1989 by Clover Joshua;

Author:Clover, Joshua;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2009-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

BRIDGE

Just a Stop Down the Line

Grunge’s inward turn is replicated beyond the confines of the genre, most evidently in the adjacent but more capacious arena of “modern rock” (into which grunge and “alternative rock” would shortly be folded). When grunge arrived, U2 had nearly a decade of hypertrophied success on the books; it remains striking that their finest album (by a considerable measure) was released in 1991, openly influenced by both grunge and electronic dance music. Both of these emergent genres left sonic traces and donated some elements of their structures of feeling, but the former more decisively infected the album’s emotional tenor. From the title on, Achtung Baby evinces a degree of irony distinct from the band’s earnest tradition; among other things, the disc announced U2’s period of autocritique, with its accompanying send-ups of rock stardom (itself redolent of the KLF’s contemporaneous delights, albeit without the crooked grins and explicit capitalist critique).1 Overfuzzed guitars and distorted vocals orchestrated much the same self-disgust that grunge had codified; Bono seemed, for the first time, at odds with himself more than with the world. Largely absent were the band’s familiar calls to spiritual, social, and political engagement and confrontation.2 A half-dozen singles, each one ambivalently erotic/romantic and variously haunted by self-doubt, dominated the Modern Rock charts in late 1991 and on into 1992.3

The album was not without social resonance. Achtung Baby’s most suggestive and finally most renowned song is “One,” in no small part because of the multiple video clips released to promote it. While the title offers a flatfooted monosyllabic return to the theme of unity, the more nimble videos in many regards confirm “One” as a song of queer pathos, insisting plaintively on gay love as equal but not identical to other loves. Much of the proceeds from singles sales went to AIDS-related charities. One video takes images from gay artist/activist David Wojnarowicz, while another features the band in drag as Bono sings to his father.

The latter video (directed by Anton Corbijn) is set in Berlin and cut with shots of the Wall, Brandenburg Gate, and the band driving Trabants through the streets of Berlin, where the song, indeed much of the album, was recorded—band and crew having arrived on October 3, 1990, the day of reunification. The glam drag in turn summons the Berlin of Bowie and Cabaret; it also follows by a year the Nirvana video for “In Bloom,” in which that band appears in dresses.4 Meanwhile, the album’s opening track, “Zoo Station,” is named for Berlin’s busy subway and train station (as is Scorpions’ 1980 song “The Zoo”). Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten had been West Berlin’s central hub while the Wall stood, and the only point at which one could take a train from West to East (and back by midnight if one had only a day pass): a transfer station.

This offers a broad figure for Achtung Baby, which served as a transfer wherein the energies of recently emergent genres could move into a more generalized pop sphere.

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