Vorsprung Durch Technik

Happy 30th birthday to the underloved sibling

Because you don’t have enough U2 “content.”

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I’ve always liked the little spaceboy doodle.

30 years ago today, I was driving home from a trip to Montana with my friend Barrett. The two of us shared—and still share—a love of music. We’d been in a band together since junior high. Not coincidentally, the first song our band had ever played in front of anyone was U2’s “Sunday Blood Sunday” at some year-end assembly in eighth grade in which we briefly assumed that we were the greatest band to ever live. Anyway, by 1993, like most big U2 fans, we were more than a little eager to hear how the band would follow up their landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby. So much so that, right off of a 6-hour drive, we didn’t go home. We drove straight to Sound Off (RIP) to buy this long-awaited, new U2 album. I got it on cassette for reasons that require a separate post. Barrett got it on CD. Barrett was the first person I knew with one of those big carousel, home stereo CD players where you could load in, like, 15 CDs at once. It even had a “shuffle” feature where you could shuffle between CDs; you’d hear some mechanical noises emitting while the carousel moved from Nevermind to …But Seriously to Vivid. If I hadn’t been an ardent cassette loyalist, I would’ve been jealous of his setup.

We got back in the car and immediately stuck the cassette in the tape player (I miss not having a tape player in my car, honestly). It clicked in with that unmistakable sound and, then, what did we hear?

Some vague soundscape and, out of nowhere, Bono was…

…saying something in German?!?

BONO: Zooropa… vorsprung durch technik
ME & BARRETT: ?

It means “progress (or advancement) by technique.” And, I learned today, it was the ad slogan for Audi¹ for years and years. 1993 didn’t have Google Translate, much less reasonable access to the internet or anything like smartphones, so it just kinda shocked our ears to hear Irish Bono gurgling through some semi-intelligible German.

Sure, the line makes sense now, especially in context of the rest of the titular song’s lyrics, all of them a reflection of then-Bono’s fascination with capitalism and commercialism and technology and the seductive power of advertising. The song trots out other sarcastic takes on ad slogans: “Zooropa: Better by design / Zooropa: Fly the friendly skies.”

But back in 1993, as our very first taste of the new U2 album, Barrett and I just looked at each other nervously, attempting to disguise our initial confusion and vexation and, oh boy, maybe even disappointment. This was decidedly not the Achtung Baby follow-up we'd hoped for. The band, by our fanboy estimation, was on a hot streak: War > The Unforgettable Fire > The Joshua Tree > (Rattle & Hum with an asterisk²) > Achtung Baby. It would’ve been weird if we didn’t have celestial expectations for this album. Why wouldn’t this be just as good—or better—than the ones before it?

On the heels of “vorsprung durch technik”, we each had our doubts But, being U2 stalwarts, we soldiered on and gave it a good listen. Both refused to say it: letdown. But it was pretty clear we simply were not ready for whatever this was…disappointment? experimentation? a new U2? It for sure wasn’t Achtung Toddler³ or anything resembling a continuation of the last thing they’d done.

Rose colored glasses, though! We kept listening. Both in that car and, independently, in the weeks and months thereafter.

Some moments were better than others. From Day 1, I loved "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)⁴.” Overall, though, the album was a challenge. Maybe even an affront, which makes sense as far as art projects go. It grew on me to some extent. But it took a full decade before I could ever hear it as anything but The Head-Scratching Album After The String Of Great Ones.

My take on Zooropa, all these years later is this:

It’s a mainstream band taking chances, playing with house money, being willing to fail (and, to some degree, failing) at a time when most bands would be more intent on doing whatever it took to sustain their massive success. I love it for that. It’s quite indulgent in ways both positive and less so. The band at their artsiest. Most of all, though, I see it as critical bridge between who they were, who they’d become, who they thought they were becoming, and eventually who they went back to being.

I dialed it up recently and was surprised (delighted?) by how much I liked it. And not in that “straining to find its bright spots” kind of way. Genuinely enjoying. Now that more time has passed and electronic music (in 1993 it was far more niche and definitely more Euro-centric) has become more mainstream and I'm no longer on an endless quest for some The Joshua Tree II⁵ album, it kind of works.

Bono’s lyrics still have some heft in places, the quality of which Bono himself admits in his recent book would start to take a dip⁶ (see: “Some Days Are Better Than Others”) right around this part of their career.

