July 21st, 2011 2:55am
Ridiculous Voices
U2 @ New Meadowlands Stadium 7/20/2011
Even Better Than the Real Thing / The Fly / Mysterious Ways / Until the End of the World / I Will Follow / Get On Your Boots / Magnificent / I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For / Stay (Faraway, So Close!) / Beautiful Day / Elevation / Pride (In the Name of Love) / Miss Sarajevo / Zooropa / City of Blinding Lights / Vertigo / I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight - Discotheque / Sunday Bloody Sunday / Scarlet / Walk On // One - Hallelujah / Where the Streets Have No Name /// Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me / With or Without You / Moment of Surrender / Out of Control
I wrote a
full review of this show for
Rolling Stone. Let's talk about "Zooropa."
"Zooropa" is as close as U2 has ever come to expressing their artistic philosophy in song. They are true believers in music as a communicative medium that can work on a massive, global scale. When Bono sings "skip the subway, let's go to the overground / get your head out of the mud, baby," he means it as an indictment of every talented artist who shrinks from the possibility of engaging with a large audience. While I can certainly understand the point of view of such artists, I'm very inclined to agree with Bono on this in a broader sense. I genuinely believe that challenging, imaginative artists should push their ideas as far into the mainstream as possible rather than retreating to the margins. When Bono sings this part, he sounds heroic. The music swells to an anthem like many U2 songs before, but it's still has an odd, slightly detached feeling. I think that climax is very well-earned in this piece, in part because I think this pledge to "dream out loud" is genuinely courageous, even if it sounds a bit corny.
It's perhaps a bit ironic that this was the only song in this concert where U2 themselves were barely visible to the audience. The band performed within a cone of cascading lights and words, a visual set piece that countered the indifference of some audience members who didn't recognize a relatively obscure album track. At several other points in the show, Bono did his "mugging directly into a camera at close range" trick. I couldn't help but think that maybe that move should've been reserved for "Zooropa," a song that could have benefited from a bit of eye contact.
7/21/11 9:16 am
A bit clunky as a whole..,But the intro is classic incredible and the release is smashing!
7/23/11 4:09 pm
What are tour thoughts on “Zooropa” as an album? Although never a huge U2 fan, I love their mid-era material, and always felt that album in particular was given short shrift.
7/23/11 7:38 pm
I feel the same way. Zooropa is the only U2 album I will listen to. I was actually listening to it last week and reflecting on how “Numb” was a really underrated single….listening to it in 2011 and it sounds like it’s just a few tweaks away from being a great LCD Soundsystem song.
7/24/11 8:11 am
Zooropa is my second favorite U2 album after Achtung Baby. There are very, very few albums that I love as much as Achtung Baby.
7/25/11 3:26 am
I’m going to respectfully disagree on this point. I don’t think that staying underground as an artist is a result of willfully shirking your responsibility to engage with as large an audience as possible. To me it has more to do with challenging and imaginative artists engaging with nuanced and difficult ideas that have a harder time reaching a broad audience. It’s difficult to be both populist and subtle in the way you deal with an issue. Generating a mass audience requires to some extent that you streamline ideas into simple, easily relatable content. It’s the reason that shows like “Everybody Loves Raymond” or “Law and Order” can be so popular and something genuinely complex and interesting like “Arrested Development” falters in the ratings. The former two require very little from their audience and paint things in broad strokes whereas the latter rewards only those with the patience to engage with not only the show itself, but also news current to its airing and references to cultural touch points in the preceding decades. All of these things serve to make AD a rich, intricate and thoughtful satire of the American family and capitalism’s effect on it. In comparison, “Everybody Loves Raymond” is a very simple comedy about a kuh-razee family that has little more to say besides families are important, but difficult and sometimes kuh-razee.
Likewise, I find it pretty disingenuous for one of the biggest bands in the world to call out other artists for not engaging as many people as possible with their art. U2 is huge because they aren’t specific and they engage with an audience on a surface level. Bono has even admitted dissatisfaction with the lyrics of their most popular song “Pride (In The Name of Love)”, which were left impressionistic in order to give added force to the song’s feeling (apparently, according to the book “U2 Limited”). I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the song boils down to standing by your ideals even in times of great strife. I’m not saying that isn’t a noble sentiment, but are there a lot of people out there vehemently disagreeing with the idea? Who (if anyone) is being converted to this idea after hearing the song? If no one is being pushed into an internal or external dialogue after hearing the idea, then Bono is more or less preaching to believers. So why does it matter if he’s preaching to 10 or 10 million believers?
8/2/11 7:33 am
Zooropa is an interesting album. It’s that in-between album that was not quite the masterpiece Acthung Baby was and not quite the disappointment that Pop was. It falls somewhere in the middle and it also has The Edge singing lead on a song (pretty cool).
My favorite moment from Zooropa though is Johnny Cash singing The Wanderer. What a great song!