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The unexpected resonance of Zooropa, U2’s least-remembered album, 25 years later

On the 1993 release, U2 decided to stop being U2 for a little while.

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When The Joshua Tree turned 30, U2 hit the road for a special anniversary tour and played the whole damn album 50 times start to finish.

There will never be such a revival for Zooropa .

July 5 is the 25th anniversary of the smallest album from the world’s biggest band. Maybe you’ve never heard of it; maybe you have and want to forget it. But you should listen to it now. Because it’s every bit the masterpiece that The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby were, even if it sounds nothing like them: a weird but heartfelt meditation of humanity on the verge of the technological revolution that is still remaking our world today.

Zooropa also teaches us something about U2, a band that increasingly flirts with self-parody these days. It still strains to live up to that self-given moniker — “the best band in the world” — but its recent output fails to inspire. They’ve invaded our iPhones . Their latest record came and went without much fanfare. They’re still selling out concerts, but critical reception has become middling . Even for longtime fans like myself, U2 isn’t so much a source of wonder as it is a fact of life. They’re as novel as air.

That’s what makes Zooropa such a revelation in retrospect. U2 had hit its creative and commercial peak with 1987’s The Joshua Tree , faced the backlash from 1988’s Rattle & Hum (the archetype album of U2 being simply too much ), and then regained its stride with 1991’s Achtung Baby . They had nowhere left to go and nothing left to prove.

So they made this strange little album with few pretenses and a modest agenda: what it’s like to be a person in this changing world. The band members themselves have called it an “interlude,” a sentiment that seems totally at odds with U2 as we think about them today. U2 doesn’t do small. They sell out football stadiums to play their 10-times platinum album from 30 years ago, reliving the glory years one more time.

But they did small once. That is Zooropa ’s stroke of genius.

U2 wants to forget about Zooropa

“I never thought of Zooropa as anything more than an interlude,” said U2 guitarist the Edge (given name David Howell Evans), who received his first production credit on the album, in Neil McCormick’s 2006 history U2 by U2 . That more or less sums up the band’s feelings toward their oddest production: It was an experiment, even a fun one, but “this is something we don’t necessarily care to do anymore,” the guitarist and co-band leader said.

Once in a while, the album receives some favorable retrospectives — here’s a semi-ironic piece by Rob Harvilla in Spin for its 20th anniversary, an occasion also commemorated by Stereogum — but it’s mostly an afterthought in the U2 pantheon. Boy was a promising first album, War made them stars, The Joshua Tree became one of the biggest records in history, and Achtung Baby wasn’t far behind it.

It was at that moment, during U2’s frenzied, glitzy, and overamped tour for Achtung Baby , that Zooropa was born. The story is that it started out as an EP, but the band eventually fleshed it out into a full 10-track, 50-minute album that they completed by flying back and forth from their shows to their studios in Dublin. The word “mad” gets used a lot by the band and its associates to describe this period.

Zooropa was released on July 5, 1993, and then it just sort of ... disappeared. It sold merely 2 million copies in the United States — a steep fall from Achtung Baby ’s 8 million or The Joshua Tree ’s 10 — and its singles mostly failed to chart on mainstream radio.

But for a group that thinks of itself first and foremost as a live band, U2’s near-erasure of Zooropa from its set lists is the most telling indicator of the album’s legacy. The first single, “Numb,” hasn’t been played live since December 10, 1993, in Tokyo. “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” — the “one legit, fairly conventional all-time U2 classic” on the album, as Harvilla put it — is the only song to be played more than 100 times in concert.

For context, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is the clubhouse leader with more than 1,000 plays. And five different songs from Pop , the band’s vastly inferior 1997 release, have gotten at least 100 turns over the years. (Hat tip to the meticulous u2gigs.com for this data.)

Even on the band’s current Experience + Innocence tour — during which U2 has eliminated songs from The Joshua Tree from its set list, following the 2017 roadshow dedicated to that album, and thereby taken several mainstays out of the rotation — not a single Zooropa track has made an appearance yet. Not one snippet for its 25th birthday.

The U2 on Zooropa is unlike we had ever heard, or would hear again

The myth of Achtung Baby was that U2 finally embraced alternative and electronic music after driving the American roots act straight into the ground on Rattle & Hum , an impressive reinvention propelled by radio-friendly hits like “One” and “Mysterious Ways.”

I came here not to besmirch Achtung Baby , but the truth is that album was still very identifiably U2. Maybe a little more jaded, maybe a little more adventurous, but there is a clear line from “With or Without You” to “One.” The guitar licks are clean, Bono is a little moodier but he’s still crooning, and every track still sounds like it was made to be played outdoors in front of 30,000 people.

But on Zooropa , U2 — the stadium-packing, diamond-selling, chart-topping band that had taken over the world — was nowhere to be found.

The album’s first two minutes — an indistinct fade-in of transmitted voices, before a melancholy piano melody sets in with pulsing bass behind — pass before we hear anything that sounds even remotely like U2.

Bono, famed war protester and AIDS activist, beams into the album from outer space with a few lines straight out of a second-rate Don Draper meeting: “What do you want? Be all that you can be. Fly the friendly skies. Eat to get slimmer.” Throughout the album, Bono sounds both alien and inescapably human.

The next song is a love ballad to a woman on TV, powered by a toy piano that sounds exactly like that, and the tone is set. With the exception of the lovelorn and familiar “Stay,” there is really no comfort to be found.

On “Numb,” the Edge drones out a series of “Don’t” commands over a distorted guitar that conjures turning gears, and we never hear Bono at all, except for his “Fat Lady” voice in the background. “I feel numb/too much is not enough,” he cries. It might as well be the band’s thesis statement on Zooropa , warping the overwhelming and guileless emotion that had defined U2 up to that point in their careers into something more listless and postmodern.

