Achtung Baby - Legacy

Legacy

"The album accomplished a feat artists love to undertake but rarely pull off: the public image reinvention and stylistic about-face that is so masterful it silences all the doubters. Even as the 21st century has seen U2 return to stadium-friendly rock postures, there are elements in the group's music (Bono's falsetto, the casual flirtation with danceable grooves, the quartet's continued ability to take itself less than seriously when necessary) that are still derived from those heady days in a Berlin studio. The biggest band in the world wouldn't hold that title today if it hadn't taken one hell of a chance at the exact right time with a record that proved more than strong enough to warrant that gamble."

Achtung Baby is certified 8× platinum in the US by the RIAA, and according to Nielsen Soundscan, the album has sold 5.5 million copies in the country, as of March 2009. The record has been certified 5× platinum in Australia, 4× platinum in the UK, and diamond in Canada, the highest certification award. Overall, 18 million copies have been sold worldwide. It is U2's second-highest-selling record after The Joshua Tree, which has sold 25 million copies. For the band, Achtung Baby was a watershed that ensured their creative future, and its success led to the group's continued musical experimentation during the 1990s. Zooropa, released in 1993, was a further departure for the band, incorporating additional dance music influences and electronic effects into their sound. In 1995, U2 and Brian Eno collaborated on the experimental/ambient album Original Soundtracks 1 under the pseudonym "Passengers". For Pop in 1997, the group's experiences with dance club culture and their usage of tape loops, programming, rhythm sequencing, and sampling resulted in their most dance-oriented album.

The record is highly regarded among the members of U2. Mullen said, "I thought it was a great record. I was very proud of it. Its success was by no means preordained. It was a real break from what we had done before and we didn't know if our fans would like it or not." Bono called the album a "pivot point" in the band's career, saying, "Making Achtung Baby is the reason we're still here now." Clayton concurred, saying, "If we hadn't done something we were excited about, that made us apprehensive and challenged everything we stood for, then there would really have been no reason to carry on... If it hadn't been a great record by our standards, the existence of the band would have been threatened." The group's reinvention occurred at the peak of the alternative rock movement, when the genre was achieving widespread mainstream popularity. Bill Flanagan pointed out that many of U2's 1980s contemporaries struggled commercially with albums released after the turn of the decade. He argued that U2, however, were able to take advantage of the alternative rock movement and ensure a successful future by "set themselves up as the first of the new groups rather than the last of the old". Toby Creswell echoed these sentiments in his 2006 music reference book 1001 Songs, writing that the album helped U2 avoid "becoming parodies of themselves and being swept aside by the grunge and techno revolutions". A 2010 retrospective by Spin said that "U2 became the emblematic band of the alternative-rock era with Achtung Baby."

Achtung Baby is acclaimed as one of the greatest albums in rock history, and many publications have placed it among their rankings of the best records, including Q, Entertainment Weekly, Hot Press, and Time. In 1997, The Guardian collated worldwide data from a range of renowned critics, artists, and radio DJs, who placed the record at number 71 in the list of the "100 Best Albums Ever". Rolling Stone ranked the record at number 63 on its 2012 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", calling it "a prescient mix of sleek rock and pulsing Euro grooves" and writing that "the emotional turmoil made U2 sound more human than ever". The record topped Spin's list of the 125 most influential albums from 1985 to 2010. The author said, "Unlike Radiohead with OK Computer and Kid A, U2 took their post-industrial, trad-rock disillusionment not as a symbol of overall cultural malaise, but as a challenge to buck up and transcend... Struggling to simultaneously embrace and blow up the world, they were never more inspirational."