U2 – Zooropa [Audio CD]

Description

U2 Zooropa + Stay (Rare 1993 Australian-only limited edition double CD set comprising the 10-track Zooropa CD album with the purple interference silk screen printed disc along with a bonus exclusive 4-track Stay [Faraway So Close!] CD single each in their own case with picture sleeve and housed within a unique outer card picture box. The box displays just a little light general wear whilst the contents remain near as new) Zooropa is almost perverse in the way it subverts every expectation we’ve ever had of U2. The world’s most serious rock band releases an album of advertising parodies, Prince imitations, girl group tributes, taunts of rich girls and straightforward love songs. The album opens with the title tune, a vision of a near-future Europe that finds its common culture in advertising slogans and synth programs. As Bob Dylan once did with “Like a Rolling Stone”, U2 takes aim on “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car” at a spoiled rich girl who discovers her life of privilege has sapped all her strength. Bono’s vocal has a Dylanesque sneer, but the Edge’s guitar and Mullen’s percussion create the sounds of a snarled traffic jam and Clayton’s in-your-face bass line throbs like a migraine headache. By contrast, “The First Time” is the most genuinely romantic track U2 has ever recorded. The most surprising and most pleasurable tracks on the album, though, are a pair of R&B infatuation numbers, “Babyface” and “Lemon”. Nothing better serves overextended rock stars than a return to the music’s origins at the sock hop. The results aren’t always fully satisfying, but they do reveal an unglimpsed, unexpected side to one of the world’s most celebrated, most ambitious pop acts. –Geoffrey Himes Review U2 was unassailable by the mid 90s – they had married art and commerce in a glorious union. They had underlined the post-modernism of Achtung Baby with the Zoo TV Tour, which saw Bono ridiculing his band’s vaunted position with enough sincerity as to not lose their audience, and in the process, gain a new one. Zooropa took the restless flippancy of Achtung Baby and multiplied it. As every lumpen rock band seemed to latch on to glitter and quotation marks, U2 were still ahead of the pack, releasing this left-turn of a ‘mini-album’, produced by Flood, Brian Eno and the Edge. It was a European answer to Britpop and grunge, which almost perversely seemed to ditch any trademarks associated sonically with the band. Using all of Eno’s tricks and atmospherics, they took what was essentially some slight material, dressed it in filmic, artificial beauty and continued their march as the greatest band in the world. The title track emerges out of two minutes of atmospherics; and comes in two parts. Numb – a collection of negative instructions – is a critique on the relentless and disposable nature of popular culture. A lot is down to the album’s sound – the synth and percussion clash at the start of Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car; the warmth of Adam Clayton’s bass on Some Days Are Better Than Others. The ”man builds a city” refrain in Lemon is Eno revisiting his choral work with Talking Heads on Remain In Light, using the voice as another instrument, to lustrous effect. It is only the final track, The Wanderer, sung by Johnny Cash, which reinstates the real and provides a link with the mythical heartlands of America they spent the latter half of the 80s searching for. For something that was essentially an adjunct to its predecessor (and much was made about how quickly it was delivered) Zooropa still has a delightful hi-tech raggedness to it. It is a bit serious and a bit daft at the same time. Remarkably,