Revisiting the albums of my youth: Zooropa

Music makes its deepest mark on us when we’re young; there’s no favourite song like the one we had when we were, say, 15 in the middle of our first crush.

Some of those early music revelations we carry forward, going back to listen to our personal classics again and again (for me, Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero soundtrack), or following the bands we adopted then through their various iterations and reinventions (Pet Shop Boys, New Order).

At the very least, our youthful music catalogue determines our taste later in life. As someone shaped to my core by brightly imagined 1980s acts like Thompson Twins, ABC and, a little later, Prefab Sprout and Deacon Blue,  the time-travelling neo-’80s sound of Alphabeat, Cut Copy, Capital Cities and Penguin Prison in the last decade has been like a dear friend coming back from the dead.

Some music doesn’t attach so tightly to us. We buy albums (we bought albums—this is the streaming age now, I know) during a particular time and place in our lives, with a particular set of contextual motivations that mean much less later on. Hype or an affection for the last record send us rushing out to plunk our hard-earned money down for something we hadn’t heard and, damn it, we were going to love it. Or feel betrayed. An album that seems like a revelation when we buy it can eventually sound like a dated dud, or vice versa.

I decided to go back into my CD and cassette collection (my mother got rid of my albums back in the 1990s during a major yard sale purge) to listen to things that I had set aside after my first infatuation, just to see if there was any lingering feelings of affection or resentment.

Back in 1993, I remember sending two friends who I knew from my university years a missive that somewhere stated that U2’s Zooropa “changes everything.” I want to believe it was a CC email, but since I wasn’t on the Internet until 1994, it must have been a letter I printed, copied and mailed. Neither of the recipients shared my enthusiasm; they didn’t argue back one way or the other and it was at this point I started to doubt our friendship.

I had avidly followed U2 since 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire—even now I can only listen to The Joshua Tree album when I am emotionally grounded enough to handle an intense rush of teenage nostalgia. While other bands had laid claim on my desire to dance or my sense of humour or my romantic side, U2 occupied the most existential chamber of my heart. By the time Zooropa came along, though, they were starting to feel too earnest to be as slick and clever as I wanted to be in my early 20s. My letter signalled that I wanted U2 to still be relevant, but also that I had reservations that that was so.

Listening now, “changes everything” was certainly naïve and definitely an overstatement. Sure, the grainy, lime green and hot pink digital imagery of the glossy CD booklet signalled a shift in U2’s image, which had until this time been etched in wood, stone and rust, smeared with dust and blood. The purposeful tackiness signalled a new ephemerality. The Unforgettable Fire may have been for the ages, but Zooropa came with a best-before date.

For U2 at the time, all the production tricks—the sound effects, the distortion, the bleeps and bloops, the non sequitur intro and extros—seemed bold and mysterious. In retrospect, the production was not much more aggressive than their previous album, Achtung Baby, which has sold more over time and is regarded with much more affection than Zooropa. (I probably listen to it more now than any other U2 album.) Zooropa had less sweat and grit, so was another small step away from U2’s core sensibility. But compared to today’s producer-driven chart-toppers, Zooropa still allows you hear each band member’s instrument as an instrument. The synth fuzz rarely gets in the way of The Edge’s guitar, Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums. It would be another six years before producers autotuned Cher for her Believe album; Bono’s singing is pretty much what it was on U2’s seven previous studio albums.

While Achtung Baby seemed to have placed every sound in its right place, Zooropa’s sonic texture, designed by Flood, Brian Eno and The Edge, comes across as sloppy to the point of contemptuous of the songs themselves. Which might have worked better if the songs were stronger. U2’s catalogue to that point was full of singalong classics. Quirky as it was, Achtung Baby was a genuine karaoke carnival: “One,” “The Fly,” “Mysterious Way,” “Even Better than the Real Thing.” As far as melody goes, Zooropa offers little to sink one’s teeth into. Beneath the layers of production, it now feels like a roundup of Achtung Baby B-sides tarted up to hide their deficiencies. The title track is supremely blah, even as it echoes their most anthemic work.

My choice for most appealing song, “Numb,” is a mumbled rap that only works as karaoke if you or your singing partner can pull off the chorus’ falsetto. The mumble/falsetto schtick also carries the next track, “Lemon,” making the songs feel like a two-for-one package, a charming “concept album” conceit that hints that neither is able to stand on its own.

On the first few listens back in 1993, I remember being fascinated by “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.” Perhaps for its grinding audaciousness, its strangely undanceable proximity to electronic dance music. It’s a song that’s constructed, not inspired. Now it seems like pure novelty, along the lines of Prince’s “Batdance.”

Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey were diva-ing away at the top of the singles charts in 1993, but so was Robin S. with “Show Me Love,” and Snap! with “Rhythm Is a Dancer.” Pop music was breaking into piece, with the dancey singles part getting much fluffier and, on the album-driven side of things, Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Wu-Tang Clan and Pearl Jam bringing on the heavy. At this time of my life, still going to nightclubs, I was definitely siding with the lighter stuff.

We tend to rebel against the music of our parents, which for me was country and western. So the guest of appearance of Johnny Cash on “The Wanderer” was a factor I could not overlook. My rationalization: The song was a joke, its fat, artificially squishy bass-line making fun of Cash’s existential doom. With a more seasoned taste, I can now hear the song as U2 trying desperately to add something—anything—to the force of nature that is Cash, before whom they were bowing down in homage. Perhaps the weirdly awkward production which placed quotation marks around Cash's appearance (he's credited as “starring” in “The Wanderer”), was what started me down the road to eventually appreciating him as a music legend, a hidden trigger that caused an explosion decades later. 

Though Zooropa may have signalled the end of U2’s cultural dominance, they were still gliding along at the height of their global commercial success. The band could pick and choose the best of what everyone else was doing, or zig when everyone else was zagging. Zooropa is a cocky album, but you can also hear it hedging its bets. That caution worked against the album as a reinvention, I think. The songs that were the U2y-ist, like “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” and “The First Time” get more respectful and traditional treatment. Even if they’re weaker than other U2 hits, they wouldn’t be jarring on a compilation album. “Changes everything” was more of a business plan than a new chapter of artistry.

For me, Zooropa was a signal to move on. It was the last U2 album I bought. I was sad it had put me on the wrong side of the divide between me and the university friends I had written to about it.

U2 would never be as playful as Björk, who has burst onto the scene and seemed to be able to harness philosophizing to goofiness and danceability. And they had seemingly given up on their desire to be grand and inspiring. (Though they did reclaim that on later albums.) For earnestness, I held onto Sting, though I was not included to proclaim my affection for him to my peers. He, too, was starting to feel a little embarrassing, a little too much like dad music.

That seemed to be the fight Zooropa lost—to not be music your dad would listen to. But I didn't take to it in my early 20s, and I am not much more fond of it now that I'm dad-aged.