I nearly posted a response here but I see my 2008 self already covered it (go younger me!). Anyway old man me wants to chime in - Achtung Baby is a goddamn masterpiece.
Achtung Baby holds a special place in my heart because I was stationed in Berlin when it came out. Everything from the album’s packaging, Zoo Station, the Zoo TV tour, and the marketing around Trabants seemed to be designed to resonate with me specifically during that period of my life. It didn’t hurt that you couldn’t go anywhere in Berlin for about two years without hearing something from this album blasting on the radio or in-store system.
My favorite U2 album is Pop but AB and TJT are close. I think I’d have to pick AB over The Joshua Tree.
That said, I have a flight and hotel booked in Toronto for June! I’m excited that I might to get a chance to hear Exit live.
Joshua Tree is a musical masterpiece. First three tracks on the album were all insanely popular (because they’re all very good), but honestly the entire thing just plays together so well. Red Hill Mining Town, One Tree Hill and Exit are three deeper cuts the blend seamlessly with the overall feel of the album and remain favorites of mine to this day.
Joshua Tree is probably my second favorite album of all time behind only Marillion’s Childhood’s End and slightly edging out Queensryche’s Empire in third. It’s not that they’re concept albums or anything (though Marillion’s is), it’s just the sheer number of amazing tracks on each of those three albums outweighs anything released from any other bands (IMHO of course).
U2’s tour this summer (where they will be playing Joshua Tree live) is coming to Cleveland. As much as I hate Cleveland, I think I am going to have to go. I already have tickets to see Roger Waters in May in Louisville too, so if I can grab U2 tickets, then somehow maybe add RUSH to the mix, I might just stop going to concerts afterwards, as nothing could top a summer like that. =)
Its not even close for me, The Joshua Tree. One Tree Hill, Bullet the Blue Sky, Red Hill Mining Town all great tracks. I use to start on track 4 because I was tired of the 1st three songs.
The Unforgettable Fire is still my favorite U2 album.
I haven’t taken out my copy of Marillion’s Childhood End in a decade, putting it with my work stuff, its going into the car tomorrow.
While musically I prefer Unforgettable Fire, I saw U2 on the Joshua Tree tour in 1987 after an epic road trip to Syracuse, New York on my 18th birthday. One of the most memorable nights of my life, it was like the first day of adulthood.
So I’ll be seeing em again in Dallas this year, even though I haven’t listened to them in years.
Time spent listening to U2 not listening to Achtung Baby is time wasted.
I mean, seriously. Love Is Blindness? Who’s Going to Ride Your Wild Horses? Acrobat? C’mon, Acro-freakin’-bat. Until the End of the World? Until the End of the World! I haven’t even mentioned Even Better than the Real Thing. And One? If the album had consisted of ten tracks that were all the same recording of One, it would still be the best thing U2 has ever done.
Whoa, there’s a name I haven’t thought about in a long time. I remember seeing Marillion in concert and thinking, “Hey, that Fish guy is just some old dude…”.
-Tom
“But you, you were acting like it was the end of the world.”
Also, I can’t foroget hearing the first single off the album, The Fly, for the first time. Man, that was a lightning bolt moment. I had heard so much U2 and just never really noticed them. I never hated them - I don’t know if it’s possible to hate U2 with their puppy dog earnestness, but everything they had done previously just bounced right off me. But the opening of The Fly was just a buzz saw into my brain, kind of the same way Smells Like Teen Spirit and Seven Nation Army were. I remember driving around hoping it would get played again so I could hear it - man, the days before the Internet were tough.
I’ll add my vote for Achtung Baby. Joshua Tree was fine, but AB really resonated with me better. It doesn’t hurt that the Zoo Station tour was just a mind-blowing extravaganza of light, sound and little Eastern European cars on robotic arms.
I had forgotten that Until the End of the World was on that album. Great song. I loved that movie too.
These posts are a good reminder to me that the songs on Achtung Baby were actually quite good. But One and Even Better than the Real Thing and Who’s Going to Ride Your Wild Horses were so overplayed on the radio that year in the U.S. that even though I liked the album when it came out, by the end of that year of involuntarily listening to those songs constantly on the radio, I was soooooo sick of them. That’s happened to me with other bands and albums, but Achtung Baby is the only album of U2’s that it’s happened with.
I like both albums when viewed with a cool head. But it’s hard for me not to react with visceral hatred towards the singles from Achtung Baby.
True. I l also loved that movie, and that song was perfect for it. If memory serves, there was also a haunting
[EDIT: Jane Siberry w/ kd lang] track on that soundtrack. I’m almost tempted to change my vote, but nah. Ultimately, they’re both fantastic albums, but you have to go with your gut.
