The Alternative Number Ones: U2’s “Mysterious Ways”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

"The Fly" was the provocation, the break from that which came before. U2 were in the process of reinventing themselves, and they wanted the world to know that they were reinventing themselves. As they prepared to unleash their 1991 masterpiece Achtung Baby on the world, they kicked things off with the song that sounded the least like U2, and that was "The Fly." It's a great song that also worked as a signal that the U2 of The Joshua Tree and Rattle And Hum were gone. This new U2 were into new things: Rumbling grooves, rave-rock dynamics, weird guitar noises, muttery monotones, disco-diva falsettos, irony.

"The Fly" wasn't exactly engineered to become a hit, but it became one anyway -- at least in much of the world. "The Fly" was a #1 hit in the UK, Australia, Ireland, and a bunch of other places. In the US, "The Fly" topped Modern Rock chart, but it only barely dented the Hot 100. Island Records, U2's label, consciously decided not to push the song at top-40 radio, and top-40 radio seemed entirely OK with this. Here, "The Fly" existed mostly to convey the idea that U2 were on some different shit. With their next single, U2 showed exactly what they could do with that different shit. "Mysterious Ways" was a full-on smash, a song that could work in almost any context. From where I'm sitting, it's also the best song that U2 ever made.

I fucking love "Mysterious Ways." Some of that is probably circumstantial. U2 released Achtung Baby shortly after I turned 12. "Mysterious Ways" was all over alternative radio in the days when I first got into alternative music, and it's the first U2 song that fully hypnotized me. I didn't really understand the track -- I kind of still don't -- but I thought it sounded just unbelievably cool. It probably had a formative influence on what I thought "cool" sounded like. My little brother and I used to drag our parents into the living room and force them to watch us dancing to "Mysterious Ways." If TikTok existed back then, we probably would've made them post our routines, and I would now be trying to scrub all traces of that from the internet. Thank fucking god I grew up when I did.

So "Mysterious Ways" hit me at an important personal time. I don't believe in objective music criticism. Music is the most personal, intimate form of art that there is. Songs can't be objectively good or objectively bad. If a song sounds good to you, then it's a good song. My relationship with "Mysterious Ways" is a personal and specific one, but it's also bigger than that. Decades after that initial buzz faded, I still love "Mysterious Ways." If there was such a thing as an objectively good song, "Mysterious Ways" would qualify.

It took a while for U2 to put "Mysterious Ways" together. While U2 worked on their version of "Night And Day" for the 1990 Cole Porter tribute comp Red Hot + Blue, three quarters of the band spent some time together, jamming in the studio. (That "Night And Day" cover made it to #2 on the Modern Rock chart, but it's not what I'd call a good song, objectively or otherwise. It's a 3.) Bono, the Edge, and Adam Clayton started out improvising a groove over a drum-machine track. Originally, it was going to be called "Sick Puppy," and it's fun to imagine a U2 song with that title. That version of "Mysterious Ways" has never been released, but you can hear a bit of it in From The Sky Down, the Achtung Baby documentary that came out on the album's 20th anniversary.

The main thing that U2 liked from that "Sick Puppy" demo was Adam Clayton's bassline, and that's ultimately the only thing that they kept. The band kept toying with the track when they headed out to Berlin for the early Achtung Baby sessions, and they couldn't crack it. At one point, Bono and producer Daniel Lanois got into such a heated argument over the in-progress song that engineer Joe O'Herlihy thought that they were about to start physically fighting. This makes me wonder: When was the last time Bono was in a fight? Do you think he could fight? I'm leaning toward no. I don't know enough about Daniel Lanois to guess whether he could handle himself, but if you threw Bono into the ring with an average man of his age and build, I'm thinking he gets rinsed. Just a feeling. No offense. I'm sure Bono is in great shape. He just doesn't strike me as an ass-beater.

In any case, there was no fight, and the work on "Mysterious Ways" eventually led U2 to come up with another song that'll appear in this column pretty soon. That turned out to be the creative breakthrough that they needed, and the rest of "Mysterious Ways" truly came into focus when the band was back in Dublin, getting through their second round of Achtung Baby sessions. As with a surprising number of U2 songs, "Mysterious Ways" got the kick that it needed when the Edge got a new toy -- in this case, a Korg A3 digital effects unit.