Some of my favorites:

A little uptight, you're a baby's fist / Butterfly kisses up and down your wrist

Red lights, grey morning / You stumble out of a hole in the ground
A vampire or a victim / It depends on who's around

Three o'clock in the morning / It's quiet, there's no one around
Just the bang and the clatter / As an angel runs to ground

Beyond the lyrics, the production has teeth. The whole thing takes risks, experiments, zags. The band plays—and by that I don’t mean “plays their instruments” which of course they do; I mean plays like children play; there’s a playfulness and a curiosity that streams through the recordings. Take the buzzsaw hypnotech riff⁷ of “Numb.” It’s light years away from The Edge’s patented echo-heavy shimmery guitar parts that made them famous. It wouldn’t be too out of place on, say, a Nine Inch Nails remix. And you wanna talk about a zag? How about having The Edge sing (ok, monotonically mumble) the song instead of Bono? It’s the only U2 single with a lead vocal by anyone but Bono⁸.

Somehow, with this mumblecore fuzzsquawk song, they still managed to get MTV to play the video. Not only that, but MTV had The Edge perform the song live at the 1993 MTV Music Awards (Bono makes an appearance via one of the many TV screens—a hallmark of the Zoo TV era; meanwhile drummer Larry Mullen Jr and bassist Adam Clayton took the night off).

The Edge with no musical instrument or bandmate in sight.

For context, the other performers at the same awards show were:
-Madonna doing “Bye Bye Baby”, only the sixth-most streamed song⁹ from her 1993 album Erotica
-Lenny Kravitz doing “Are You Gonna Go My Way” with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on bass
-Sting doing “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You”
-Soul Asylum doing “Runaway Train” with REM’s Peter Buck and the underrated Victoria Williams
-REM doing “Everybody Hurts” and “Drive”
-Aerosmith doing “Living On The Edge”¹⁰
-Naughty By Nature doing “Hip Hop Hooray”¹¹
-Spin Doctors doing “Two Princes”
-Janet Jackson Doing “That’s The Way Love Goes”
-Pearl Jam closing it out with “Animal” and “Rockin’ In The Free World”¹² with Neil Young

If you think I did anything but love the ever-loving crap out of that show, you don’t really know me. If they’d added Counting Crows or Soundgarden to the lineup, I might’ve had an aneurysm. Looking back, it’s hard to believe the program was so light on hip-hop, though. And the most-nominated act of the night (En Vogue) didn’t even get to perform? Rock was still ruling the day. But its days were numbered.

All of this to say: it was awfully ballsy of U2 to send The Edge up there as more or less an art installment amid what else was happening on that stage that night.

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But I digress. Back to Zooropa…this is getting wordy. Let’s cut to bullet points:

• The drums on “Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car”! It’s my opinion that Larry Mullen Jr is an undersung (underhit? underdrummed?) drummer in rock history. This song takes him and then throws him through the oversaturated filter like he’s the drumming version of the guitar guy from Mad Max: Fury Road, drumming out the industrial end of times.

  

• The bassline on “Some Days Are Better Than Others”! I don’t know that I’d call Adam Clayton undersung (underbassed? underthumped?) but I will say that—in a band with an oft-caterwauling frontman and a sonic chemist/genius guitarist—U2 needed someone who played workmanlike. Clayton plays his part.

• Speaking of caterwauling, Bono’s falsetto really hits its stride on this record. He’d explored it on previous albums, most notably on Achtung Baby, but on Zooropa he finally takes the leash off. It’s the focal point of “Lemon”, it’s the counterpoint to Edge’s droll recitation on “Numb”, and it’s the siren descant to Johnny Cash’s post-apocalyptic narrator on “The Wanderer.” Pretty cool to uncover a new aspect of your instrument 15 years into your career.

• Bono’s lyrics explore faith in a fascinating way. He shows empathy for those who lose faith in “The First Time”, taking on the POV of a prodigal son who opts not to return. The narrator in “The Wanderer” grapples between faith and faithlessness. As a man who trends towards belief, I appreciate his willingness to tread on the doubt side of things.

• I already mentioned “Stay (Faraway, So Close!) but I just need to reiterate that I think it’s one of the best U2 songs out there. And, at risk of losing my fan card, say that I actually believe that—if produced differently—it might have been another hit for the band. In their experimentation on this record, I think this song might have gotten the short end of the production stick. With a different touch, maybe it becomes a radio song. (Another Paul Jacobsen hot take on a song that’s 30 years old!)

