#U2 ZOOROPA FULL#
#U2 ZOOROPA FREE#

(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. 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 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. There’s a bit of bog-standard rock balladry on Zooropa, but it is, otherwise, a record of staggering weirdness. Maybe he’d have preferred to lock horns with Ozzy Osbourne and Meat Loaf in the rock categories. “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. 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. Instead, they made an odd hybrid of live album and avant-garde experiment. U2 intended to record a companion EP to Achtung Baby, something to spur ticket sales as Zoo TV continued into its second year. 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. The album’s sleeve is a bright collage of purples and pinks, blues and yellows on every album since, they’ve opted for greyscale.

#U2 ZOOROPA FREE#

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. Very little has changed if we’re talking geopolitics everything has changed if we’re talking U2. So goes the introduction to nearly every review of U2’s Zooropa published in 1993.

U2 zooropa