By the time “Achtung Baby” came out in 1991, I had already turned my back on U2. While I loved “The Unforgettable Fire” and “The Joshua Tree,” “Rattle & Hum” had deeply disappointed me. And “Achtung Baby!” would turn my fondness for the band into antipathy. The hype surrounding the album was unbelievable. At the time, it was truly considered the most “avant-garde” thing you could sell in the mainstream. Listening to the album again 35 years later, you find neither anything particularly avant-garde in it (aside from a few studio gimmicks by Lanois and Eno), nor anything hateful. Since “The Unforgettable Fire,” U2 had been shifting more and more toward a very ‘American’ expansive sound, which was fully realized here for the first time. In short: this is mainstream at its broadest, featuring a few good tracks (“Mysterious Ways,” “The Fly,” ‘Acrobat’), many mediocre ones, and a few bad ones (“Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”—hey hey sha la la, hey hey, sha la la). Back then, U2 were the biggest rock band on the planet, and that fame certainly went to the band’s heads; above all, though, it makes it so difficult to properly categorize their music. Without all the media hype surrounding the band and the album, “Achtung Baby” (what a stupid album title that no English speaker can pronounce correctly) is just a rock album with the sound of its time, with some highs and lows but mostly “more of the same,” which has acquired a lot of patina over the years. The album wasn’t even “groundbreaking” for the band itself, whose hubris would spiral out of control after this album and culminate in gigantic tours.