This fall, U2 will play a series of concerts inside of a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas. Dubbed The Sphere, the bowling ball costs an estimated $2 billion and has been dubbed the “world’s largest spherical structure,” which suggests that it is even larger than Joe Rogan’s skull. Actually, The Sphere is much larger than Joe Rogan’s skull — it is 26 stories tall and 37 stories wide, which is big enough to fit 164,000 speakers and around 18,000 people.
Because this story involves 1) a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas and 2) the internationally famous rock band U2, people naturally goofed on the residency when it was originally teased during the Super Bowl in February. But as The Edge explained to Rolling Stone, “We’re always on the lookout for emerging technologies in the world of concerts and audio.” That is absolutely true, particularly as it pertains to U2’s most famous concert experience, The Zoo TV Tour of the early ’90s, which utilized a barrage of video screens to create a multi-media experience that simultaneously harnessed and satirized the seductive qualities of television. The Sphere run is directly linked to Zoo TV by branding that centers on U2’s landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby, which will be the focal point of the shows.
But when I ponder the reality of a giant, state-of-the-art bowling ball in Las Vegas, the U2 album that feels more appropriate for this gaudy/campy sci-fi scenario isn’t the one that opened Zoo TV, but rather the one that concluded it. I refer to the seventh U2 LP, Zooropa, which was released 30 years ago today.
On that record, U2 dared to imagine something that in the present moment seems to be of little common interest: the future. When I say “the future,” I don’t mean the future as we have come to understand it, which is a slightly removed version of the present that’s scarcely different save for some incremental iPhone updates and steadily worse weather. I mean the future as it stood in the ’90s, when people looked beyond the 20th century and envisioned a radically different world emerging from a period of political and cultural uncertainty. Zooropa came out of that moment, and its version of the future makes a lot more sense in 2023 than it did in 1993.
I’ll give you an example: On the back half of the Zoo TV tour, Bono adopted a devilish persona he called MacPhisto. When playing this character, he applied white facepaint and lipstick in a manner that recalled Joel Grey’s emcee character from the 1972 Nazi musical Cabaret, and affected a mock British accent that resembled David Bowie at his most gacked-out. He wore a golden leisure suit, a puffy red shirt, and devil horns, as if he were a lounge singer from Hell (or Las Vegas). In 1993, this confounded a lot of U2 fans, because Bono was acting like the singer of a band who might one day play inside of the world’s largest bowling ball. Now we know he was just foreshadowing.
Of course, I understand why Zooropa is not the focus of a Las Vegas residency for which U2 will be paid $10 million on top of taking 90 percent of the gate at every gig. Achtung Baby is one of U2’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed records, and Zooropa … is not. At the time, it was their worst-selling record since their second, 1981’s pre-fame October, and was widely perceived as an inessential tangent from its predecessor. (Their next album, 1997’s Pop, sold even worse.)
Even the members of U2 have classified Zooropa as an arty indulgence that came in the midst of their least accessible era. (1995’s Original Soundtracks 1 by the Brian Eno-assisted side project Passengers took this experimentation to its furthest extreme.) By the dawn of the 21st century, U2 ceased reimagining the future and re-embraced its past, and immediately revitalized itself as one of the world’s top stadium-rock attractions.
More than any other U2 album, Zooropa has a muddled legacy. It has inspired thoughtful reappraisals, and it has also been called the U2 record that “almost killed their career.” But what fans and detractors agree on is that Zooropa ranks as the riskiest record U2 ever made, and that’s due entirely to the period from which it came. The process of making Zooropa began in early 1993 between legs of the Zoo TV Tour. Originally conceived as an EP, the album’s amalgam of sardonic media commentary and dead-serious spiritual crisis reflected the tone of the Zoo TV shows. On stage, U2 mixed cheeky pranksterism (like ordering 10,000 pizzas from a local pie shop in Detroit) with post-modern quasi-journalism (like the live remotes from Sarajevo with war-scarred locals during the tour’s European leg). Off stage, the band was shuttling around the world in their own “Zoo Plane” private jet and blasting ABBA songs nonstop. Their collective head space was not, as they say, normal.
The outside world was also in a state of flux. “The old ideologies have fallen away,” The Edge opined to Rolling Stone in a 1993 cover story. “Capitalism won out. You can’t even say it was democracy, because ultimately the ground upon which the battle was fought was economics — it was about money. And the West’s economy won, and communism is pretty much over.”
In the story’s next paragraph, The Edge — who was credited as Zooropa‘s co-producer, which nodded to his commanding role in guiding the music and even collaborating on the lyrics — essentially articulates the album’s central theme. “People are perplexed. Maybe the stability that the Cold War created was the foundation of the West’s movement forward, and now that that’s gone and we have the resurgence of radical nationalism, people in Europe don’t know who they are trying to be. Not only do they not know who they are, they don’t know who they want to be. They don’t know whether they want to be Europeans, part of the European community or whether they should be fighting to protect their national and ethnic identities.
“Even national boundaries don’t mean much anymore. You’ve got the movement in Italy to partition the country into two or three autonomous states. There’s the Basque-separatist movement that’s alive and kicking. Northern Ireland is still no closer to a real solution. And Yugoslavia is the most obvious example of where things are starting to dissolve. Sarajevo has been a symbol of this.”
