The Alternative Number Ones: U2’s “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”

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.

Imagine having a song like this and throwing it away on the Batman Forever soundtrack. In 1995, U2 had a decade and a half in the game. In the grand scheme of the group's history, that puts them closer to the beginning than to their interminable, endless present, but it was long enough that they were an institution. U2 had already been through at least one successful reinvention, and they had avoided the plight that befell so many of their '80s alt-rock contemporaries. Even R.E.M., the closest American equivalent that U2 ever had, were just reaching the end of their dominant run in the mid-'90s. U2 were coming off of a hugely lucrative stadium tour and figuring out what to do next, and the thing that they decided to do next was to put a banger in the worst Batman film ever made. How does that happen?

The question answers itself, really. Batman Forever is just an unbelievable piece of shit, but it made a splash, at least financially. Director Joel Schumacher, taking over the franchise from Tim Burton, wanted to do business with U2, and U2 wanted to figure out what to do next after the golden run of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. The Batman Forever soundtrack gave them an opportunity. It gave them a big stage, a platform for a huge new single, but it didn't carry the pressure of the next reinvention. Without sacrificing their stadium momentum, U2 could play around a little. They could make something fun. What they came up with was "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me," a towering meta-rocker driven by synth-whines, handclaps, and a full orchestra going ham like they were trying to outdo the arrangement on Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." U2's next album didn't really follow the lead of "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." Instead, the song was a glorious little one-off, a side-quest that stands as a classic unto itself.

I've seen people claim that "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" is U2's best song. You could make a strong case, though you could probably make an even stronger case for like 20 other U2 songs. U2's whole superstar arc has been discussed to death, as if they were always destined to their present status as the house band at Davos. These days, U2 are the sort of entity that feels the need to make a mealy-mouthed statement about Palestine. They might be the only four guys in Ireland who don't feel comfortable decrying Israel's genocide, which means they operate more like Apple than Echo & The Bunnymen. That's detestable, but one of the reasons that U2 were able to reach that level is that they made lots of great songs for a very long time. That's something.

Even in 1995, U2 did not operate in the same world as every other band on alternative rock radio. They barely even functioned as a rock band back then. But Bono still took careful note of the intense reluctance that a new generation brought to rock stardom, to the way that vocation chews people up and spits them out. In its way, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" is just as jaded and self-reflexive as Soul Asylum's "Misery," the song that it replaced atop the Modern Rock chart. But U2's song is also playful and majestic in ways that Soul Asylum never could be. Without the platform of Batman Forever, maybe "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" would've been lost forever -- a vestigial unfinished experiment that never saw release until it found its way onto some U2 box set or other. But we got the song, and the song is good. You might think that the track's mere existence would be enough to get me to forgive Batman Forever. You would be wrong.

Fuck Batman Forever. We're deep in a time of '90s nostalgia and superhero-movie fatigue, and some people might be tempted to find comfort in Joel Schumacher's vision of camp-addled slime-green absurdity. I would urge these people to reconsider. With 1989's Batman, Tim Burton found a way to turn heightened comic-book hijinks into vast, visually inspired blockbuster entertainment. He improved on his own blueprint with 1992's Batman Returns, a beautifully damaged piece of mutiplex madness that still hauled in hundreds of millions and imprinted itself deeply on my 12-year-old imagination. But Batman Returns didn't make as much money as the first one, and parents' groups decided that it was too dark and vicious, so Burton became a scapegoat. Warner Bros. fired him and brought in Joel Schumacher, a former costume designer with a rep for making mindlessly stylish cinema like St. Elmo's Fire and The Lost Boys. (The Lost Boys fucking rules, but it's far and away Schumacher's best, and it's still got nothing on peak Burton.)

Previous Batman Michael Keaton didn't want to keep playing the character if Tim Burton wasn't the director, so Joel Schumacher brought in the late Val Kilmer, who was right in between Tombstone and Heat and who clearly did not want to be there. Kilmer played Batman as a wax-museum statue, and he's the only person involved in Batman Forever who held the slightest thing back. Jim Carrey had just had his golden starmaking run -- Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb And Dumber all arriving within the same calendar year. Nobody was going to tell him shit, and almost everyone had to sanction his buffoonery, so he turned his Riddler into a gesticulating bit-monster. Tommy Lee Jones, coming off of his Oscar for The Fugitive, absolutely hated Carrey, but he still tried to keep up, going about as big as he's ever gone. The costumes, lighting, and set decoration all work within the same feverish pitch. Nothing makes sense.