I love how much the Edge cares about the sounds that he can conjure from a guitar. When he finds a new sound, or when the helps invent one, the rest of the song might follow. In this case, the new doohickey helped Edge come up with a funky, grainy squelch-stab that paired beautifully with the bassline that the band already had in the bank. Through the demo process, U2 used drum machines on "Mysterious Ways." Toward the end of their sessions, though, Larry Mullen Jr. added the loose, funky drum track. If anything, "Mysterious Ways" sounded like it started with the drums -- this "Sympathy For The Devil"-esque percussive groove-ripple that seems to attack the track from every direction. You can kind of tell that Mullen is doing his own version of a drum-machine groove, but you can also hear the beat as his argument that his bandmates should never, ever replace him with a drum machine.

"Mysterious Ways" came out of a time when younger rock bands were falling in love with rave sonics, figuring out how to mirror them in relatively organic ways. Some of the best songs from that moment -- the Stone Roses' "Fools Gold," Primal Scream's "Movin' On Up" -- look forward and backward at the same time. They're bacchanalian dance-party tracks that draw lines from the acid-house zeitgeist back to funk and psychedelia. "Mysterious Ways" sounds like U2's version of that same idea, and they come off just as hungry and inventive as their younger peers.

The members of U2 are intense Christians from Dublin. Before Achtung Baby, they'd never really shown a lot of compelling evidence that they could achieve something genuinely funky. Theoretically, they never should've even attempted it, and it should be howlingly embarrassing to hear them try. But "Mysterious Ways" has that magic to it. It's got all these pulsating cross-rhythm layers, these sounds that undulate and groove together with muscle and grace. It sounds like garage rock and disco and early-'90s house all at once. How did they do that? Bono once described the track as a combination of "Sly And The Family Stone and Madchester baggy." I really don't think rock bands should compare themselves to Sly And The Family Stone, but I will say that Bono popped up onstage at a 2016 Chic show and sang "Mysterious Ways" with them, and it didn't sound like too much of a stretch. After all, the guitar solo is pretty much just Edge doing his best Nile Rodgers.

It all just works together. Edge's guitar sounds like a ferocious garage riff that's been chopped up into shards, rearranged so that it only comes through in clicks and Morse-code beeps -- berr-mm-berm. Larry Mullen sounds like at least 10 different drummers and percussionists at once, and I would love to know how many drum tracks we're actually hearing on the final version. The bassline struts hard, but it also slides onto the track so nonchalantly that you might not even register its presence. As the track develops, little keyboard hums and drones quietly flesh things out. And then there's Bono just turning into a ham sandwich before our eyes. It's awesome.

Bono goes in on "Mysterious Ways." On the chorus, when Bono and Edge are yelling together -- "It's all right, it's all right, allll right!" -- it's about the closest that U2 ever came to soccer-hooligan chanting. On the verses, Bono gets soft and vulnerable. He's said that "Mysterious Ways" is a song about a man without romance in his life, one who's perplexed by his own inability to understand women. Bono spends the song addressing that guy, who he's named Johnny, and basically telling him to lighten up and surrender the sense of control that he clings to so tightly.

There's more to it than that, of course. Bono has said that "Mysterious Ways" is partly about his own idealization of women, and St. Francis Of Assisi might also have something to do with it. Religion definitely comes into play. The lyrics work as a riff on the old truism about God working in mysterious ways, so there's something provocative about the she there -- God as a woman, the divine feminine, whatever. (Don't get Bono started on that stuff.) Like a lot of U2 songs, "Mysterious Ways" exists somewhere at the intersection of sex and religion. Bono purrs that if you wanna kiss the sky, you gotta learn how to kneel. That could be about prayer or giving head. Either way, you're submitting yourself to another entity, trying to please someone who is not you. Maybe that line is about both of them at the same time -- just all-purpose supplication. U2 were still seeking transcendence, but they were taking a different route this time.

I don't think of U2 as a particularly sexy band, but "Mysterious Ways" is a sexy song. It's built on a kind of playful undulation, and it really rides its groove. Bono runs though his full arsenal tricks -- bellows, croons, falsetto whimpers. When Bono tells you to get on your knees, boy, he sounds less pious, more flirty. It's one of those songs that seems tapped into some secret information -- one that knows the stuff that we're not supposed to know. It's perfectly tuned into where the pop zeitgeist was in 1991, but it's maintained a weirdly timeless grace. On my cassette copy of Achtung Baby, "The Fly" and "Mysterious Ways" were back-to-back at the beginning of side two, and I used to just rewind and play those two songs over and over. When I finally saw U2 at Chicago's Soldier Field in 2011, they opened their set by playing those two songs in that sequence, and I felt like I was levitating.

