ZOOROPA
(1993)
.::
ZOOROPA ::. [back
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Playing
the new album's first track, "Zooropa," Bono shouts above the music: "A
lot of what's in this album comes from reading the work of William Gibson"
-- the cyberpunk sci-fi author.
[...]
When
the Edge rides in with a steely, angry "Zoo Station"-like bolting together
this amorphous musical maze, followed by Larry Mullen's steadying pulse
on drums and bass, Bono yells, "It's a trip!" Less flippantly he
adds: "That's what I want it to be! Legal drugs. Why else would
you buy an album these days?"
(from
"Bono vs. The Beast -- A Guided Tour Through U2's New Album" by Joe Jackson,
Musician, August 01, 1993)
While U2 sets no advance expectations about what, if anything, it might release from its studio deliberations, the intention behind the recording was always clear. "One of the central ideas of Zooropa [the album] is that it is of the moment, it's catching the stuff that's in the ether at that time. We went into the recording studio with that in mind. And looking back now, I'm delighted that it became an album because it has captured the moment, for me at any rate. Of all our records it probably is the most vital and current. It's like a Polaroid of what was happening to us and what was happening around Europe at that time.
"And some of the ideas that we were playing with while we were recording seems to be catching up," he adds. "We started songs like 'Zooropa' itself which was dealing with the way Europe and the EC [Common Market] seems to be dissolving, and that process now seems to be accelerating."
(from
"New 'Zooropa' Revue" by Hugh Fielder, Pulse! Tower Records magazine, October 01, 1993)
The title track itself is like a post-modernist sermon, if that's not a contradiction in terms.
[Edge:] It's a word collage almost, cut-ups of advertising words; it's really the way the words are supposed to evoke a certain memory that is important. The weirdest thing is the way it started to become a kind of Euro-manifesto. My favourite line is: "We're mild and green and squeaky clean."
[Edge:] Taking advertising jargon, you start to get an insight into the advertising culture that produced it.
(from
"The Edge Of The Zoo", Propaganda, Issue 18, November 01, 1993)
[The advertising slogans and companies, according
to the "Mysterious
Ways " website:
"Vorsprung
durch technik" -- Audi
"Be
all that you can be" -- The US Army
"Eat
to get slimmer" -- SlimFast
"A
bluer kind of white" -- Persil / Daz
"We're
mild and green, and squeaky clean" -- Fairy Liquid Mild Green
"Better
by design" -- Toshiba
"Fly
the friendly skies" -- United Airlines
"Through
appliance of science" -- Zanussi
"We've
got that ring of confidence" -- Colgate]
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.::
BABYFACE ::. [back
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"This
is called 'Babyface,'" says Bono. "And in this brightly lit, fucked-up
commercial landscape we'll have onstage, we take the audience through a
window and there's a guy watching somebody on a TV, a personality, a celebrity
he's obsessed with. It's about how people play with images, believing
you know somebody through an image, and think that by manipulating a machine
that, in fact, controls you, you can have some kind of power (sings, in
a chillingly sweet voice): "Watching your bright-lit eyes / In the freeze
frame / I've seen them so many times / I feel like I must be your best
friend / You're looking fine, so fine."
(from
"Bono vs. The Beast -- A Guided Tour Through U2's New Album" by Joe Jackson,
Musician, August 01, 1993)
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.::
NUMB ::. [back
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"Edge
has just got a list of things there, one following the other," says Bono.
"'Don't cry / Don't eat / Don't drink / Don't sleep.' It's kind of
arcade music, but at base it's a dark energy we're tapping into, like a
lot of stuff on Achtung Baby. And, here, I use my Fat Lady voice
that I used on 'The Fly.' There's a big fat mama in all of us!
But you need that high wail set against the bass voice because the song
is about overload, all those forces that come at you from different angles
and you have no way to respond. It's us trying to get inside somebody's
head. So in that mix you hear a football crowd, a line of don'ts,
kitsch, soul singing and Larry singing for the first time in that context.