In fact, the whole album is like a retcon of familiar U2 tropes. The wailing “Tomorrow” on 1981’s October was Bono’s anguished, affecting cry for the mother he lost so young. He returns to the same subject here on “Lemon,” and we instead are greeted by the Fat Lady again while the Edge and Brian Eno chant in a monotone through the chorus. “Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car” must be U2’s weirdest song about heroin, another of Bono’s favorite subjects, a tale of dependency played over upbeat industrial noise rock.

The album ends with Bono stepping offstage — and what could be less U2 than that — to give Johnny Cash the microphone for “The Wanderer.” That’s right: Johnny Cash closes the U2 record best classified as experimental electronica, not the gospel and roots-influenced Joshua Tree or Rattle & Hum, singing atomic apocalyptic imagery over a muffled bass that somehow still approximates a country twang.

Finally, Zooropa appropriately ends on a joke or a warning or both: an alarm pulsates and cuts out abruptly.

But it all ... works. There really isn’t a band better positioned to meditate on the excesses of the dawning internet age than U2, which turned earnest excess into an art form during its rise to fame. And they found an oddly alluring sound to match their feelings about this strange new world.

“I feel that they are one of the few rock bands even attempting to hint at a world which will continue past the next great wall — the year 2000,” David Bowie said after Zooropa came out, according to U2 biographer Bill Flanagan. So in its own way, the album remains as resonant as anything they’ve ever produced.

We may never hear an album like Zooropa again — but it deserves to be remembered

U2 seems content to regress these days. Its last two albums have been characterized by a thematic return to the youth of the band’s members, and especially its lead singer. They haven’t totally lost sight of this period, though, even if Zooropa isn’t making it onto their set lists. U2’s latest tour marked the return of one of Bono’s most outrageous stage characters, a glam impersonation of the devil who first appeared on the early 1990s tour that birthed Zooropa.

There’s something identifiable in that character in our ridiculous times, and Zooropa is plump with thematic material that seems as relevant now as it did in 1993. They hit it all: soulless capitalism, digital infatuation masquerading as true love, the hopeless apathy that feels so familiar in the era of Trump. “Some days you wake up in the army/And some days it’s the enemy,” Bono reminds us, about as far from the righteous anger that electrified War as he would ever get.

But it feels earned, in a world just escaping from the Cold War and only just beginning to understand the new age, the digital age, that it was entering. These guys saw it and they recognized it, even if they were as perplexed as anyone about what you were supposed to do about it. Their only real conclusion is to do the same thing you did before: You miss your mom, you get mad at your dad, you fall in love, you get high, sometimes you wonder what the point of all this really is. But you don’t give up. You keep living. It just sounds a little bit different.

That acceptance comes right near the end of the album. After the drone of “Numb,” the operatics of “Lemon,” and the detached sarcasm on “Some Days Are Better Than Others,” we find the serenity of “The First Time.”

Over a gentle guitar — a spiritual sequel to “Running To Stand Still in its sound — Bono finds peace in losing faith. The prodigal son comes home again, the father hands over the keys to his kingdom, and the son ... throws them away. The song’s softly triumphant climax is the only real emotional catharsis over these 50 minutes, and it is beautifully understated.

Part of Zooropa ’s appeal is its novelty: U2 making the least U2 album of their career. They overplayed this hand a few years later on Pop — got a little too self-aware, a little too confident that they could make any kind of sound work for them — and they would spend years overcompensating for it. They would retreat to safer spaces in the 2000s: sincerity and soaring riffs and shout-along choruses meant to be sung by thousands of fans. You no longer listen to a new U2 album hoping to be surprised. You just hope there’s a good hook or two.

U2 has never been more U2 than they are now, but, for a flitting moment, on Zooropa , they broke free from all the constraints that come with being themselves. This is a beautiful and discordant, sweet and angry piece of music, out of body and out of time. Spin magazine wrote that the album “freed U2 from itself.” But they didn’t know what to do with that freedom. They didn’t know where to go.

They are the wandering protagonist in the atomic wasteland that Bono wrote and Cash sang about on Zooropa’ s final song. Even after the apocalypse, U2 still can’t find what it’s looking for.

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30 Years Ago: U2 Polarizes Audience With ‘Zooropa’

Between their massive world tours and philanthropic efforts,  U2  has often kept its fans waiting for years for new music. That's why it seemed so unusual for them to release Zooropa on July 5, 1993, a little more than a year and a half after delivering Achtung Baby in November 1991.

Even more startling was the music. After the anthemic post-punk of their '80s work and the moody introspection of its brilliant predecessor,  Zooropa seemed to serve as a counter to the grunge of the day with electronic dance grooves, understated vocals and samples.

“I think we were still surfing on the wave of creative energy from Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV tour when we were making Zooropa ." the Edge said . "It was the same burst of inspiration. When we were working on Achtung Baby , we were looking to discover new sonic terrain – and on this record that was already established, so we were more confident of what we were doing."

The idea for Zooropa came about during the Zoo TV tour, which saw them embrace irony, satire and self-deprecation (concepts not usually associated with U2) while targeting the sensory bombardment of the media. To sell the concept, Bono created characters like "The Fly" and, most famously, "Macphisto." It inspired the band to the point where it wanted to explore them in their new songs, as well as onstage.

During a break from the tour, they set up shop in Dublin with co-producers Brian Eno and Flood and composed the material in an untraditional manner. As they jammed in the studio, Eno pointed to a whiteboard that had chord changes and words like "hold," "change," "stop" and "change back," with the band following his instructions, and they worked from there.

