U2 zooropa tv#

Maybe you are howling “SHE WO-AH LEMMMON” in a derisive-farting-sound falsetto at this precise moment. We should just dispense with “Lemon,” right? Okay. As we will see, one of 2012’s best rock songs rips off Zooropa‘s first single wholesale. (The wordless, formless first 1:45 is basically an Oneohtrix Point Never record: uneasy synths, plaintive piano, thrice-VHS-dubbed chattering ghouls.) That a lot of it sounds totally normal now shows how oddly ahead of, and out of, its time it was. It is not quite their most despised album - that’d be 1997’s stupendously gaudy Pop - but it is undoubtedly their weirdest.

U2 zooropa tv#

Zooropa was originally intended as a stopgap EP in between legs of the Zoo TV tour, but like many things in U2’s universe, it just kept growing. No: Here began the Weird Years, the Ironic Years, the Tacky Even for Them Years, the Flirting Awkwardly With Dance Music Years, the Dark Years, and/or the Sucky Years if you look to these guys for meat-and-potatoes guitar-god bombast. Its parents won’t be throwing a lavish party or buying it a Camaro. U2’s eighth album turns 20 years old today. What job? The best band in the world job.”īut to stage such a ferocious comeback, you’ve got to fall off. The piece’s opening line: “Bono is an egomaniac.” Its climactic quote: “ reapplying for the job.

That American flag jacket made the Time cover, in fact. With that, their staggering comeback was complete: 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, a massive back-to-grandiose-basics success a triumphant 100-plus-date tour, culminating with their 2002 Super Bowl halftime set - unafraid to play the 9/11 card, down to the backdrop crawl of the victims’ names and Bono’s climactic American-flag-as-jacket-liner reveal - which was a genuinely moving and cathartic career peak. So let’s begin at the end, shall we, with U2’s apology, which we can date to a February 2002 Time magazine cover story with the headline (brace yourself) “Can Bono Save the World?” (It wasn’t a sarcastic question, by the way - this was post-9/11, and thus post-irony.) You know you’ve made it as a Serious Rock Band when an entire years-long phase of your career is so problematic that you spend a subsequent entire, years-long phase of your career apologizing for it.