So what we're trying to do is recreate that feeling of sensory overload."
"Numb"
ends as it began, with a drumbeat yet minus Edge's guitar lines.
The drumbeat is sampled from the Nazi propaganda The Triumph of the Will.
Changing
the tape again, Bono explains: "For us, it's a new way of working.
We've been taking audiovisual loops and working with them. That drum
loop comes from the scene where an 11-year-old Nazi plays the drum at the
1936 Olympic Games. And we're going to be playing, and using that
loop, in the actual stadium where that boy played, in Berlin. That's
going to be a very eerie moment, because that boy could still be alive,
I suppose."
(from
"Bono vs. The Beast -- A Guided Tour Through U2's New Album" by Joe Jackson,
Musician, August 01, 1993)
Bono:
It's Edge playing the rhyming thesaurus like a conga player, that's what
I think.
Edge:
It was a lot of fun, actually. It didn't take very long once we got
the idea. I just sat down and wrote out about eight sheets of possible
lyrics, then went in and put it together pretty much just verse by verse
until I got some kind of shape to it. The mix was the easiest thing
in the world, you just put up the faders and just let it go.
(from
an interview by Carter Alan in Verona, Italy, July 03, 1993)
Using television [Zoo TV] was certainly a very timely idea, given that the Gulf War was
starting and TV news channels were suddenly required viewing.
[Edge:] Yeah.
Once we'd figured out that it was going to be television, a lot of connections
started to happen. It was a very dark time with the Gulf War.
I think it was the period when cable TV -- particularly CNN and Sky --
started to have a major impact. Because it was like you were watching
history unfolding live on TV. But what we were aware of was how editorialised
that coverage was. It was having the opposite effect to what you
might have imagined. Instead of it drawing people closer to the issues
and making people more aware -- and therefore more concerned -- about what
was actually happening, and more motivated, it was actually desensitising
people to what was going on.
It became a form of entertainment...
Yeah, it was almost as if
the news had become another entertainment form, and at the end of the news
you just turned off and went back to your life. There seemed to be
no sense that there was any need to respond in any way. And I think
we're seeing now that the net result of that is there's a much greater
appetite for "reality TV," as they call it. I think that is completely
as a result of this thirst people have developed for not fiction, but what's
actually happening, as a form of entertainment. And it smacks of
the Roman Coliseum or whatever -- people showing up to watch the latest
tragedy unfolding. And I guess with the Zoo TV shows we were trying
to draw some attention to what was going on.
[...]
And there's also "Numb,"
which you sang...
Well, that's the least emotional
song (laughs).
Is that how you felt at the
time? Numb?
I think it was definitely
a comment on what we've just been talking about -- the TV news as entertainment
syndrome. 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. So that was really where that lyric came from.
(from "Closer To The Edge"
by Olaf Tyaransen, Hot
Press, December 04, 2002)
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.::
LEMON ::. [back
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Carter:
"Lemon" would be the best example of how you use the falsetto, the "fat
lady" voice, on the new record.
Bono:
Yeah. "Lemon" is a song from two completely different traditions
-- a European tradition and an almost Disco Duck, Studio 54 kind of tradition.
It was influenced a lot by Fellini, who's an Italian filmmaker we were
into. It's a juxtaposition that seems to work. I don't know,
you got to be playful. Mystery and mischief -- that's where rock
and roll is at. It has to have both of those ingredients. There's
a bit of mischief in the "fat lady" voice.
(from
an interview by Carter Alan in Verona, Italy, July 03, 1993)
[...]
Bono has been unable to finish the lyrics for a track called "Lemon," his
attempt to write a Prince song. Faced with such a block, Eno and
Edge dig up and sing an alternative melody and lyric ("A man makes a picture
/ a moving picture / through light projected he can see himself up close")
that had been rejected for being too much like the Talking Heads.