They had planned to release it as an EP to promote their European dates but soon decided to flesh it out to a full-length. But that leg started before Zooropa was completed so they flew back to Dublin until the project was finished during their days off.

Watch U2's 'Numb' Video

The first single, "Numb," arrived in June, hinting at their new direction. One of the few U2 tracks that feature the Edge – who also received a production credit – on lead vocals, "Numb" is a hypnotic drone in which the Edge recites a litany of things not to do. " I feel numb / Too much is not enough ," Bono sings in a falsetto on the chorus, a vocal technique also employed in "Lemon."

Gone were the political messages of hits like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)." In their place were songs about obsession with celebrities ("Babyface"), advertising ("Zooropa") and addiction ("Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car").

Although it topped the charts worldwide, Zooropa  only sold 2 million copies in the U.S., fewer than any U2 LP since 1981's  October . To an audience weaned on Bono's vocal histrionics, the slash-and-burn attack of the Adam Clayton-Larry Mullen, Jr. rhythm section and the Edge's delayed riffs, the album felt like the work of an entirely different band.  Achtung, Baby may have brought in ideas commonly found in industrial music, but its songs were still undeniably U2 underneath.

Listen to U2 and Johnny Cash's 'The Wanderer'

The record's excellent ballads, "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" and "The First Time," were most connected to U2's previous work. But so did the closer, "The Wanderer." As they did the Rattle and Hum standout "When Loves Comes to Town," U2 brought out another American music legend,  Johnny Cash . The decision was a head-scratcher at the time, given how the country legend had fallen out of favor with the public. But within a year, Cash would release American Recordings and begin a career renaissance and reevaluation of his catalog until he died in 2003.

Many were turned off, especially when the succeeding  Pop continued along those themes with diminishing returns. It's hard to understand all the fuss now that such sounds are commonplace in indie rock.  All That You Can't Leave Behind found a way for U2 to carry their '80s into the '90s; notice how the grooves of "Lemon" work their way into "Elevation."

The transition U2 made with  Zooropa  isn't as jarring now as it was then. In that respect, Cash's cameo on "The Wanderer" is a microcosm for the entire album.

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U2's zooropa tour (1993): a report from the frontline when tv comes to town.

Graham Reid  |  Jan 30, 2009  |  10 min read

U2: Even Better Than The Real Thing (Perfecto Mix by Paul Oakenfold)

The whisper-voice and marble polish Hilton Hotel in Melbourne isn’t the sort of place you’d normally associate with rock ‘n’ roll. Suits and chic glide by, uniforms open doors and fingerprints on the gilt are removed discreetly by maids with an imperceptible swipe of a cloth.   The place breathes class. Upper class.

But this time last week the lobby of the Hilton was a swarm of bomber-jackets, back-stage passes and the well-worn jeans that is rock on the road in the 90s.   Because just across the park outside the automatic doors is the MCG.   And there, for two nights, the U2 Zooropa travelling show has set up shop.

When rocks comes to town on this scale – a permanent crew of 120, most housed in the Hilton and other scattered in other hotels – then it’s good business.

As some of the crew sit in the lobby bar after the first show and keep those rock ‘n’ roll hours which see last drinks ordered around 2am, the air is full of multinational laughter and voices, stories about that time in Jersey City, talk of the boxes of T-shirts seemingly in permanent limbo between Sydney and Auckland …

And how smoothly this two year tour has been going.   By consensus, U2 management is a good employer, knows what its doing and treats its people right.

These guys stay in the Hilton … and the Hilton accommodates rock ‘n’ roll.

But when a classy hotel has three “adult” programmes (sample dialogue: ‘oh baby, that’s right, just like that”), the Pentagon supplies pictures from cameras in smart bombs, and contestants on a game show have to identify fake “new items” from real world (and can’t) then you know you are in the post-modern age where one image is worth about the same as any other.

It’s the television zoo.   Zoo TV.

And U2 have brought theirs to town.

With satellite feeds, high-definition screens stacked 20 metres high and technology so far advanced they had to write their own computer programmes, the Zoo TV tour is ambitious, provocative, mind-jarring and maybe even on some kind of as-yet unclear cutting edge.

“I knew it was going to be big, but this was amazing,” wrote reviewer Ian MacFarlane grasping for words in the Weekend Australian after the opening night of the Australian leg in Melbourne.

But there wasn’t much more than that to say.   Amazing.

“ Television, the drug of the nation … ”   The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 1992

The lights around the MCG go down, 50,000 punters roar in anticipation and on the three-storey-high stage a stack of 50 television screens crackles with high-definition visual static.

More lights on the stage towers flash with blinding intensity, dozens more screens are illuminated. Out of the cathode collisions, sonic mash of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and blitzkrieg of visuals Bono appears high on the stage engaged in some demented puppet dances before a wall of images.

He does a mocking goose-step and hauls his hand down from a Seig Heil salute which set the political subtext for a show which runs well past the two-hour mark and touches bases with a number of recent periods in the band’s 15-year career.

As white light hits the stage and the rest of the group are lit up, the huge crowd roars again, presses towards the stage and the first brittle chattering notes of Zoo Station are unleashed through the massive sound system.

The band that began life named the Hype and then became the hype   –   only to walk away from it on their last two albums – have opened in uncompromisingly aggressive mode.   Bono takes the mike at centrestage and sneers the lyrics, “I’m ready for the laughing gas, I’m ready ... ready for what’s next …”  

But only because he knows where this is going. The crowd is trying to get a hold on it themselves.   Ready to let go of the steering wheel, as Bono says?

The screens fire images and words at an almost incomprehensible rate and what can be deciphered is variously funny, ambiguous, oblique or nonsense.   Achtung, baby.   But achtung to what?   Words and pictures fly by.

