Achtung Baby

Achtung Baby is a sobering album - U2's troubled, troubling, and most fully-realized effort. While many parts of the world were awakening from the assorted nightmares of the 20th century, U2 seemed to be entering the dark night of the soul. Once, the band summoned the sound of the trumpet blast that brought down the walls of Jericho. On Achtung Baby, the trumpet is often muted, somberly playing taps over the ashes of lost love, lost hope. In many ways, this dazzling and prophetic album seems to foreshadow the disintegration of the old world order and the splintering of traditional alliances which have marked the start of the third millennium. Add to that its nervous ruminations on the many facets and demands of love (romantic, erotic, and filial) and you have an album that Bono rightly called a "heavy mother". This book considers Achtung Baby through the prisms of politics, spirituality, and music. In the words of the author, "While this book is written chiefly as a series of reflections, it is not entirely meditative. Arguments are advanced and there is some wrestling with the mysteries of life, death, love, betrayal, God, man, woman, sin, salvation, time, and eternity. I invite the reader to pause from time to time to simply think about those mysteries - and I offer no apology if any of that sounds pretentious. Without a fair amount of pretension, rock and roll would never have made it past 1955, and U2 would never have made it out of Dublin."