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U2 Zooropa 1993 |
// Lyrics:
- Zooropa
- Babyface
- Numb
- Lemon
- Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
- Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car
- Some Days Are Better Than Others
- The First Time
- Dirty Day
- The Wanderer
// About 'Zooropa'
Originally slated to be an EP, Zooropa was recorded between legs on the ZooTV Tour and released in May 1993 by Island Records as a full LP.
It was very much an "alternative rock" album in the climate of 1993. In America, grunge was at its peak. While contemporaries R.E.M. latched onto this with their distortion-filled Monster, U2 released an album without angst or even a single guitar solo. In Europe, BritPop was beginning to conquer the charts, yet Zooropa owed more to the experimentation of David Bowie and Brian Eno than to the melodic pop of The Beatles and The Kinks.
Nonetheless, it was a successful release--perhaps riding the wave of popularity started by Achtung Baby and the ZooTV Tour--winning a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album the year of its release and spending two weeks at #1 on Billboard's Top 200 Albums Chart despite lacking a strong single. It has subsequently sold more than 7 million copies worldwide.
As the title suggests, the album has a distinctly European texture (in contrast to the distinctly American roots of their late eighties work), continuing the band's experimentation with electronica, techno, and other predominantly European forms of music. Heavy on samples and irony, it also ties the "media overload" themes of the ZooTV Tour into the context of a post-Berlin Wall Europe. The lyrics seem fascinated with the way technology unites as well as separates us. The spacey title track, for instance--laced with ad slogans like "Better by design" and "Vorsprung durch technik"--paints a babel-filled vision of a single Europe united by satellite television.
But largely, the album's vision of technology is a cynical one. On the techno-rap "Numb", guitarist The Edge's drones a list of "do's and dont's," overwhelmed by a noisy backdrop of arcade sounds and "fat lady vocals." "Just that sense that you were getting bombarded with so much that you actually were finding yourself shutting down and unable to respond because there was so much imagery and information being thrown at you." --The Edge
The closing track, "The Wanderer", features country music legend Johnny Cash on lead vocals. It lays his haggard voice over a wobbly synth line, a bizarre juxtaposition in line with the album's central irony: that the band's most synthesized and postmodern album would be a condemnation of technology. The song's narrator wanders through a soulless world "in search of experience", ultimately finding meaning in the spiritual rather than the superficial.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Zooropa".
