Can We Talk About Zooropa For a Moment?

Few albums have ever spoken more boldly, and accurately, about the emptiness of a humanism without God.

The story goes that in the early 1990s, the Berlin Wall toppled and the USSR collapsed, the Dalai Lama reached out to U2’s Bono asking the band to attend a Oneness festival. A sense of optimism regarding human possibilities had seized control of the Western mind. The festival was a gesture toward the kind of global unity that many thought on the horizon for Europe. Bono declined the invitation, concluding his note to the Dalai Lama with an epigraph: One, but not the same. Those words went on to form the chorus of what might be U2’s best song.

Bono tells the story in the memoir he released last fall, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, though the story has been told before interviews and band histories.¹ The story came to mind while reading the lectionary for today’s liturgy, with our movement through the Book of Genesis getting us to the story of the Tower of Babel. A common language—the absence of cultural distinction in society—had given human beings a false confidence regarding human possibilities. With false confidence regarding human possibilities comes a lack of dependence on God—life becomes a project, and not a theater for the workings of providence. The response of God is to introduce diversity-in-language to the human condition. The kind of distinction without separation that we know by faith resides in the Trinity, or that is made possible by the theology of charism in the life of the Church, we see at the very beginning of human origins. We’re one, maybe, but not the same. Christians don’t do sameness because God doesn’t do sameness.

The line ‘one, but not the same’ might have featured prominently on U2’s 1991 masterpiece Achtung Baby, but the criticism of postmodern optimism behind those words is given fullest expression on the oft-maligned Zooropa from 1993. For many fans of the band, the sound of Achtung Baby came as a surprise in 1991. The album sounded nothing like the tones of epic grandeur and soul that U2 had crafted on 1987’s The Joshua Tree. Nor did the album sound much like the music of the moment, grunge, that had erupted onto the American music scene that same year with album releases by Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden. But most of those fans stuck with the band through the transition; the quality of the album is immediate, and (so I’d say) undeniable.

Zooropa, on the other hand, recorded hastily and in the wake of the band’s two-year Zoo TV tour, well, was this even rock music? The album is dominated by synthesizers and electronic beats. Vocals sometimes come in the form of hushed whispers, sometimes in the form of a soaring falsetto, and sometimes from the mouth of Johnny Cash. The guitar work of Achtung Baby, different in style from the U2 of the 1980s but still there in force on the album, gets lost in the sound of many of the songs on Zooropa. There are no anthems about political injustice and no rousing ballads about love lost or found. Just ten songs collected around the loose theme that something is wrong with us collectively because something is wrong with each of us personally, all cobbled together by electronic beats and synthesized rhythms.

The genius of the album is found in that theme of collective and personal brokenness. The album tells the story of false human ambitions, of secular faith in human projects, of a world without God and that stands in no need of God, and questions the merits of such collective social conviction when our personal lives are defined by the vices of pride and avarice and the lust for power. To the optimism of Europe in the early 1990s in a post-Cold War world, U2 wants to ask: what is the foundation for your secular hope when you yourself, and most of the people you know, are a mess? Isn’t society built up of individual persons? If the parts are sick, what is the source of our hope for the whole?

Three songs on the album drive home the reality of personal brokenness. “Babyface” describes the use of technology to control another person within a relationship because technology empowers us to control how we see other people. Bono sings:

Comin' home late at night to turn you on
Checkin' out every frame
I've got slow motion on my side
Turnin' around and around
With the sound and colour under my control

Bono once said of the song that:

It’s about how people play with images, believing you know somebody through an image and think that by manipulating a machine that, in fact, controls you, you can have some kind of power.

The theme of power in relationship continues on “Stay (Faraway, So Close),” which tells the story of a physically-abused woman who uses the escapism provided by television to distract herself from her pain. Of the woman, Bono sings:

Red lights, gray morning
You stumble out of a hole in the ground
A vampire or a victim
It depends on who's around
You used to stay in to watch the adverts
You could lip sync to the talk shows

And then, a chorus later, he continues:

Faraway, so close
Up with the static and the radio
With satellite television
You can go anywhere
Miami, New Orleans
London, Belfast and Berlin

The story of power and abuse within a relationship is told against the background of a new Europe whose technological prowess is supposed to serve as the foundation for a new hope regarding human possibilities. But on “Stay (Faraway, So Close),” technology only serves to dull the pain that comes from human vice. There is no cause for optimism in the song, and no foundation for hope at all.