By the time Achtung Baby was released I was tired of U2. Joshua Tree had pushed them to Superstardom and they were everywhere. Which I was happy for them because I think they deserved it but I had enough. I own all 8 records (3 were live) before Achtung but Rattle and Hum was the last U2 I bought. They seemed to get more poppy which wasn’t what I was in to.
They’re both great albums but I have a special fondness for the 1-2-3 punch of JT’s first three songs. Also, on top of that, there’s Red Hill Mining Town, which IMO is one of the band’s very best. And of course Bullet the Blue Sky.
I was in the gym once listening to the album and as Streets Have No Name started, with the delay effect on The Edge’s insistent 16th notes, I wondered if anything had sounded like quite that before. It has the character of a manifesto.
Funny you mention that - I find The Edge’s jangly, echo-y guitar playing on Joshua Tree irritating. It’s one of the main things I found so refreshing about Achtung Baby, that he seemed to be expanding his repertoire.
It’s nice that he moved on from that style, but the style itself was extremely striking IMO.
I remember listening to 102.7 WNEW FM here in NYC the weekend before the album was released in March of 1987 (they were playing a different song from the album every hour or something like that). I was glued to my boom box ready to hit RECORD at any second. By Saturday night I think I had most of the album recorded - out of sequence, of course - and I listened to it all day Sunday. Tuesday afternoon, after school, I ran to the record shop to pick up a copy and was blown away. At that point, at 15 years old, it was the best album I had EVER heard.
I stopped listening to it at the point I sort of “lost” U2 - think it was after Poop, I mean, Pop. Gave a listen to it recently and it’s just such a perfect album.
Not my favorite U2 album though - I think I love The Unforgettable Fire and War more, and Zooropa I think is very underrated. Fire had a very unique feel/mood with more unconventional, experimental songs (“Bad”, “4th Of July”), War had this aggression and energy, it was them at their post-punk peak.
But Joshua Tree is definitely their masterpiece. And before radio played it (and the other 2 songs that start the album) to death, “With Or Without You” was such an incredible track. The whole first “side” of that album is just perfection. The second half was great too, but didn’t hit as many highs.
Tried to get into their more recent stuff and I just can’t. I like a song here or there, but they just don’t have it in them anymore, like many bands that have been together that long (The Australian band The Church is one of the few exceptions).
Overall, it makes my top 30 favorite albums of all time (Achtung Baby did not make the list) but it’s probably somewhere in the middle and not at the top.
It was striking, and very distinct, and… vastly over-played at the end of the 80s. Much like heavy synthesizers, his old “U2 guitar sound” is (at least for me) too heavily linked to that decade, or at least the end of that decade. While lots of the songs on JT are spectacular, they seem to me to be… I guess “less timeless”?.. than some of their other stuff, mostly because of that guitar. I’m glad he matured and branched out a bit.
Was it vastly overplayed in 1987? I had never heard anything like it, including in previous U2 songs. I’m happy to be corrected on that point. I mean, “dun dun dun DUN” doesn’t sound quite as striking now as it did in 1808, but I don’t particularly blame that on Beethoven.
“Overplayed” is ultimately a judgement call, of course. Joshua Tree was the #1-selling album in the US for nine weeks running at the beginning of the summer and spent 35 weeks in the top-10, according to Billboard.
But a lot of it is my time and situation, I guess. That was the summer I graduated from High School, and “Where the Streets Have No Name” seemed to be on the radio ALL the time. Once I got to college a couple months later, it was worse - U2 seemed to be easily 93% of what the college stations played, with the other 7% being tunes from REM’s Document. I didn’t know that Guns and Roses or Michael Jackson had new albums out until I came home for Christmas Break.
I couldn’t agree more with a Tom Chick post. I loved The Joshua Tree but Achtung Baby is easily my favorite U2 album, and still one of my all time favorites today. It was one of those switches in their sound, in their sonic identity, that kept them fresh as musical organism for so much longer than most bands survive. It was also a changing in that decadal geography where much like the masses discovering the Seattle “grunge” sound (I know there are others on Qt3 who frame the time differently) but when I sat listening to (watching?) “The Fly”, “The End of the World”, etc. I knew the 80’s, for better or worse, were over.
Achtung Baby, for me, was one of those albums where every song was good; Even in the CD era, I would listen to it the whole way through. Every track was at least good enough to listen through and the great songs were amazing. They particularly spoke to the place where I found myself in my early 20’s, which wasn’t entirely great. I don’t whole-heartedly enjoy many of the songs today due to the associations I have with the time period; that doesn’t detraction from my appreciation of their worth.
This, btw, is a great thread; Kudos for its creation.