Taking Sides: ACHTUNG BABY by U2 VS. MONSTER by R.E.M

Stodgy old stadium rockers Styx going techno on "Mr Roboto" was 982734 times more radical than stodgy old stadium rockers U2 going techno on Achtung Baby 8 YEARS LATER.

Seriously, even to my middle school ears, Achtung Baby didn't seem radical at all. It just seemed that Jesus Jones/EMF was the 'next big thing' at the time (maybe even stuff like PWEI and NIN or Beastie Boys even) and U2 was adapting to it, preserving major elements of their sound (even ripping off "With or Without You"!) and setting it to a more modern beat. U2 wasn't rock in the sense of Bon Jovi and GnR either. They were more comparable to, say, the Cure who used dance beats all the time in the 80s. Or Peter Gabriel may be a better comparison.

But I don't get the 'credit' thing. IIRC U2 was totally feted by the press for this album, weren't they? And Radiohead got much more mixed reception - a couple Rolling Stone critics even said that they should have learned from U2 who remembered to keep the songs in when they got weird or somesuch. (Which seems a crucial point to me. U2 was playing fairly straight songs even if, like Def Leppard did on Hysteria, they were experimenting with the production and arrangements. Radiohead were experimenting with songform itself. If "Treefingers" doesn't cut it, like, what would they have had to do to be more radical than Achtung Baby?)

Sure Sundar, you and me and some of our middle and high school friends were listening to PWEI and NIN, but the other 99.9% of the school was listening to GnR and telling you that DM was pussy music because they weren't using real drums. U2 took Apollo 440 remixes to *those* people.
(xpost)

U2, *as huge as they were*, did an abrupt about-face from what they had been for the previous 12 years. Radiohead, OTOH, hopped on the electronica bandwagon 3+ years after it had been hailed as the "next big thing".
(xpost)

the hell?

U2 sold dance music to a lot of rock fans who weren't expecting it (or expecting to like it).

M'Lord, better save that for the eff-orribleness that is Reveal.

Oh well. I still love about a third of the songs off A-Baby - and about a half of Monster.
But Baby has over the years lost some of its luster for me, whereas Monster at the same time has come to appear *a bit* more solid record that it initially did.

It still kind of seems that most of what you've said of U2 could be applied to Radiohead. Surely the number of people who were already listening to Boards of Canada or Autechre or even DJ Shadow was much smaller, whatever the press coverage of that stuff. (Ditto for Paul Lansky, though he was the darling of the electronic art music world too!) Even Portishead and Bjork and Massive Attack weren't doing what Kid A did. I guess maybe NIN did throw an ambient instrumental on to Downward Spiral but still. Certainly the people who were listening to The Bends along with Oasis (and frankly, Soul Asylum and The Tragically Hip . . . and U2) weren't listening to all that stuff. And most people I know offline did go off Radiohead when they went electronic.

I'd say OK 'puter sounds the most U2-like (and the most uninteresting to me)of the R'head alb's I've heard.

Also, my experience in middle school may have been atypical but what it was was that I listened to classic and hard rock (and a bit of blues and jazz and Karnatak music) while 99% of the school listened to Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer and C&C Music Factory (and LL Cool J and Dee-Lite), with maybe some GnR, but for the most part people thought you were a freak if you wanted to play guitar or listen to stuff that didn't use drum machines. It seemed like that stuff was everywhere and 'modern' rock bands like U2 and EMF and Jesus Jones were just adapting to and drawing on it.

(xpost Was James a Britpop band?)

As if this mattered anymore. Eno's a whore.

What aboot the Top 10 debut for Broken? It's pretty rare for an EP to chart that high, especially one for with the seemingly limited audience yr giving the band.

I was 15 in 1991, and I recall all the hype of Achtung Baby prior to its release focused on the fact that they were making a dancable rock album along the lines of Jesus Jones (the name did appear repeatedly in all the stories), which seemed like a huge folly by the fall of '91 when Metallica, Guns 'n' Roses and Nirvana were the big bands, in contrast the the winter/spring popularity of JJ/EMF.

Gotta differ with you there. If there were any bands' sounds U2 were "gearing" towards on Achtung Baby, I wouldn't have cited James among them (more like Front 242 and, fuck, Berlin-era Bowie). Whether they succeeded or not is another matter.

Dare I suggest it here, but I think a lot of U2's departure had more to do with sartorial presentation. I mean, "One" and/or "Trying to Throw Your Arms Around My Pancreas" could've easily been on an earlier U2 record. The oft-cited "new direction" pretty much begins and ends with "Zoo Staion" and "the Fly".

I want a show of hands from people who go to sleep to this record.
(*Lowers Hand*)
No. And as for "Monster", it *IS* a snoozathon, but I doubt I could use it as an Audio Sedative. The Guitar work is awkward and jarring in spots.

I want a show of hands from people who go to sleep to this record.
(*Lowers Hand*)
No. And as for "Monster", it *IS* a snoozathon, but I doubt I could use it as an Audio Sedative. The Guitar work is awkward and jarring in spots.

M'Lord, better save that for the eff-orribleness that is Reveal.
After hearing "Monster" I didn't want to buy "Reveal"

Thats where the Eno connection makes sense.

I don't hear the Depeche Mode comparisons at all, only that they both owe something to glam.

I mean the Mirrorball Man, honestly.

Leftism came out in 95 - ie. about halfway between Zooropa and Pop. I don't think you can really hear its influence on the latter, but then by the time Pop came out there were other, more appropriate dance music reference points the band probably wanted to make.

The Depeche Mode similarity comes through stronger on their Songs of Faith & Devotion than on Violator, though I can imagine that "Personal Jesus" might have played some part.

Flood is a major reason that record sounds the way it does, after all he worked with Depeche Mode (Violator & Songs of Faith and Devotion) to NIN (Downward Spiral) to New Order (Movement) to Nick Cave (Your Funeral, My Trial). That guy is an expert at making things sound dirty and expensive at the same time.

I can't check to see if it was an official single but it did get a lot of airplay.

it was a promotional single w/ no video but it was maybe the 3rd or 4th biggest radio hit off the album.