I wrote about Batman Forever for an old AV Club column in 2018, and I don't want to belabor this any further, so I'll just quote myself here. This part follows my confession that I saw Batman Forever in the theater and received it, at the time, as a perfectly acceptable Hollywood blockbuster:

What the hell was I thinking? What were any of us thinking? I was 15, old enough to know better. And yet I, along with untold millions of other Americans, plunked down summer-job money to see a movie that regarded both me and its own hero with absolute, all-consuming contempt. Watching Batman Forever today, it’s a fucking nightmare, a jarringly irritating pileup of blockbuster tropes and frantic mugging that doesn’t succeed on any level whatsoever. It has a star who clearly wishes he were somewhere else, a sidekick whose idea of rebelliousness is to wear an earring and to call the butler Alfred "Al," a love interest who’s supposed to be a brilliant psychologist but whose role is basically limited to breathing heavily and putting her hand on her chest, and two villains who seem to be locked in a mortal struggle to see who can overact most obnoxiously. Summer blockbusters were not in a great place in the mid-’90s, but were they this bad? Were things so bleak that I could really pay money to see this oozing sore of a movie, and just shrug and think "good enough"? I guess so!

I'll say one thing, though: The Batman Forever music supervisors blacked the fuck out on the soundtrack album. Joel Schumacher, credit where it's due, apparently played a huge role in that. Schumacher pushed hard to get Seal's "Kiss From A Rose," one of a handful of previously released songs, into the film. "Kiss From A Rose" first came out a year earlier and went nowhere, but Schumacher directed a new video on his Gotham City set, and it took off, topping charts worldwide. "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" was the lead single from the Batman Forever soundtrack, and it was presented as the movie's big song. The U2 song was big, which is why you're reading about it here, but "Kiss From A Rose" became the real phenomenon.

Beyond those two songs, the Batman Forever soundtrack works as a survey of a lot of the better sounds that were hovering in the air in summer 1995. The album has peak PJ Harvey, peak Mazzy Star, peak Nick Cave. It's got Sunny Day Real Estate and the Flaming Lips before either band was canonized -- an even more impressive pull when you consider that Sunny Day had just broken up for the first time. It's got covers -- the Offspring doing the Damned, Michael Hutchence doing Iggy Pop, peak Massive Attack doing a Smokey Robinson-written Marvelettes tune with Everything But The Girl's Tracey Thorn. (On the Modern Rock chart, the Offspring's take on "Smash It Up" peaked at #16.) The soundtrack even has a Method Man song called "The Riddler," with a RZA beat that flips the '60s Batman theme into berserk circus music. (Meth randomly goes for a Don Corleone thing in the video, and he comes out looking more like the Colin Farrell Penguin.)

Batman Forever came out in an era when the smartly curated alt-rock soundtrack album was a hugely important marketing tool. It came together in the aftermath of Wayne's World, Singles, Judgment Night, Natural Born Killers, and especially The Crow. The Batman Forever record, which mostly consisted of songs that weren't in the movie, works along the same lines, though it aims bigger in some strange ways. There's no real through-line to the Batman Forever soundtrack. The songs simply don't fit together at all, and the mishmash itself is part of the appeal. Joel Schumacher was never going to do like Tim Burton and get a genius like Prince to make a whole album that tied in with his picture. He went in the opposite direction, and it worked almost as well.

The various marketing strategies around Batman Forever apparently did the trick, since the movie was a smash. At the domestic box office, it brought in $184 million -- good enough to finish at #2 on the year-end list, right behind Toy Story. Things didn't go as well for Schumacher's follow-up Batman & Robin two years later. That one got the near-universal derision that Batman Forever truly deserved, and the series died until Christopher Nolan resurrected it eight years later. The big alt-rock single from the Batman & Robin soundtrack was Smashing Pumpkins' maximal bugout "The End Is The Beginning Is The End," which Billy Corgan co-produced with Nellee Hooper. It's no "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." ("The End Is The Beginning Is The End" peaked at #4. It's a 6.)

The Batman Forever soundtrack went double platinum in its day, but it's not on streaming services today, even in playlist form. If you want to get the full effect, you have to do like me and pull a bunch of the individual songs up on YouTube. (I never owned the record, so there's no dusty CD for me to dig out of storage.) It's a truly chaotic album, but if I strain hard enough, I can hear some elements that repeat -- stentorian singers with echo on their voices, glossy digital textures, lurching trip-hop beats, ultra-processed electric guitars. "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" works as the album opener not just because it's a great song from a huge band but also because it has all those things going for it.

