Word: zooropa
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...year existence, and that's not such a bad thing. Early on, Bono sang with a moral force that suggested Cotton Mather with a mullet; not satisfied to rock you on "Sunday Bloody Sunday," he needed to convert you. In the towering period that spanned The Joshua Tree to Zooropa, U2 made stadium-size art rock with huge melodies that allowed Bono to throw his arms around the world while bending its ear about social justice. After 1997's Pop - a disastrous mix of disco and hubris that provided a harrowing glimpse of career death - the band decided to banish...
...into 90’s alternative failed to collapse as drastically as we wanted it to, given the band’s self-righteousness and potential for pretension by the 80s’ close. The cycle repeated, though, and we kept watching through the relative failures of experimental albums Zooropa and Pop, and as the band won back their audience of baby boomers and their kids with the sappy balladry of 2000’s All that You Can’t Leave Behind. The problem, then, was that people bought it, and bought it big. How To Dismantle...
...other style--murky, cold, abrasive--has the same exhilarating-yet-numbing power of much of U2's latest albums. The third track "Jam J," seems lifted right from Zooropa, with driving rhythms, snarly lyrics obscured by feedback, and angry bursts of guitars breaking through the mess...
...despite the future-shock flourishes, most of Zooropa flies beneath the radar, mapping a personal terrain of reflection and emotional catharsis. The sensory overload of superstardom is chillingly conveyed in Numb as the Edge's monotonic vocal is underscored by a lacerating guitar lick. Other songs are suffused with a sense of fleeting time. In Some Days Are Better than Others, Bono observes, "Some days take less but most days take more/ Some days slip through your fingers and onto the floor." And in the hymnlike Dirty Day, he seems to glimpse his own mortality as he sings, "These days...
...performed by guest singer Johnny Cash that pushes the album into the numinous region of The Joshua Tree. Bono still hasn't found what he's looking for, but the search continues to redefine the boundaries of modern rock. Like a memoir written while the applause is still thundering, Zooropa is a plugged-in, spaced-out dispatch from the blinking LED eye of the multimedia storm...