"If you give a pop star a shit pile of dough and he refuses to self-destruct, I think it is a bit wet," said a smoking, slicked-back, black-sunglasses-clad Bono in a 1993 interview on the UK music show "Naked City". "I think it's part of the deal. If they don't die on a cross by 33, I'd ask for your money back." Like many of the knowingly audacious quotes from the singer and his U2 mates during this period, it's a little tough to deduce the exact level of sincerity involved. And that was the whole idea. In the early 1990s, U2 were sending up the idea of a "rock'n'roll star." They were offering themselves as an ironic, postmodern band for similarly confused times. They were making fun of themselves and their own humorless, slate-faced 80s reputation. A year after Bono's casual quip about pop stars dying on a cross, Kurt Cobain killed himself. And in Nirvana's final video, for "Heart-Shaped Box", Cobain could be seen making wild eyes in front of one.
Achtung Baby and its accompanying Zoo TV tour lived within the slippage between perception and reality. "Sometimes you can get far closer to the truth of what you're trying to say by highlighting what it isn't as if it were true," said the Edge on "Naked City". "That's assuming we know the truth-- 'truth' is one of those words that's lost its meaning." In the 80s, U2 seemed endlessly in search of a definite truth, whether in peace or god or love or some ambiguous combination of the three. Famously, they didn't find it.
But the quest was thrilling-- at least until 1988's album and film Rattle and Hum, which found the group looking and sounding spectacularly self-serious while gawkily paying tribute to some of their American heroes like Elvis Presley and B.B. King. The resulting critical backlash caused these open-hearted Irishmen to reflect, and they weren't crazy about what they saw in the mirror. "We looked like a big, overblown rock band running amok," says Bono in an excellent new documentary called From the Sky Down that chronicles the band's pivotal turn-of-the-decade moment. And while that might seem like an aptly derisive opinion of today's incarnation of U2, it's important to remember that these guys originally came out of the cacophony of rule-breaking post-punk, a realm where bloated arena rock was the enemy. So they went away and tried to come up with a new way to seek some truth.