Once More Into The Zoo Station: U2′s Super Deluxe Achtung Baby

That Achtung Baby receives a grander 20th Anniversary tribute than The Joshua Tree did four years back is due entirely to vagaries of the record industry, both in the old millennium and the new. Back in 2007, deluxe single-album reissues had yet to explode into ludicrously lavish luxury items; now, LP-sized boxes housing scarves (as in Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here Immersion Box) and sunglasses (featured in the Uber Deluxe Achtung) are commonplace. The market may exist for these high-ticket items but Achtung Baby is also easier to expand than The Joshua Tree because it existed during the peak era of CD singles, when each single—and there were five from the album, nearly half of its tracks—had at least two B-sides, sometimes much more thanks to U2’s embrace of rave, Madchester, anything the could conceivably be tagged as dance in the early ‘90s, a shift that lead to so many remixes they swallow up two of the six CDs in the Super Deluxe Set. Such a heavy footprint naturally is hard to ignore within the context of this box and, digging through all the material on the Super Deluxe set, what’s striking is how Achtung Baby does lend itself well to such elasticity; compared to all of its 90s peers, the band is buttoned-up—there’s no swing in their rhythms, they march forward on a rigid, rigorous beat—leaving all the adventure in the texture, which does mean remixers can step in and re-work the material in engaging, if not necessarily startling, ways. Certainly, the sheer dense sound of Achtung Baby winds up as U2’s cleanest break from the po-faced Americana worship of Rattle & Hum, something that remains effective two decades later, but the band’s embrace of irony, much ballyhooed at the time, seems almost non-existent in 2011. Without Bono’s grinning personas of The Fly and MacPhisto eating up column inches during U2’s never-ending Zoo tours of ’92 and ’93, what’s left is the music, which, like all of U2’s albums, has absolutely no sense of irony and the band’s mythologizing the era via the David Guggenheim-directed making-of documentary From The Sky Down hammers home how even the band’s smallest moves are crafted with their signature combination of cheerfully high self-regard and naked sincerity. What’s different about U2 during the Achtung Baby era—nearly a half-decade encompassing its messier, sometimes more exciting, sequel Zooropa, now packaged as part of the big box—is that the group created its own world, cobbling together visual and aural elements borrowed from their peers and the past, embracing artifice as a way to speak to higher truths, favoring chilly Eurodiscos to American roadhouse dives. It was a world that spilled over outside of its 12-track origin so it winds up being an ideal album for a ridiculously large expansion: there are so many sounds and visuals it is possible, to borrow a term from Pink Floyd, to immerse yourself within Achtung Baby at this grand scale.