For an instant it’s as if the languages and images of the world can be brought down to this stage as a crew of over 200 have pulled together high tech, low art, hype and type into a show which can’t be called the future of rock ‘n’ roll for one very simple reason. It’s happening   right now.

And only U2 perhaps – 50 million albums sold, a new record deal signed in may for an estimated $400 million for their next six albums – have the financial clout and intellectual curiosity to put it together.   The statistics here defy comprehension: 1200 tonnes of equipment, a dozen laser discs preprogrammed, nine cameras scanning the stadium all linked to be mixed live, a sound system that pumps out over a million watts of power, 26 on-stage mikes fed into 60 monitors …

And in the middle of all this are four men from Dublin whose collective worth has already grossed them $1500 million from album sales.   Drummer Larry Mullen sits behind a remarkably small kit back and centre, bassist Adam Clayton is off to the right impassively cool behind shades, guitarist The Edge carves out great shards of sound and up front is Bono, outfitted eerily in black leather and wraparound black glasses.

The last two U2 albums – Achtung Baby and Zooropa – may not have done the dollar business like their earlier ones, and radio backed away when it heard the gritty left-turn U2 had made musically, but on the night as The Edge drags his Eno-inspired monotone through Numb and as Bono turns on his Bowie/ Lodger voice for Lemon , the new material sits seamlessly alongside New Year’s Day and a mid-set acoustic bracket which includes Angel of Harlem and When Love Comes to Town .

For a show which has sometimes been written off by English rock writers as the triumph of television over rock, the songs hold their own without difficulty. Where once the band too readily reached for the anthemic, now they take each song on merit.   They also include Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love   which has Bono singing in a video “duet” with his childhood hero who appears on the digiwall of screens.   And they keep stadium gestures to a minimum.

They don’t have to reach out … the screens are doing that for them.   And if that makes the Zoo TV show just a little more detached, then that, too, is fitting.   This is rock … and television.

Images and words appear and disappear in blink-time and the band call a halt while Bono, as with anyone in these “pass me the remote” days, takes time out to graze the local channels.   It’s Ironside briefly, advertisements and, on this night in Melbourne, the Kiwis pasting the Australian openers at the WACA.

The crowd bays, lights race up the huge conning towers that make up the stage and Bono taunts mockingly: “You didn’t come here to watch television, now.   Didya?”

The 50,000 roar, “Noooo”.   But the answer is, in fact, yes.

Zoo TV may be rock.   But it’s also about television.

“ Everything you know is a lie. Believe everything. Watch more TV. ” Zooropa concert epigrams, 1993

These are people who watched Live Aid on the small screen and were told it was their Woodstock, have had a decade of MTV and watched the Gulf War and the Koresh compound in flames from the comfort of their own homes.   And when they got tired of it, they simply changed channels.

Zoo TV is, in that sense, nothing new.   It’s just been brought into a stadium and for two hours people can watch television as they never have before … in the company of thousands of others.   It is big, brash and briefly, participatory.

Bono too stalks the stage with his own portable video filming the crowd as words, prerecorded footage and his pictures flash across the screens.   This is a concert for the age of video artist Jenny Holzer’s “failed epigrams” (as Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes describes them) which appear on specta-colour boards in Piccadilly Circus, Times Square (right)  and San Francisco. It’s music for the age where we send photographs over the telephone and when Sega’s Sonic Hedgehog video game made more money in Britain on the day of its release than the best-selling rock album of 1992, Simply Red’s Stars , did there all year.

And standing before the U2 videowalls are the Donkey Kong kids who have known nothing else.   That ... and rock music.

“I do think that we see the platform we have as an opportunity that should not be squandered, one way or the other.” The Edge, last month.

While dislocated images and words assail the eyes it becomes hard to know where to look.   The television generations watch the screens but on the long catwalk a belly dancer snakes around tantalizingly while the band plays Mysterious Ways .   Bono reaches out … not to her flesh, but to her image on the screen now projected two storeys high at the back of the stage.

Television and reality, they are becoming one and the same.   The image?   Even better than the real thing?

   This much imagery can reach overhead fast, however, and the band knows it.   The centerpiece   of the show, the modestly rendered acoustic bracket at the end of the catwalk, shows the relentless momentum and the fireflashes across   the screens are noticeably reduced in the second half of the show.

Older material such as Bullet the Blue Sky and Where the Streets Have No Name are delivered but appreciably free of the self-aggrandising manner of the Lovetown tour.   Some of the screens shut down and at the end of Pride with the frozen image of Dr Martin Luther King behind him, Bono abdicates his frontman role again.   King can speak for himself in the video age as the footage rolls, there is a palpable frisson of sadness in the crowd.

But did we come here to watch television?   Yes and no, simultaneously.

This hemisphere, however, offers fewer video grazing options than Europe, where Bono has scanned the channels.   Seeing Australians being whumped at the WACA, however pleasurable for a New Zealander on this night, isn’t the same as the band acting a conduit for the people of Sarajevo.

And when Bono returns as his Macphisto character – decadently devilish – to make his nightly phone call to the famous, there are also fewer options.   No Salman Rushdie to phone and then call in from the wings.   But Buckingham Palace’s number has been beside the mirrored phone on stage during the day.

He goes for the local option on this night and there on the line is television’s Derryn Hinch, recently sacked from his programme.   Hinch, clearly surprised by this call to his home (“How did you get my number?”), responds with gales of laughter when he is offered a job on Zoo TV.   The crowd eat it up … then it’s back to the rock.

As the show passes the two-hour mark, the videos ignite again and burning crosses and swastikas are appropriated and condemned.   It’s about television and rock … but politics, too.

The back of the handsome programme contains the addresses of Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Aids Trust and Community Aid Abroad.   There is a full-page ad for Zoo Condoms.

