125 best albums of the last 25 years..
1 U2, Achtung Baby
1991 With the middling reaction to last year's better-than-you'll-admit No Line on the Horizon, U2's chest-heaving big-box spectacle seems to be fatiguing more of pop's body politic than it's inspiring. Weirdly, this was exactly the case more than 20 years ago. After the critical and commercial sweep of Joshua Tree, the Irish conglomerate followed its bombastic muse with the ponderous 1988 docu-fiasco Rattle and Hum, which featured a Bono mot that would haunt many of us for years to come: "Okay, Edge, play the blues!" Flailing and directionless, the band retreated and reconsidered whether it was time to fold up their flag for good.Instead, three years later they emerged with the album -- Achtung Baby, cheekily titled as a nod to German reunification -- that would energize their career and genetically engineer rock music into the hybridized mutant we know today. Initially recorded at Hansa Studios, a former SS ballroom near the reopened Berlin Wall (and later completed back home in Dublin), Achtung was an effort, stoked primarily by Bono and the Edge, to "deconstruct" the band and rewire it with jolts of beat-generated clutter and collage, nicked from industrial music, hip-hop, dance remixes, and the Madchester scene. That method almost collapsed the band -- bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., as well as coproducer Daniel Lanois, were left bewildered and cranky.
But the frisson found expression in U2's most immediately dynamic music since 1982's War, and its most emotionally frank songs to date, capturing that particular early-'90s rub of boundless possibility and worn-down despair. Bono's lyrical flights had a battered grit, like a defrocked cleric stirred to regain his flock without the usual trick bag of bullshit. "One" became an indelible anthem because it admitted "we're not the same" but urged that we've gotta "carry each other" nonetheless. The squalling swagger of "The Fly" resonated due to the rock star at its center confessing he's a liar and a thief. And for "Mysterious Ways," the Edge somehow concocted a jubilantly snarling riff that transformed Bono's gospel come-on so it didn't feel gross the morning after.
Unlike Radiohead with OK Computer and Kid A, U2 took their post-industrial, trad-rock disillusionment not as a symbol of overall cultural malaise, but as a challenge to buck up and transcend. Their confessions of frailty and blindness amid murky atmospherics (no doubt egged on by coproducer Brian Eno) had an air of cleansing rather than whining. That the album trails off introspectively is brave in its own quiet way.
Though they continued to bumble through periods of bloat and self-delusion and irrelevance, U2 became the emblematic band of the alternative-rock era with Achtung Baby. Struggling to simultaneously embrace and blow up the world, they were never more inspirational. -- Charles Aaron
25 moments that rocked our world
#1
A DEATH IN SEATTLE
APRIL 5, 1994
Not since the death of John Lennon has a musician's passing had such a profound effect on pop culture. In too few short years, the shy kid from dead-end logging town Aberdeen, WA, kick-started a musical revolution, propelling his punk ethos to the top of the charts and giving a generation of disillusioned youths their unofficial spokesperson: He was an anti-rock star rock star who suffered the same pains and torments they did.
Then, in a greenhouse above the garage of his Bellevue, WA, home, Cobain ended his own life -- a violent finale to all he created, which left fans to wonder what could have been. As with other momentous pop events, people remember when and where they first got news of Cobain's death at age 27. It was the gunshot heard around the world -- and it hasn't stop reverberating yet.