This breakdown in boundaries and traditional roles is what Zooropa addresses, both lyrically and musically, throughout the record. U2’s mission, for once, is to constantly bewilder the listener. The album-opening title track is an update of “Where The Streets Have No Name,” only the desire for spiritual transcendence is expressed via the bland language of advertising-speak. (“Zooropa better by design / Zooropa fly the friendly skies / Through appliance of science / We’ve got that ring of confidence.”) On the album’s first single, the monotone oddity “Numb,” Bono abandons the lead singer role so that The Edge can intone a long list of “don’ts.” (This happens again at the end of the album in more dramatic fashion when Johnny Cash guests on the minimalist electronic epic “The Wanderer.”) For the second single, “Lemon,” the album’s most crushing personal narrative — Bono mournfully addresses the death of his mother — is set to its poppiest, most ABBA-like music.
Meanwhile, car crash imagery — an everyday form of technological disorientation and destruction — recurs in multiple songs. Even the most conventional U2-sounding track, “Stay (Faraway So Close),” double-backs on itself twice in the title. “Uncertainty can be a guiding light” is Zooropa‘s defining lyric, and yet another contradiction. Uncertainty guided U2, but there is very little light on this esoteric record made by the era’s broadest guitar-rock band.
Zooropa was artistically successful in that it set out to evoke an increasingly incoherent world by making anyone who heard it also feel incoherent. But that kind of artistic success plainly put it at cross-purposes with commerciality. (It is unlikely that the majority of listeners will ever appreciate the difference between deliberate confusion and confusion-confusion.) In 2023, however, Zooropa sounds different than it did in 1993. Unlike a lot of big-time alt-rock records from that year, it doesn’t feel dated. It, in fact, seems more relevant now than it did then.
To explain this, allow me to go on a brief, personal tangent: In August of 1993, more than a month after Zooropa was released, I reviewed the album for my local hometown newspaper. I was 15, and this was my first paid music-writing gig. I gave the album an “A” and wrote that it was composed of “pop songs that sound nothing like pop songs.” (I believe I was paid $15 for this incisive prose.)
My family did not own a computer in 1993. I wrote this review out longhand on notebook paper. I then asked my mother to drive me downtown to the newspaper office, at which point I slipped my folded-up notebook paper sheets with the fringes on the side into the mail slot. An editor then entered this data into a computer as big as 50 iPhones, and it wound up in the newspaper a week or so later.
That is how technology worked in 1993. Technology was slow, cumbersome, and ancient. But unbeknownst to me or my mother, the world as we knew it was already finished. About four months before I wrote that review — on April 30, 1993 — a world-changing innovation dreamt up by a 37-year-old Swiss physics researcher named Tim Berners-Lee entered the public domain. It was called the World Wide Web, and it was a new information system that made it possible for the average person with little or no computer knowledge to explore the Internet with ease. The effect of this, obviously, was seismic. In 1993, only 1 percent of all information moving through telecommunication networks came from the Internet. By 2007, it was 97 percent.
When U2 made Zooropa, they weren’t thinking about the World Wide Web, because virtually nobody was thinking about the World Wide Web in 1993. They were instead concerned with things like satellite television, that thrilling and overbearing new-ish innovation that allowed you “to go anywhere,” as Bono croons in “Stay (Faraway So Close).” Even though technology in 1993 was slow, cumbersome, and ancient, it felt quick, easy, and overwhelmingly immediate. The preoccupation with satellite TV should make Zooropa seem dated. But, incredibly, it does not. And that’s because the world U2 thought they were commenting on in 1993 was in reality just coming into existence, and it’s the world we’re living in now.
Zooropa is often uncanny in how it accidentally comments on online culture. The industrial guitar hook in “Numb” resembles the squawk of an Internet dial-up. “Babyface” is a good song about obsessing over a TV starlet, but it’s a great song about how internet porn disconnects chronic users from reality. And then there are the songs that unfold like lists (“Zooropa,” “Numb,” “Some Days Are Better Than Others”), which replicate the disconnected data dumps that populate social media feeds.
Above all, Zooropa summons the modern desire to unplug from the grid and reconnect with something “real” or “authentic.” The trilogy of songs that close the record (“The First Time,” “Dirty Day,” “The Wanderer”) meld the shadowy iconography of ’40s film noir and ’70s anti-westerns with Old Testament sermonizing about a godless society wracked by climate disasters and familial dysfunction where “sons turn their fathers in.”
The most remarkable track on Zooropa is also the most forward-looking: For “The Wanderer,” U2 was once again ahead of the curve in their appreciation of Johnny Cash, who was a year away from his Rick Rubin-assisted comeback with 1994’s American Recordings. Unlike Rubin, who stripped Cash’s music down to the studs, U2 mashed him up with a backing track that resembled the alien soundscapes of Another Green World. Thirty years ago, this might have seemed like a gimmick. But now, given the flattening of cultural boundaries online and the power of A.I. to situate deceased musical legends in any context we wish, putting Johnny Cash on the moon is plausible to the point of seeming barely noteworthy.
Listening to the song, you can picture Johnny traversing a post-apocalyptic hellscape. “Now Jesus, don’t you wait up,” he says. “Jesus, I’ll be home soon.” He’s out here “in search of experience.” He wants to feel as much as a man can before he repents, which is another way of saying that he wants tomorrow to be more exciting than today. In 1993, tomorrow presented real possibilities. No one could see what was around the corner. What we didn’t know is that the future wound up being scarier, and more banal (and definitely more spherical), than we could possibly imagine.