This second lyric is about filmmaking and quotes the director John Boorman,
who once employed the young Paul McGuinness as a production manager and
who used to say he made his living "turning money into light." Edge
and Eno put the movie song together with Bono's Prince tribute and the
result sounds nothing like Prince, Talking Heads, or U2.
(from
"U2 At the End of the World" by Bill Flanagan, 1995)
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.::
STAY (FARAWAY, SO CLOSE!) ::. [back
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Bono: [...] The song we're most sure about is the one we've called "Faraway, So Close!", like the film.
[Wim Wenders:] I've listened to it once or twice. Wonderful. There are three versions on the tapes, one instrumental, a second called "Control Room," much more tender and sweet, while the third is more rock with an omnipresent guitar.
Bono: That's it. We've sent you the instrumental version because I thought that the words, even if they share some of the themes of the film, were too specific.
[Wim:] What you consider too specific is in fact very close to the film, the last couplet about the fallen angel is superb.
Bono: It's a song about an impossible relationship and someone looking at what's happening. In those kinds of situations, observing and the desire to intervene can poison everything.
(from
"Lights, Camera, Achtung Baby", Propaganda, Issue 19, May 01, 1994)
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.::
DADDY'S GONNA PAY FOR YOUR CRASHED CAR ::. [back
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Carter:
You're talking about sounds. In "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed
Car" it seems as if the sounds created the song.
Bono:
Yeah, that's interesting because that's a combination of two traditions.
See, that's a blues. In very basic form, that's a blues. Robert
Johnson, that's what that (song) is. "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your
Crashed Car," it's a song about dependence, the things that you need and
the things that reek. It can be read any way -- it could be the Devil,
it could be God. [...]
(from
an interview by Carter Alan in Verona, Italy, July 03, 1993)
[Edge:] "I think that in this new era of U2, the songs that are the most abstract and disconnected from our own situation are the closest to revealing where we're at. The songs that seem to be more autobiographical I think are the ones that are more fictional. Which is the opposite of the way people have seen it."
One of these own-ups is the funky "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" -- ostensibly about addiction, another word for what the Edge calls dependency. "It's dependency on what? That's the question. It doesn't have to be illegal substances. You can be addicted to applause, you can be addicted to being on the road. I mean, being in U2 can be its own addiction. We have to recognize that. And there's a part of that in the lyrics. The image of Daddy is one of benevolence and in this song it's twisted around and become the thing that you're dependent on and that you look for support from."
(from
"New 'Zooropa' Revue" by Hugh Fielder, Pulse! Tower Records magazine, October 01, 1993)
His
divided mental state [after returning home from the Zoo TV tour]
is affecting Bono's songwriting. A song called "Daddy's Gonna Pay
For Your Crashed Car" begins "You're a precious stone / You're out on your
own / You know everyone in the world but you feel alone." Sounds
like a good description of U2 on tour in America to me. Bono tries
handing me a line about the song as a religious metaphor ("Daddy may be
God," he says, "but he could be the devil too.") and I say, "Ah, come on,
Bono. Daddy is Paul McGuinness. Daddy is the organization that
provides you with all these cars and planes and fancy meals and settles
the bill after you leave, pays off the posse if you break something."
Bono
says, yes, that's right -- but he would probably say that even if it had
never occurred to him before. He may very well have in mind for these
songs bigger metaphors and deeper meanings than life as a rock star, but
the fact that he is so deep in a tour mentality while he's writing means
that they are completely informed by that strange perspective.
(from
"U2 At the End of the World" by Bill Flanagan, 1995)
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.:: THE FIRST TIME ::. [back
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"The First Time" seems to be an open-ended retelling of Jesus' parable of The Prodigal Son, but this time riven with uncertainty in keeping with the feel of the whole record -- did he come home or not?
[Edge:] I always thought of that lyric as touching on the themes of our very first record, almost like "I Will Follow" -- there is this sense of unconditional love, and the response to unconditional love is almost the opposite to what you might imagine.