Long story short: Zooropa was unabashedly experimental. Meaning, that it valiantly fails in some spots as much as it shines in others. That’s what happens when you experiment. Sometimes it flies. Sometimes it falls. You can hear their infatuation with electronic music and their desire to figure out how it might play into their sound. You can hear it in the way The Edge is trying to get away from his trademark guitar sounds and how Bono is flirting with different lyrical approaches.

If you look at the album in the context and chronology of U2 albums, it makes a lot of sense. It is THE step between Achtung Baby and Pop, as much musically and lyrically as production-wise, and also a crucial relic of their misunderstood, over-the-top glitz era. You can see them get comfortable with the new sounds and discotech/techno elements on Pop (regardless of its commercial¹³ and critical failure). Zooropa is the electronica-experimenting chrysalis of Pop¹⁴. You might go so far as to say that Zooropa is the Junior High of U2 albums: awkward, shaky, screechy here, clumsy there, but with moments of their innate brilliant and engaging U2-ness. I'm also fascinated by it because, despite all of their P.R. efforts to be glammed-out and larger-than-life and detached iconic pop art pieces, they had a hard time burying their innate sincerity and earnestness beneath smugness. It sneaks out to spite them, in songs like “Lemon” that, if you look beneath its disco-dance veneer, is actually about Bono mourning the loss of his beloved mother.

You are who you are, no matter how many masks you layer on.

1. I’m in advertising. But I wasn’t in 1993. And I’ve never been a car guy. So this one flew over my head.

2. Rattle And Hum is widely derided and some of the reasons are sound. But I don’t share the sentiment. I love the album. I love the movie. And I believe that even the haters would have to admit that the album yielded some all-timers: Desire, All I Want Is You, Angel of Harlem, When Love Comes To Town, and two first-ballot Underrated U2 Song Hall of Famers in Love Rescue Me and Van Diemen’s Land.

3. I hated this joke. It’s just that the other options were far worse:
Achtung Terrible Two
Achtung Tween
Achtung Adolescent
Achtung Teenager
Achtung Adult
Achtung Elder (which might actually be what we’re going to see in Vegas this fall)

4. Even with its pretentious parenthetical. This was a decade before Sufjan really brought the parenthetical song title heat.

U2 played it acoustic in San Jose when Barrett and I finally saw them live for the first time in 2003. And I saw Billy Corgan & James Iha cover it at the Bridge School Benefit in 1999. Both were goosebump moments for me, as neither was remotely expected.

5. I should have just done Achtung Baby II in the first place.

6. A fantastic anecdote featuring none other than Cillian Murphy.

7. Writer Steven Hyden did a 30-year write up. I loved this part about “Numb”:

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.

8. Bono isn’t one to cede the spotlight. But on Zooropa he does so twice. Once to the true star of U2 (The Edge) and the second time to legend Johnny Cash. And remember, this was pre-Cash-issaince Johnny. His career (and cred) hadn’t been revived yet by his collaboration with producer Rick Rubin. He was still in his sorta sad, diminished phase, playing state fairs and dinner clubs and who knows what else. He was (unfairly) a nostalgia act, stuck in an uninspired rut. And U2 beat the culture to the punch, even if it was cooler to like Rubin’s recordings.

9. Both U2 and Madonna’s performances are a commentary on star power and how some artists truly play with it. The song was the SIXTH single—and a clearly inferior song to some of the others— from Madonna’s record, but, ever the provocateur, she knew she could make a brothel-esque spectacle and, ever the capitalist, wanted to milk the album for all it was worth. U2 and Madonna were given pole position-type spots solely because they had the star power.

10. Did you know that Los Lobos’ “Kiko and the Lavender Moon” beat out Aerosmith for “Breakthrough Video”? MIND. BLOWN.

11. Did you know that Arrested Development (the ATL rap group, not the show) beat out Naughty By Nature for “Best Rap Video'‘? The other nominees were Digable Planets and a little song called “Nuthin’ But A G Thang” by some guy named Dr. Dre.

12. A truly pantheon MTV Awards show moment.

13. Steven Hyden’s article, regarding Zooropa’s relative poor chart performance:
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.)

14. Pop working as a butterfly in this metaphor is another question, though.