These themes of human vice are described with clarity on “The First Time,” a song that finds Bono assuming the life of a postmodern prodigal son who rejects the love of his father. The brilliance of the song is found in the way that Bono contrasts the varieties of love and human relationship in the postmodern age. The character of the song cherishes his erotic love: he has a lover like no other, who gives him hope when he can’t believe. He also values filial love: there is a brother, and each cares for the other, doing what is possible to raise up one another. But the character of the song rejects the love of the father:

My father is a rich man
He wears a rich man's cloak
He gave me the keys to his kingdom coming
Gave me a cup of gold
He said I have many mansions
And there are many rooms to see
But I left by the back door
And I threw away the key
And I threw away the key
Yeah, I threw away the key
Yeah, I threw away the key

There, laid bare in the song, is the reality of human pride and ambition, vices that cause us to refuse the love a God who would adopt us as sons and daughters. How can a society built on the foundation of personal pride and individual ambition hope to flourish collectively, talk meaningfully about a future of progress and growth?

The answer that Bono gives to the question is: “We can’t.” Another three songs on the album drive home a criticism of our false pride and secular faith in human projects. The opening song of the album, “Zooropa,” finds Bono presenting and then criticizing the new optimism of the postmodern world:

Zooropa better by design
Zooropa fly the friendly skies
Through appliance of science
We've got that ring of confidence

And I have no compass
And I have no map
And I have no reasons
No reasons to get back

And I have no religion
And I don't know what's what
And I don't know the limit
The limit of what we've got

He continues, later in the song, speaking of an “uncertainty” that can be “a guiding light,” and concludes the song talking about a woman who is able to create a world that is the product of her own imagination. The sound of the song, which sets the tone for the album, begins in hushed whispers over piano. A dystopian, futuristic, yet somehow melodic beat breaks over the piano. A man asks softly again and again: “What do you want?” The presumption is that whatever answer you give to the question is possible.

The work of building a world on the bedrock of corrupt human desires is critiqued in “Lemon.” The song features a chorus of voices singing of ambition and the scope of human activity in the postmodern world:

A man makes a picture, a moving picture
Through the light projected he can see himself up close
A man captures colour, a man likes to stare
He turns his money into light to look for her

A man builds a city with banks and cathedrals
A man melts the sand so he can see the world outside
A man makes a car and builds a road to run them on
A man dreams of leaving but he always stays behind

These collective social projects are a consequence of personal ambition: for love, for success, for comfort. But because our personal vices go unchecked within society, our faith in social projects is misplaced. Bono sings:

And these are the days when our work has come asunder
And these are the days when we look for something other

The gains that come from social projects do not satisfy; these kinds of ambitions fail to fulfill the human person. As a consequence, the postmodern world is not a source of light at all, but rather is a society trapped in darkness. Is there hope? Only by way of the fact that from the darkness comes light: “Midnight is where the day begins,” Bono sings again and again in “Lemon.” The darkness will not last forever.

The dramatic interplay between personal vice and social decay is heard most clearly in “The Wanderer,” a song featuring Johnny Cash on vocals and with lyrics that describe the ills of postmodernity about as well as any you will find. Johnny Cash, all deep-throated baritone and dispassion, tells the story of his journey through a modern countryside. First, he lifts some stones to find “the skin and bones of a city without a soul”. His journey continues:

I went drifting
Through the capitals of tin
Where men can't walk or freely talk
And sons turn their fathers in

I stopped outside a church house
Where the citizens like to sit
They say they want the kingdom
But they don't want God in it

Personal corruption breeds social corruption. The character whose life Cash assumes for those perfect 4 minutes 41 seconds of song is a man who hopes to sin as much as he can, to experience the forbidden pleasures of life, before circumstances force him to repent. The world about which Johnny Cash sang is 1993 is the world in which we find ourselves living in 2023. There will be light that comes from the darkness, but thirty years after the release of Zooropa we still find ourselves living in the shadows. What is the foundation for our secular hope in human possibilities?

There is no foundation for such a false hope, is the answer U2 give again and again on Zooropa. The truth of the slogan ‘one, but not the same,’ reveals a series of Christian realities: metaphysical, moral, political. The good of the whole depends on the good of its parts. There is no hope for progress in a society comprised of corrupt individuals, and in the postmodern world, far too many people are corrupt to speak meaningfully of confidence in human possibilities. With Christ, all things are possible. Without Christ, we’re building towers that will not stand the test of time. There is no kingdom without God, and the Kingdom of God gets built up conversion by conversion, one life at a time.

1. Protip: get the audiobook . . . it’s about as good of a listen as you’ll find.