Whether there is always a message in the fast-forward language on screen is another matter.   But one stands out which may need reinforcing: “Rock ‘n’ roll is entertainment.”   And this is never less than spectacular rock ’n’ roll arena entertainment … with a great soundtrack.

“ And these are the days when our work has come asunder, And these are the days when we look for something other … ” from Lemon on Zooropa , now.

On the last night of 1989 at the final concert of the Lovetown tour, U2 played a concert in Dublin which was broadcast to an audience of over 200 million in a live radio link-up.   At that time Bono said, “[Now] we have to go away and dream it all up again.”

They dreamed from live radio to live television.

It is both using television and about television.   What that means is anybody’s guess.   But it’s also about rock ‘n’ roll … and rock ‘n ‘ roll as entertainment.   At least for the night – short concentration span conceptualism pumped by a backbeat.

What U2 dream up after the final throes of the Zooropa tour, which ends at the Tokyo Dome a week after the Western Springs concert, is anybody’s guess. To look ahead seems unnecessary anyway, even if Zoo TV suggest a path.

But it can’t be called the future … because it’s here already.

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By Peyton Thomas

December 20, 2020

Around the world, a resurgence of fascism. In Germany, gangs of skinheads brutalize immigrants. In France, Le Pen’s far-right Front National brings hate to the ballot box. Muslims die, en masse, in intractable foreign wars, and their deaths slip from the front page to the second. So much news. So much of it bad. All of it relayed to us, instantaneous, on bright, beguiling screens.

So goes the introduction to nearly every review of U2 ’s Zooropa published in 1993. Very little has changed if we’re talking geopolitics; everything has changed if we’re talking U2. Zooropa wasn’t the band’s last risky move—that would be the 1997 flop Pop , or maybe the non-consensual downloading of 2014’s herpetic Songs of Innocence onto every iPod in the free world—but it was, probably, their last successful one. The album’s sleeve is a bright collage of purples and pinks, blues and yellows; on every album since, they’ve opted for greyscale.

Zooropa was born on a break between legs of Zoo TV, a tour-as-television-spectacle spanning continents and playing provocatively with light and color and character. U2 intended to record a companion EP to Achtung Baby , something to spur ticket sales as Zoo TV continued into its second year. Instead, they made an odd hybrid of live album and avant-garde experiment. Recording engineer Robbie Adams fashioned loops of music from Zoo TV soundchecks; aided by producers Flood and Brian Eno , the band turned these loops into strange new songs unmoored from genre. “Yeah, ‘alternative,’” said Bono, rolling his eyes as he bested Nirvana, R.E.M., and Smashing Pumpkins for Best Alternative Music Performance at the 1994 Grammys. Maybe he’d have preferred to lock horns with Ozzy Osbourne and Meat Loaf in the rock categories.

There’s a bit of bog-standard rock balladry on Zooropa , but it is, otherwise, a record of staggering weirdness. On the lead single, “Numb,” The Edge reads a dystopian laundry list in staid monotone: “Don’t answer, don’t ask, don’t try and make sense,” Bono wails in operatic falsetto. Deep in the mix, a member of the Hitler Youth hits a drum in a sample from Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandistic Triumph of the Will . (On the Zoo TV tour, U2 had used footage from the film in anti-fascist video collages full of burning crosses and swastikas.) Following the grim “Numb” is “Lemon,” a song in which Bono grieves for his mother, though you’d never guess it from the way he coos “whisper” and “moan,” sounding a little like Donna Summer, a little like Prince. A toy piano tinkles over the voyeuristic “Babyface.” A brass sample, sourced from the 1978 Soviet folk compilation Lenin’s Favourite Songs , opens “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.” Strangest of all, Bono cedes lead vocal on the final track to Johnny Cash , who walks like a Colossus over the hymnal static of “The Wanderer.”

Odd as these songs were, they fit perfectly into Zoo TV’s post-apocalyptic assault on the senses. The band’s mainstays wound up sounding silliest. The celestial opening of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the Martin Luther King, Jr. sermon punctuating “Pride (In the Name of Love),” the gorgeous addiction-dirge of “Running to Stand Still”—all were wildly incongruous with the sight of square-jawed Bono covering Elvis in gold lamé fuck-me pumps and little red devil horns . The alternate reality of this tour was so complete, so utterly impenetrable, that the traditional became aberrant. Bono delighted in donning those horns, that lipstick, and transforming into his devilish alter ego, MacPhisto. Inspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters , Bono sought to put his own spin on James 4:7: mock the devil, and he will flee from you. MacPhisto is Satan as pithy, aged Vegas lounge lizard. He cracks wise; he congratulates the Vatican for doing his work for him. When Zoo TV played Bologna, MacPhisto placed a telephone call to Alessandra Mussolini onstage, and left a message on her answering machine: “I just wanted to tell her she’s doing a wonderful job filling the old man’s shoes.”

Bono’s nightly dance with the devil, though parodic, did rankle some of his more devout followers. U2 has been a band of unabashed religiosity since their very inception, singing in liturgical Latin and offering post-punk takes on Psalm 40. But their Christianity has very little in common with the North American evangelical breed. The band formed in Dublin at the very height of the Troubles. English bassist Adam Clayton and Welsh guitarist The Edge are both Protestants, while drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. is Irish Catholic. Bono’s home was interdenominational—his mother Anglican, his father Catholic. And so, in U2’s catalog, faith supersedes denomination, and the band is unafraid to denounce the pain wrought by organized religion. For nearly every worshipful “Yahweh” in U2’s catalog, there is some other vent for disbelief—a “Wake Up Dead Man,” an “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” a “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Bono sang hymns, but he took unapologetic shots at snake-oil televangelism, too: “The God I believe in isn’t short of cash, mister.”

