for-you vocals combine with the album art to create a slick and glossy package. But that's a front: U2 is presenting a playful image and immediately accessible music to hook its audience so the band can reveal the true motivations of the album.
Achtung Baby's brillance is that it weaves stylish songs with a darker personal journey throughout, forming a narrative with a definite beginning, middle, and end. The idea that fuels Acthung is we suffer repercussions when we do harm to people around us. The most well known song on the album, "One" immediately follows the rush of "Zoo Station" and "Even Better..." It's a muted ballad that details a plea to reconcile a greatly damaged relationship. The glossy sounds that start the album are not reprieves from the personal wreckage: they serve to give us a sense of the main character's actions that cause his later torment. "Zoo Station" is announcing an intention to taste a side of life that's outside of the norm. "Even Better..." takes place in the middle of a party where seemingly anything goes. "One" shows the consequences of these actions. Closing out the first half of the album is "So Cruel," which starts with an admission that "we crossed the line" but asks "who pushed who over?" Making matters worse, "it doesn't even matter to you." The second half kicks off with "The Fly", which is as close to hard rock as U2 is likely to approach. But it's not your typical guitar shredding for the sake of guitar shredding. It's been described as "a phone call from hell" by U2's singer. "Mysterious Ways" is next, featuring chunky guitars, congas, and a music video with an Arabic feel that prominently features belly dancing (a live dancer would become a staple of the song's performance on tour). But despite the imagery of the video and bounce in the song, it's not a regression of the character's behavior. It's actually a faithful reassurance that things will work out because of the Holy Spirit. (This is actually a U2 hallmark: disguising spiritual overtones in songs that will only be picked up on if you know what to look for.)
The album closes with a trio of songs that serve as a microcosm of the album's ambitions. "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" is filled with pop sensibilities. The chorus consists of a single line with a simple sentiment: "Baby, baby, baby, light my way." The bridge declares "your love was like a light bulb hanging over my bed." But the song's title reveals a duality: ultraviolet light is invisible. Despite the chorus and bridge, the lyrics clearly reveal that something uneasy lies under the surface:
There is a silence that comes to a house
Where no one can sleep
I guess it's the price of love
I know it's not cheap
The penultimate song "Acrobat" uses a 6/8 time signature, which my guitar teacher told me provides a more relaxed rhythm compared to the 4/4 time that most songs are written in. But in yet another seeming contradiction, the guitar and drums are downright menacing with lyrics that has the main character confronting his own hypocrisy. The album closes with "Love Is Blindness." We find our narrator beaten and battered by the events of the album. He begs for relief and just wants to crawl back into the safety he finds in darkness:
Love is blindness
I don't want to see
Won't you wrap the night around me?
Nothing that I've said here is news for someone familiar with the material or pop culture history. What's crucial is that U2 has made something so immediately accessible that the audience almost has no choice to become hooked. And once that hook has been set, the personal journey of Achtung Baby becomes apparent. The band intentionally used a veneer of style to reveal substance. If the 12 tracks all focused on the darker subject matter, listeners could very easily put it off as too slow or overwhelmingly bleak.
This accessibility is the key to Achtung Baby's success, and the best of our pop culture uses a similar blueprint. Weirdness just to be weird is off-putting. We can find this in Radiohead's music. OK Computer, from 1997, has some strange textures and depicts a dystopian society but it still can grab immediate attention with songs like "Karma Police." It's considered one of the best albums of its time, and possibly ever. But since then, the band's output has become indecipherable. The result: critics love the band but sales have dropped off.
Mainstream entertainment can raise big questions. Are people inherently good? How far can someone be pushed before they mentally break? How do they react to these trials? These are questions about the human condition. Christopher Nolan leveraged the backdrop of Batman vs the Joker to explore these concepts in The Dark Knight. People showed in droves because of Batman and Heath Ledger's Joker performance. People were wowed because of the depth of the storytelling. It's couching the real message in something that's immediately engaging.
This can also expand the audience's palette. An album like Achtung Baby, filled with its club inspirations, primes traditional rock listener's ears for this type of music. Listeners may not have even realized they liked music from the genres Achtung invokes, simply because they were not exposed to it. This effect is seen in other forms of pop culture: The Matrix franchise is best known an action movie trilogy, but it contains many allusions to philosophy and mythology. The TV show Lost similarly started off as a deserted island story, but early in its run revealed its incorporation of literary and philosophical themes. Both The Matrix and Lost inspired their massive audiences to dig into all of the references and explore subjects they may not have otherwise.
This is where pop culture gets short-changed. There is a value to appealing to the mainstream. It's not literature or art-house film or progressive rock, but it doesn't have to be. As long as the material is accessible enough to capture an audience, pop culture is in a unique position to entice people into asking questions and exploring concepts. Achtung Baby, The Dark Knight, The Matrix, and Lost are just a handful of many examples of this. We shouldn't knock pop culture for being cheap, disposable, or unintellectual. It's not just "entertainment."
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