The 1990s in 10 Albums: Zooropa (1993)
Dream out loud.
In 2017, U2 released Songs of Experience, the supposed ‘quick follow-up’ to Songs of Innocence. It took three years, something that exposes the truth about U2 these days: they’re not quite the full-time concern they used to be. True, Bono apparently had a near-death experience recently, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the U2 of the 1980s or 90s would have been done long before then.
That U2 have avoided going full Rolling Stones (albums of new material once per eternity, tours for the sake of tours, more of a vehicle for selling t-shirts than an actual band these days) as they enter their fifth decade is impressive. The thing is, they once recorded an album in the middle of a colossal world tour, and released it a mere 18 months after the previous one (a legendarily difficult one, at that).
Zooropa was the opposite of a difficult album, with the distorted purple lettering on its cover hinting at songs which didn’t even make the album, and would emerge over the following four years (to judge from how well one of them fits its purpose, they apparently saw the next Batman movie from two years out). But what’s remarkable about the music inside is that, for the first and possibly only time, it’s the sound of a U2 album that isn’t trying to reach the back of a stadium — which also makes its their most interesting album.
Because U2 have never been a band to half-commit — every album tends to have a unified sound of sorts — Zooropa is also the one album of theirs that manages to be a grab-bag, too. A track like “Numb” (hip-hop, I guess, in the same way the theme tune to The Simpsons is a classical/jazz crossover) would ordinarily command an entire album of the stuff, but here it’s allowed to exist in isolation, where its glorious weirdness can stand out further. So, to, can we appreciate the quiet dignity of “The First Time” without its impact being buried by half a dozen soundalikes. The mutant hybrid of the two, “The Wanderer” (ft. Johnny Cash in a baffling, inspired pick) gets its own unique highlight too.
None of which makes Zooropa the mere collection of 10 songs on a disc. From the title track to “The Wanderer”, it stakes itself as European, more than The Joshua Tree was ever an ‘American’ album (they even stuck the EU flag on the cover, just in case it’s not obvious enough). There’s a simultaneous newness — the electronica here is of the mid-to-late 1990s persuasion, rather than the plinking keyboards and basic loops on Screamadelica — and sense of the ancient, as in the spacious backgrounds of “The First Time” and “Stay” — the latter, in particular, has this vast density during the pre-chorus that doesn’t seem to appear on any other U2 song.
The 2nd half of Zooropa gets a little weaker. “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car” and “Some Days Are Better Than Others” each have one idea during their runtime, and both seem to loosely tie into the rest of the album at best. Even so, with the possible exception of the Passengers project, Zooropa remains the boldest album U2 have ever made, and as a consequence, it’s one of their best. True, divorced of its full context — the ZooTV tour and Achtung Baby — it doesn’t make as much sense. But in many histories of U2, the story seems to skip from the Berlin reinvention to the various and slightly overstated fiascos of the PopMart tour, treating this album as a mere curio, or like the EP it was originally intended to be.
In part, this is probably for the same reason I haven’t contextualised this album within the decade yet: Zooropa doesn’t quite carry the weight of profundity, the palpable heaviness and sense of zeitgeist that allows The Dark Side of the Moon, or Screamadelica, or even Achtung Baby, to show up in all-time Best Albums lists. This, I think, is a point in its favour. It’s unmoored from 2018 with its post-Berlin-Wall context, but also unmoored from 1993 (sandwiched in the UK №1 Albums list between Jamiroquai and UB40, for example); in a way, that means it’s there for anyone who finds it.