What distinguishes Zooropa from these moments of religious critique is the album’s streak of genuine agnosticism. MacPhisto may have been satirical, but “The First Time” is deadly serious, imagining a prodigal son who returns only to reject his father’s love:

My father is a rich man He wears a rich man’s cloak He gave me the keys to his kingdom Gave me a cup of gold He said, “I have many mansions And there are many rooms to see.” But I left by the back door And I threw away the key

The song, says Bono, is about losing one’s faith. “I’m very sympathetic to people who have the courage not to believe,” he said, in the 2006 memoir U2 by U2 . “I’ve seen a lot of people around me have bad experiences with religion, be so badly abused they feel they just can’t go there anymore, which is a shame.” For a celebrity Christian of Bono’s caliber to suggest that abandoning faith is “courageous,” that “throwing away the key” is a principled act of love—this was, and remains, genuinely radical. “For the first time,” he sings at the song’s end, “I feel love.” Bono is not rejecting the Church here, and he is not rejecting Tammy Faye Bakker; he is rejecting the love of God. He is looking, instead, for human intimacy.

Toward the end of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest , another wildly experimental ’90s meditation on the addictive allure of television which remains thumpingly relevant in 2020, a man swears he’ll leave the priesthood unless his brother can convince him of humanity’s goodness. This priest proposes a test: His brother must sit on the floor of a subway station and beg—not for money, but to be touched. If even one single person deigns to reach out and lay a hand on him, then mankind is worth saving, not yet beyond salvation. After nine long months on the dingy floor of Boston’s Park Street Station, a handshake finally arrives, proffered by a child: “only 14 and largely clueless… about defensive strategies outside T-stations,” having “no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted.”

The conclusion Wallace reaches here is very like the one U2 arrive at in the songs of Zooropa : organized religion is not a guarantor of sanity and wellness; human touch is, even if it comes at great personal cost. “The Wanderer” of Johnny Cash’s closing track is not out to find God, but “to taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can”—at least, “before he repents.” This emphasis on the sensual, the physical, recurs throughout Zooropa , and not just as a counter to religious abnegation. The band warns, just as Wallace did, of the suffering that results when people are subsumed by their screens. Whether Bono is masturbating to a video vixen with “bright blue eyes” on “Babyface,” or weeping over a tape of his mother, on “Lemon,” it is abundantly clear that no amount of virtual intimacy holds the power of one real kiss, one last hug. 

For U2, this idea was a genuine political commitment. In the latter days of the carefully constructed Zoo TV tour, the band set aside time for unscripted video calls, via satellite, to a besieged Sarajevo. Long before the ubiquity of Skype and Zoom, these video calls were genuinely novel—conversations held in real time, as intimate as any dialogue broadcast on a Jumbotron can be. The suffering people of Sarajevo became as real to the cheap seats as the band itself. Participants in these calls confronted the complacent West directly, forcefully. “You’re all having a good time,” said a group of Sarajevan women, one night, via satellite, to a crowd at Wembley Stadium. “You’re going to go back to a rock show. You’re going to forget that we even exist. And we’re all going to die.” It was a profoundly uncomfortable moment; “the show,” according to manager Paul McGuinness, “never recovered.” As the video-call ended, and the women on the screen faded from view, Bono turned to a silent stadium. “Tonight,” he said, “we should all be ashamed to be European.” In the absence of Jesus, every person in the stadium was forced to lay hands on the leper.

U2 would never ask their audience to confront atrocities like this again. In the mid-2000s, their vacuous activism came with consumerist demands: to purchase (RED) products, to view the Live 8 broadcast, to sport a snow-white Make Poverty History bracelet next to your canary-yellow Livestrong. People who actually lived with HIV or lived in poverty were not the spokespeople of these campaigns; Bono was, posing on the cover of Vanity Fair next to Condoleezza Rice. Though the band still performs the stunning 1995 track “Miss Sarajevo” in live performances, it is now divorced from its original context. If the recent dust-up over Dua Lipa’s pronouncement of Kosovar Albanian indigeneity is any indication, most young people are fully unaware of Serbia’s war crimes. This is history that must be taught; U2, unfortunately, is no longer in the business of education.

But Zoo TV was the perfect blend of form and content for its political moment: a direct confrontation of distant violence, a subversive refusal of God and the Devil both, a hand extended in friendship on a subway platform otherwise crowded with folks hurrying home to watch television. It was wise enough to understand that the future may be bleak, but unafraid to push forward. “I have no compass,” sang Bono, on Zooropa ’s title track. “And I have no map, and I have no reasons, no reasons to get back.” He has no religion, either; nor does Cash, wandering at the album’s conclusion. “Jesus,” he sings, “don’t you wait up,” having left his home with “nothing but the thought of you”— you , another person; the same kind, perhaps, who opened the eyes of the narrator of “The First Time.” It is interesting to consider “The Wanderer” against Cash’s end-of-life masterpiece, the video for “ Hurt .” Director Mark Romanek films Cash in a Dutch master’s array of delicacies in slow decay; his camera lingers on a House of Cash wrecked by neglect. And yet June is in frame, alive, looking at her husband and loving him. “I left with nothing,” Cash sings, on Zooropa , “but the thought you’d be there, too.” And there, at the very end, she was.