When this column last checked in with U2, it was in spring 1992, when the deathless ballad "One" became the third and final Modern Rock chart-topper from Achtung Baby. With that album, U2 pulled off the impossible, staving off uncoolness and rebranding themselves as detached and ironic postmodern commentators who could still fill stadiums. While Achtung Baby sales were booming U2 launched their Zoo TV tour, a dizzy and overwhelming spectacle that raked in money and crossed the world multiple times. U2 kept that tour going for nearly two years straight. During breaks, they still found the time to make Zooropa, the 1993 album that sold a few million copies even though the band and the rest of the world persist in treating it as a full-length Achtung Baby B-side.

I think Zooropa rules. It doesn't rule as hard as Achtung Baby, but that's an unfairly high bar. Zooropa doesn't have the same reach, but it's relatively loose and playful, and its club-music experiments take things a little further. Over the course of the record, Bono gets in some truly delightful falsetto action. None of U2's Zooropa tracks reached #1 on the Modern Rock chart, but a couple of them came close. Lead single "Numb," a weird little showcase for the Edge's quasi-rap deadpan, made it to #2, while the extended Talking Heads-y disco goof "Lemon" peaked at #3. ("Numb" is a 7, and "Lemon" is a 6. The singles don't really define how I feel about that record.)

When the Zoo TV tour finally wrapped up at the end of 1993, U2 took a well-earned break. Eventually, the band started workshopping plans for their next LP. They messed around with a few different producers, including Achtung Baby engineer Flood and Nellee Hooper, the former Soul II Soul member and Massive Attack affiliate who has already been in this column for his work on Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U." Hooper was never a dance producer, exactly. Instead, he did important work on pop records that played with breakbeats and rave signifiers -- Björk's Debut, Massive Attack's Protection, Madonna's Bedtime Stories. He co-produced "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" with Bono and the Edge.

"Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" got its start as an unfinished sketch during the Zooropa sessions. Apparently, the title's initials are somewhere in the Zooropa cover art, though I've never stared at that image long enough to find them. That means U2 didn't write the song specifically for the Batman Forever soundtrack, but the movie was the reason that the song got finished. Reportedly, Joel Schumacher wanted Bono to make a cameo in the film. Specifically, Schumacher wanted Bono to appear as MacPhisto, the satanic face-painted lounge lizard that he played during parts of the Zoo TV show, during a party scene. Can you imagine how fucking stupid that would've been? One more famous person getting one more chance to mug ferociously in that film? Thankfully, schedules didn't match up, so it never happened, and Schumacher still got a U2 song on his soundtrack.

The title "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" is a riff on "Hold Me, Kiss Me, Thrill Me," a love song that was a hit for Mel Carter in 1965. Later on, Bono wrote about "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" in his memoir, claiming that it's about how rock star's fans turn on them if they don't die at 33, just like Jesus. But we don't really need Bono to explain that part, since it's right there in the text: "They want you to be Jesus/ They'll go down on one knee/ But they'll want their money back if you're alive at 33." The song came out a month after Bono's 35th birthday, so I'm sure that was on his mind. But Bono never sounds like he's singing about himself on "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." Instead, I hear the song as his response to a generation of rock stars who saw their fame as even more of a burden than Bono ever did.

Avoiding own messianic-martyr schtick, Bono describes rock stardom as something much more fun than most of his '90s peers envisioned: "Dressing like your sister/ Living like a tart/ They don't know what you're doing/ Babe, it must be art/ You're a headache in a suitcase/ You're a star!" He sings the whole thing in second person, like it's Bright Lights, Big City. He addresses a big smash who wears it like a rash, someone who's caught in stretch-limo headlights. Bono belts all that out with lounge-singer brio. He sells it. He pants and moans and insinuates. Bono rarely indulges his falsetto on "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." Instead, he locks into rocker mode, oozing charisma everywhere as he pushes his voice right down the center of the track.

In interviews later in the '90s, Bono talked about being sick of rock 'n' roll, looking for inspiration elsewhere because he just didn't think the rockers of the day had anything exciting going on creatively. But "Hold Me, Thrill Me" is a straight-up rock song, and it never pretends to be anything else. It just doesn't sound like other rock songs of its day. Instead, it calls back to '70s glam-rock -- not just in the attitude that Bono radiates but also in the handclaps, the acoustic-to-electric riffs, and the stomp-snort rhythm of the whole thing. "Hold Me, Thrill Me" does sound like a 1995 song, though, and a lot of that must come down to Nellee Hooper. It sounds like the work of a rock band, but the pulsing beat and oscillating synth-sounds at least gesture in the direction of rave. And then there are the strings, which swirl and overwhelm and eventually take over the entire song.