Achtung Baby came out in November 1991, just as "Mysterious Ways" showed up on the radio. Within two weeks, the single vaulted to #1 on the Modern Rock chart, cutting short the reign of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." "Mysterious Ways" held that #1 spot for nine weeks, breaking a record previously held by two different R.E.M. singles. "Teen Spirit" was the generational zeitgeist anthem, but at least on that one chart, "Mysterious Ways" fully overwhelmed it. (For most of that nine-week reign, "Teen Spirit" was stuck at #2.) "Mysterious Ways" was also a big pop hit around the world, though I'm a little surprised to see that it didn't do as well as "The Fly" in a lot of countries. In the US, "Mysterious Ways" peaked at #9 on the Hot 100 in January 1992 -- one of only six top-10 hits in U2's entire career.

For the "Mysterious Ways" video, U2 went to Morocco and filmed with Stéphane Sednaoui, the same French photographer who'd directed the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away" clip. You can tell where it's shot, but only barely, since the clip is mostly just funhouse-mirror distortion effects. You could do that back then, as long as you made the band look cool. In the video, U2 look really cool.

The "Mysterious Ways" video also has lots of shots of a bellydancer, but she doesn't come from Morocco. Instead, it's Morleigh Steinberg, a Los Angeles native who'd already been in U2's "With Or Without You" video. Back then Steinberg did a lot of choreography for tours and music videos. When U2 launched their Zoo TV tour in February 1992, they brought in Steinberg as a choreographer. The tour was conceived as an overwhelming multimedia blitz, and bellydancing was part of that. Steinberg wasn't the first bellydancer on the tour, but she took on that job at some of the shows. Around the time the tour wrapped up, the Edge, who'd separated from his first wife in 1990, started dating Steinberg. Edge and Steinberg got married in 2002, and they're still together today.

Actung Baby came out while "Mysterious Ways" was sitting atop the Modern Rock chart, and the album debuted at #1, selling about 300,000 copies in its first week. By the time "Mysterious Way" fell out of the #1 spot, the album was already double platinum. Actung Baby kept moving copies when the Zoo TV tour started up, and that tour kept going for a long time -- nearly two years, filling stadiums all over the world. It was basically the early-'90s equivalent of the Eras Tour. I didn't get to see it, but my aunt had a corporate job for the St. Louis Cardinals, and it was a huge deal when the Zoo TV tour came to Busch Stadium. Public Enemy opened that date, and apparently people in the Cardinals organization were terrified that PE were going to incite a riot -- during the opening set, at a U2 show. Some people just love to worry.

A few critics were skeptical of the new tricks that U2 pulled on Achtung Baby, but most were fully on board. On the 1992 Pazz & Jop poll, Achtung Baby came in at #4 -- right behind R.E.M.'s Out Of Time, right ahead of PM Dawn's Of The Heart, Of The Soul And Of The Cross: The Utopian Experience. Alternative radio programmers were big fans, too. By the end of 1992, six different Achtung Baby tracks went top-10 on the Modern Rock chart. We'll see another one of them in this column soon.

GRADE: 10/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's Beavis and Butt-Head watching the "Mysterious Ways" video and noting that "Boner's pretty cool sometimes":

BONUS BONUS BEATS: The Edge has talked about how industrial music was a big influence on his Achtung Baby work, so I wonder if he was psyched when the German band KMFDM released a theatrically creepy "Mysterious Ways" cover in 1993. Here's their version:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: "Mysterious Ways" naturally lent itself to dance remixes, and the band put a bunch of remixes on different editions of the single, getting people like Paul Oakenfold, Apollo 440, and Stereo MCs to rework the track. U2 also commissioned a Massive Attack remix, but that one didn't come out until the 1995 fan-club compilation Melon: Remixes For Propaganda. Here's what Massive Attack did with it:

(Massive Attack's only Modern Rock chart hit is the 1991 masterpiece "Safe From Harm," which peaked at #28. They were way less of an alterna-chart factor than Stereo MCs, who made it to #5 with 1993's "Connected," an absolute banger. That's a 9.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: In 2009, Elvis Costello, someone who's been in this column a couple of times, had Bono and the Edge as guests on his TV show Spectacle. To introduce them, Costello and his band covered "Mysterious Ways," with Costello doing a fun carnival-barker routine during the song. Bono and Edge came out onstage before song was over, thus proving that they have no idea how to dance to U2 songs when they're not the ones actually performing those songs. Here's that:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's Snow Patrol covering "Mysterious Ways" on a 2011 tribute compilation, thus proving that "Mysterious Ways" is a good enough song to survive the soulfully-sensitive treatment:

(Snow Patrol's highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 2006's "Chasing Cars," peaked at #8. It's a 7.)