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• August 12, 1993 Setlist

U2 Setlist at Wembley Stadium, London, England

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• Zoo Station Play Video
• The Fly Play Video
• Even Better Than the Real Thing Play Video
• Mysterious Ways Play Video
• One ( with "Hear Us Coming" and "She's a Mystery to Me" snippets ) Play Video
• Until the End of the World Play Video
• New Year's Day Play Video
• Numb Play Video
• Zooropa ( last performance until 2011 ) Play Video
• Babyface Play Video
• Stay (Faraway, So Close!) Play Video
• I Will Follow Play Video
• Satellite of Love ( Lou Reed  cover) Play Video
• Bad ( with "Fool to Cry" and "The First Time" snippets ) Play Video
• Bullet the Blue Sky Play Video
• Running to Stand Still Play Video
• Where the Streets Have No Name ( with "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" snippet ) Play Video
• Pride (In the Name of Love) Play Video
• Desire Play Video
• Ultraviolet (Light My Way) ( with "Getting to Know You", "Hanging on the Telephone", "I Just Called to Say I Love You" snippets ) Play Video
• Love Is Blindness Play Video
• Can't Help Falling in Love ( Elvis Presley  cover) Play Video

Edits and Comments

23 activities (last edit by kaz_usa , 20 Feb 2018, 20:02 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Even Better Than the Real Thing
• Love Is Blindness
• Mysterious Ways
• Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
• Until the End of the World
• Zoo Station
• Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
• Bullet the Blue Sky
• Running to Stand Still
• Where the Streets Have No Name
• Pride (In the Name of Love)
• Can't Help Falling in Love by Elvis Presley
• Satellite of Love by Lou Reed
• I Will Follow
• New Year's Day

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U2 Zooropa Tour 1993 Europe

More detailed listings from this tour can be found here .

By Anthony DeCurtis

Anthony DeCurtis

Bosnia and Herzegovina. The resurgence of Nazism in Germany. Mafia terrorism in Italy. Escalating unemployment throughout the former Western Bloc. Zooropa, indeed.

None of those issues is explicitly addressed on U2 ‘s startling new album, of course. But the chilling emotional atmosphere of Zooropa – one of grim, determined fun, a fever-dream last waltz on the deck of the Titanic – is well suited to contemporary times in the Old World. “I feel like I’m slowly, slowly, slowly slipping under,” Bono wails amid the dizzying disco rhythms of “Lemon.” “I feel like I’m holding onto nothing.” From that vantage of desperate spiritual dislocation, the vanished certainties of Cold War Europe look comforting.

Principally recorded earlier this year, Zooropa began as a toss-off EP to crank some juice into the European leg of U2 ‘s worldwide Zoo TV tour. Deeper inspiration struck, however, and with Brian Eno, the Edge and Flood producing, this 50-minute, 10-track album emerged.

Historically, U2 have always attempted to follow up breakthrough albums with less ostensibly ambitious efforts. Live EPs came hard on the heels of both War (1983) and The Unforgettable Fire (1984), and for the most part, they effectively eased the pressure on the band and left U2 free to explore whatever new aesthetic directions they pleased.

Unfortunately, the strategy backfired the last time U2 attempted a “spontaneous” one-off. In 1988, to get some distance on the prodigious success of The Joshua Tree , U2 perpetrated Rattle and Hum , an album-book-movie media blitz so self-conscious and contrived that it seemed about as unplanned as the invasion of Normandy.

With Zooropa the results are far more satisfying: The album is a daring, imaginative coda to Achtung Baby (1991), U2’s first unqualified masterpiece. Zooropa defuses the daunting commercial expectations set by that album while closing off none of the band’s artistic options. It is varied and vigorously experimental, but its charged mood of giddy anarchy suffused with barely suppressed dread provides a compelling, unifying thread.

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The title track sets the tone from the very start. As the song opens, a stately piano figure, beautiful and foreboding, underlies indecipherable, static-stricken signals from the information-age inferno of Zoo TV. That alluring sonic chaos ultimately yields to the wah-wah blast of the Edge’s guitar and the insistent groove of Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums. Bono enters like a Mephistophelean seducer, offering jaded pleasures, nurturing dissatisfaction and stoking desire, crooning the pander’s eternal appeal, “What do you want?”

The exuberant paranoia of Bob Dylan ‘s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” gets a postmodern twist on “Numb.” Above a hypnotic rhythm track and a repetitive, industrial guitar screech, the Edge blankly intones a long string of disconnected injunctions, post-apocalyptic advice (“Don’t move/Don’t talk out of time/Don’t think/Don’t worry everything’s just fine/Just fine”) for stunned survivors. Meanwhile, Bono coos in a woozy falsetto, “I feel numb/Too much is not enough.”

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For “The Wanderer,” Zooropa’s concluding statement, U2 usher in Johnny Cash to handle the lead vocal. It’s a wildly audacious move that could so easily have proved a pathetic embarrassment – U2 overreaching for significance yet again – but it works brilliantly. Speak-singing with all the authority of an Old Testament prophet, Cash movingly serves as a link to a lost world of moral surety (“I went out walking with a bible and a gun/The word of God lay heavy on my heart/I was sure I was the one/Now Jesus, don’t you wait up/Jesus, I’ll be home soon”), literally replacing the various corrupted and confused personas Bono (and, on “Numb,” the Edge) had occupied in the course of the album.

Cash’s “Wanderer” is no less lost than the album’s other dead souls, but his yearning to be found and redeemed sets him apart. Zooropa never resolves whether that yearning is merely nostalgic – a wish for a resurrection that has long ago been canceled – or a genuine intimation of hope. No matter: The album’s true strength lies in capturing the sound of verities shattering, of things falling apart, that moment when exhilaration and fear are indistinguishable as the slide into the abyss begins.

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1993 studio album by U2 / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Zooropa is the eighth studio album by Irish rock band U2 . Produced by Flood , Brian Eno , and the Edge , it was released on 5 July 1993 on Island Records . Inspired by the band's experiences on the Zoo TV Tour , Zooropa expanded on many of the tour's themes of technology and media oversaturation. The record was a continuation of the group's experimentation with alternative rock , electronic dance music , and electronic sound effects that began with their previous album, Achtung Baby , in 1991.