With "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me," U2 made a visceral, primally satisfying stadium-rock banger that doesn't sound anything like their '80s material. It's arch and silly and heavy on sleek textures, but the Edge cranks out one of his simplest, most direct riffs, and the rhythm section is out for blood. Some part of me can imagine Soundgarden recording this song, and I bet that version would rule, too. U2 sound like they're in conversation with the music of that moment, but they don't play catch-up to anyone else. Bono clowns disaffected rock stars without coming off as one. He doesn't sound like he's condescending to his younger peers, either. Instead, U2 put on a clinic, showing the kids how to make a glossy, self-aware statement that actually sticks.

The "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" video is a fun statement, too. 10cc's Kevin Godley co-directed the cartoon clip with Maurice Linnane after the two of them worked on the visuals for the Zoo TV tour. The video puts U2 into an animated Gotham City, with Bono's Fly and MacPhisto characters working as his own internal Batman and Joker. I love the way it shows his two faces emerging out of shadows. At one point, Bono pulls a halo off of his head, balls it up, and transforms it into his Fly sunglasses. At another, Elvis Presley almost runs Bono over; Bono is distracted because he's reading The Screwtape Letters. The other U2 guys shoot guitar flamethrowers at Batman and chase the Batwing in a flying car. Even in their own video, they're the henchmen. I could do without all the sound effects and Batman Forever clips, but the final product is some fun movie tie-in bullshit, right down to the orchestra of Batmen playing the string part at the end.

I wonder what would've happened if U2 had continued in the direction of "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" -- if they'd continued to prioritize rocking even as they kept going with the knowing mischief of their early-'90s music. Maybe "Hold Me, Thrill Me" wasn't a big enough hit to justify all that. It was a real-deal hit -- topping the Modern and Mainstream Rock charts, reaching #16 on the Hot 100 -- but not a game-changer. The song topped pop charts in a few countries, and it went as high as #2 in the UK. Maybe U2 couldn't compete with "Kiss From A Rose," but they liked messing around in the cinematic playground, so they kept doing that for a while.

Later in 1995, Bono and the Edge wrote Tina Turner's James Bond theme "GoldenEye," and Nellee Hooper produced it. In 1996, their bandmates Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen recorded an electronic version of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme for the first of the Tom Cruise movies. Bono and the Edge went back to the superhero well as late as 2011, when they wrote the songs for the catastrophic Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. That enterprise didn't go nearly as well.

Speaking of film: In November 1995, all four members of U2 got together with their longtime collaborator Brian Eno for an album literally called Original Soundtracks 1. That record is loose and weird and quietly experimental, and U2 didn't want people to think it was a U2 record. So they released it under the name Passengers, effectively telling the public that they could safely ignore it. I don't think I ever heard Original Soundtracks 1 until today, and I'm not mad at the record, though this opinion is probably helped by the fact that I didn't pay $15 to hear it.

The songs on Original Soundtracks 1 are mostly U2 and Brian Eno's tracks for imaginary movies, but some of them were done for actual films, including "Miss Sarajevo," the only single from the record. "Miss Sarajevo," written about a beauty contest held during the siege of Sarajevo, appeared in journalist and U2 buddy Bill Carter's TV documentary of the same title. It's got motherfucking Luciano Pavarotti belting out a solo. Weird song! Nice, though! "Miss Sarajevo" was a top-10 hit in the UK, but it didn't go anywhere in America, even on the Modern Rock charts.

Original Soundtracks 1 was a side project. So were the songs that U2's members made for actual movies. Unlike many of those tracks, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" bears the actual U2 name, so it's not really a side project. Still, it's a one-off, a glimpse at a road not taken. When U2 released that song, they were still in the early days of figuring out the direction for their next album, but that next album wouldn't arrive for another two years. There will be a lot more to say about the next U2 album down the line, when they appear in this column again.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" happens to be the second Modern Rock chart-topper in a row that "Weird Al" Yankovic parodied on his 1996 album Bad Hair Day. Here's Yankovic singing about going to the dentist ("numb me, fill me, floss me, bill me") on "Cavity Search":

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's Cormega rapping over a sample of the "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" strings on the intro to his 2004 album Legal Hustle: