U2 just ended their extremely successful residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Those shows were based around the band’s landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby, an album that’s impossible to imagine without the heartbreak anthem “So Cruel.”
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What is the song about? What event within the band inspired Bono to write it? And how did U2 use the album that contained “So Cruel” to completely revamp their image? Let’s take a look at everything you might want to know about this haunting track.
Cutting The Joshua Tree
U2 entered the ‘90s feeling their image had calcified into a far-too narrow representation of who they really were as people and artists. Oddly enough, the catalyst for this unfortunate turn of events was their greatest success to that point: the 1987 album The Joshua Tree. Although the record raised them to new heights of popularity, acclaim, and overall rock glory, it also painted them, at least to certain critics, as holier-than-thou and not very much fun.
In an interview with Apple Music previewed by Billboard, U2 guitarist The Edge explained their image at the time diverged from who they were as men. “We started to become caricatures on that basis, like the Joshua Tree period had way overexaggerated this sense of earnestness and responsibility,” he said. “We just had to own up and say, ‘Actually … we’re very silly, we’re not those characters.’”
To do that, they took an entirely different approach with Achtung Baby. They leaned heavily on the experimental tendencies of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who purposely tried to push the band from their comfort zone in terms of how they approached their material. In addition, lead singer Bono wrote lyrics that were messy, raw, funny, and somehow more human than what he had previously managed.
“We were also not taking ourselves nearly as seriously as people thought we were, and we were able to laugh at ourselves,” Edge explained. “Achtung Baby was that antidote for us as much as for music fans to that overly sanctimonious, pious and earnest sort of image that had grown up around us. We needed to flesh out the truth about who we were and give ourselves the freedom then to be in both.”
“Cruel” Intentions
Even though many of the tracks on Achtung Baby take a lighthearted approach, that doesn’t mean the band had forgotten how to be serious. It’s just when they were serious, the songs tended to stay away from the uplift on which they had leaned in the past. Case in point: the brooding, haunted “So Cruel.”
Perhaps this change in attitude was inspired by real-life events surrounding the band. Around the time they were making Achtung Baby, the Edge’s marriage to his first wife Aislinn was crumbling. Because they band had grown up together, and Edge and Aislinn had been together during the band’s earliest days, the loss was felt by all of U2. Bono channeled those feelings into the writing of “So Cruel.”
The Meaning of “So Cruel”
“So Cruel” fearlessly depicts the devastating feelings lingering at the end of a relationship. The lyrics to the song aren’t pretty, but they’re certainly honest. For all of Bono’s eloquent pontificating, everything boils down to the direct hit of the refrain: Sweetheart, you’re so cruel.
The narrator doesn’t even try to hide his bitterness at the collapse of the romance. I’m only hanging on / To watch you go down, my love, Bono wryly sings. He can’t understand her behavior: The men who love you, you hate the most. But he also admits he’s still hooked: And you need her like a drug. Bono’s imagery is fierce throughout, culminating in this dire couplet: Between the horses of love and lust / We are trampled underfoot.
On top of these cutting lyrics, the song scores with its off-kilter music, a kind of slow-motion, hallucinatory backdrop against which all these nightmarish scenes play out. It’s hard to imagine the earlier version of U2 even considering a song like “So Cruel” before Achtung Baby. Thankfully, they made that course correction, opening the doors to dark wonders like this one.
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