• " Numb " Released: June 1993
• " Lemon " Released: September 1993
• " Stay (Faraway, So Close!) " Released: 22 November 1993

U2 began writing and recording Zooropa in Dublin in February 1993, during a six-month break between legs of the Zoo TV Tour. The record was originally intended as an EP to promote the "Zooropa" leg of the tour that was to begin in May 1993, but during the sessions, the group decided to extend the record to a full-length album. [1] Pressed for time, U2 wrote and recorded at a rapid pace, with songs originating from many sources, including leftover material from the Achtung Baby sessions. The album was not completed in time for the tour's resumption, forcing the band to travel between Dublin and their tour destinations in May to complete mixing and recording.

Zooropa received generally favourable reviews from critics. Despite none of its three singles—" Numb ", " Lemon ", and " Stay (Faraway, So Close!) "—being hits consistently across regions, the record sold well upon release, charting in the top ten of 26 countries. The album's charting duration and lifetime sales of 7   million copies, however, were less than those of Achtung Baby . In 1994 , Zooropa won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album . Although the record was a success and music journalists view it as one of the group's most creative works, the band regard it with mixed feelings.

U2 Celebrating 'Zooropa' 30th Anniversary With Livestream and Special Reissue

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On Yellow Vinyl, Zooropa at 30

Zooropa, the 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Gatefold , will be released in a transparent yellow vinyl pressing to celebrate three decades of the band's Grammy-winning eighth studio album. 

Arriving this October , this special release coincides with ' U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At The Sphere ' opening in Las Vegas on 29th September. 

Pre order Zooropa - 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Yellow Vinyl and Gatefold here.

And starting next Wednesday, 12th July, join fans around the world for a global stream of ZOO TV: Live From Sydney. FOUR SHOWTIMES Showing 1: July 12 8PM BST / 7PM GMT Showing 2: July 12 8PM EDT / 12AM GMT Showing 3: July 13 8PM AEST / 10AM GMT Showing 4: July 13 8PM GST / 4PM GMT

A limited-edition merch capsule collection  (available for one week only) to mark the 30th anniversary will be available only until midnight PST on 13th July.   Pre-order here . 

'Zooropa... Don't worry baby, it's gonna be alright…'     Why was Zooropa such an exceptional album?  You tell us!   Add your reviews and memories in the comments below.

Produced by Flood, Brian Eno and The Edge, Zooropa was released on 5th July 1993 on Island Records . U2 began writing and recording Zooropa in Dublin in February of that year, during a six-month break between legs of the industry-defining ZOO TV Tour.  Initially intended as just an EP, Zooropa became a fully-fledged album with 10 tracks – including singles ' Numb ', ' Lemon ' and ' Stay (Faraway, So Close!) ' - recorded in just six weeks, making it the fastest U2 album ever produced. 

Inspired by the band's experiences on the ZOO TV Tour, Zooropa expanded on many of the tour's themes of technology and media oversaturation. The album went to Number 1 in Ireland, USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Sweden, Austria, France, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. In 1994, Zooropa saw the band collect the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

FORMATS - Zooropa - 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Gatefold 2 x LP Info: ·       Deluxe gatefold package on foil board ·       Newly added photo of the band by Anton Corbijn from 1993 on inner gatefold ·       2LP pressed on transparent yellow vinyl ·       2018 remaster – the original album tracks across 3 sides, with two additional mixes on side 4 Tracklisting:   SIDE 1: 1. Zooropa 2. Baby Face 3. Numb   SIDE 2: 1. Lemon 2. Stay (Faraway, So Close!) 3. Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car   SIDE 3: 1. Some Days Are Better Than Others 2. The First Time 3. Dirty Day 4. The Wanderer   SIDE 4: 1. Lemon (The Perfecto Mix) 2. Numb (Gimme Some More Dignity Mix)

Pre order Zooropa - 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Yellow Vinyl and Gatefold here.  

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The anniversary will be further marked by a special livestream and a limited merch capsule collection.

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A 30th anniversary limited edition pressing of U2 ’s 1993 landmark Zooropa will be released by Island Records and UMR in October. Ahead of that, the anniversary will be further marked by a special livestream and a limited merch capsule collection.

Shop the best of U2’s discography on vinyl and more .

Zooropa – 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Gatefold , which can be pre-ordered now , will be a transparent yellow vinyl pressing of the band’s Grammy-winning eighth studio album. The October release will coincide with U2’s return to the stage for U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At The Sphere , which is set to open on September 29, 2023 in Las Vegas.

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Next Wednesday (July 12), fans will be able unite to mark the album anniversary with a special global livestream of ZOO TV: Live From Sydney , taking place at 12 noon PST/ 8pm BST. The capsule collection, featuring all-new designs based on the Zooropa theme, will be available only until midnight PST on July 13.

Zooropa , produced by Flood, Brian Eno and The Edge and recorded in just six weeks – U2’s fastest-ever recording – was released by Island on July 5, 1993 on Island Records, only some five months after U2 began to write and record it in Dublin. In a period of creative intensity, this was in a six-month hiatus between legs of the ZOO TV Tour , and the record blossomed from the originally-planned EP into a a fully-fledged, ten-track album.

The album included the singles “Numb,” “Lemon,” and “Stay (Faraway, So Close!),” and was informed and inspired by the band’s recent experiences on the ZOO TV Tour , expanded on many of its themes such as technology and media oversaturation. The album became a No.1 hit in Ireland, the US, the UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Sweden, Austria, France, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. At the following year’s Grammys, Zooropa won for Best Alternative Music Album.

Pre-order Zooropa – 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Gatefold .

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