You run from it, instead of to it.
[Edge:] That's right, and maybe that is the right response sometimes. Bono started writing that in Los Angeles, and he and I were working on it for Al Green. We started three songs and sent one to Al, but I don't know if he is going to record it. "The First Time" is one we decided we'd record ourselves. It's almost like a film script, starting out with characters and scenario and situation. We weren't quite sure until we were recording the song which way he was going to end the story.
(from
"The Edge Of The Zoo", Propaganda, Issue 18, November 01, 1993)
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.::
DIRTY DAY ::. [back
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Bono
explains that "Dirty Day," the next track, "is exactly as it happened":
a largely instrumental sonic rumble, and ramble, made up mostly of improvised
riffs and rhythms in the studio.
"Iggy
Pop was very much an influence in terms of the way he'd make up songs in
performance," he explains. "So this is really U2 in its most raw
state. At the moment I'm toying with the idea of something that keeps
flashing up in front of me when I hear the music, an image of a father
giving surrealist advice to his son. I also see Charles Bukowski
in my head and the kind of advice he gives, like 'Always give a false name!'
But whatever lyric I finally put to it, the music strikes me as very sad.
What I'm saying there is 'Make it better, son.' The feeling I get
is that the father has fucked off, or something like that. Then again
it may end up begin about Gorbachev! But what you're hearing there
is the base if what probably will become a song, and the creative process
is obviously very much dictated by the atmosphere the band originally got
while improvising. That's what will dictate the kind of lyrics the
song finally has."
(from
"Bono vs. The Beast -- A Guided Tour Through U2's New Album" by Joe Jackson,
Musician, August 01, 1993)
[Dirty
Day was dedicated to the American beat poet Charles "Hank" Bukowski (1920-1994)
in the liner notes, and the phrase "days run away like horses over the
hills" is in fact borrowed from his work (thus the 'Hank says').]
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.::
THE WANDERER ::. [back
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One
track on the new album highlights the ways in which U2 are intent on kicking
rock into the 21st century while refusing to deny its equally important
links to the past. That track, "The Wanderer," features a lead vocal
by Johnny Cash.
"Johnny
Cash is a very smart man and he's definitely someone who had no problem
coming along with us for the ride, for the trip," says Bono, laughing as
he changes the tape. "He came in from day one and started singing
over what we described as this 'Holiday Inn band from hell!' And
yet, seriously, this song is definitely the antidote to the Zooropa manifesto
of uncertainty.
"Even
if it begins with 'I don't have a compass / I don't have a map' -- in other
words, I don't know, I don't know, but I accept this state of uncertainty
-- this track gives one possible solution.& But overall on the album
the key is learning to live with uncertainty, even allowing uncertainty
to be your guide."
(from
"Bono vs. The Beast -- A Guided Tour Through U2's New Album" by Joe Jackson,
Musician, August 01, 1993)
U2 used to be criticised for their uncertainty. One American reviewer said that in the midst of all the uncertainty on the record, "The Wanderer," the last song on Zooropa, offers a sense of certainty again, a suggestion that maybe it's not all uncertain.
[Edge:] I always saw that song as the denouement of the album, it felt like the credit roll, and I think in some senses it condenses the idea of the uncertainty of the album, that ultimately we are crawling around in the dark looking for something to hold on to. That journey is both a physical one -- as in our case, being on the road -- and a spiritual, political and social one.
[Edge:] The last song I don't think has much in the way of reassurance because the character that Johnny is singing about reveals himself to be a complete nutcase at the end of the song, off doing God's work. It emerges that he's just a mad guy on a journey that he has described to himself as one thing, but is actually something completely different -- the split personality aspect of the character is most disturbing. It's not a question of what you are searching for, but why you are searching in the first place.
(from
"The Edge Of The Zoo", Propaganda, Issue 18, November 01, 1993)
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