i suppose i don't know why some U2 fans pit one period against another. i am an Achtung Worshipper myself, i describe it as my "favorite thing ever" -- and by "thing" i include other CDs, premium denim, cars, boats, Diesel shoes, man bags, hair product, sofas, ice cream, tickets to Mamma Mia, etc. -- and it is the only album that i can't live without. but all the albums do different things to me and seem to have had an undue influence on my life as it has progressed since i discovered them in the late 80s/early 90s and became something of a superfan in the mid-1990s.
the Achtung/Zooropa period was, for me, almost a fantasy of a cooler, better life ... slick Euro-trash-ness, sort of, think vinyl, rain-slicked streets, Berlin, new world after the end of the Cold War, angsty songs about sex and wrestling with inner demons ... it was almost like a soap opera and just perfect for my early teenaged life when things were just getting complicated.
Pop came out my freshman year in college, right when i was also getting into techno music, and it was a study in irony, in not saying what you mean, in confronting through avoidance, the absent presence/present absence, etc., all the lit theory stuff i was studying in college i found applicable in the Pop-era, the whole using the master's tools (artifice) to take down the master's house (consumerism) is applicable to both PopMart as well as, say, early 20th century African-American literature.
ATYCLB was when i moved to europe, it was a wandering, pondering, "who am i and what really matters to me" album that was perfect for a rather isolated period in time, a time when i was coming to terms with being gay, and being totally on my own and stripped of all that i had grown up with and left with just myself, i was as bare as the songs, etc.
HTDAAB is all adrenaline, it's thrilling, it's helped me get back into shape because it's the best album to run to, and thematically
it's about a sort of reconciliation with finding out who you are and what matters and strengthening your core, your essence, of who you are and what you believe just as i'm figuring out who i am -- after 3 or so years in the "real world" -- and what i want and what matters and what is crap (a whole lot of the "real world" is crap) and what is important, and let's celebrate that.
and after all that, only then can you move forward.
at any U2 concert, i let each song -- whether from HutDab or Boy -- take me back to these places in my life, and it's usually a revelatory experience, new meaning opens up right in front of me, whether it was the startling revelation that "streets" pretty much coached me out of the nice-but-homogenous suburbs or that "kite" is *my* song or that "mysterious ways" is a rather apt summation of the futility of putting sexuality in a box, the world is always a little different after a U2 show from any era.
i suppose, if i might be so bold, is to question the music less, be a little less critical, and let it wash over you and meet the music where it is right now and where the band are right now. sort of be a little zen, a little buddhist ("this is what is now") about it.
at least that's my attitude.
