It's been more than 30 years since rock music was still important and had great relevance. Artists were not pop bunnies who sang with computer voices, but stars with guitars, poets, explainers of the world.
We are looking back in a series. Today we have to remember "Zooropa", the monument made by U2.
U2 are always different. Bands in their price range usually take a year or two to release a new album, but it "happened" to the four Dubliners 30 years ago as if in passing. The planned EP becomes an LP. While other bands name their tours after their current record, Bono & Co. have recently done the opposite: after the "Zooropa" tour comes the "Zooropa" record - and it comes without a single live piece.
However, the ten new songs from "Zooropa" were a disappointment for fans of the flat stadium rock that made U2 big in the eighties. What was already announced on “Aehrung Baby” is completed on the ninth album by the Irish ex-revival rockers.
Edge's guitars barely shimmer through the tough wall of sound collages and sound tinkering, Clayton's bass sounds like a machine, Larry Mullen drums against his electric colleagues and Bono's voice barely even finds a clearly structured melodic line in the middle of the chaos of noise that at first seems chaotic.
Gone is the folk phase, the blues phase is over - now U2 are catching up on their techno/trance and disco phase. “Zooropa” pimps up lean song ideas with tons of studio technology to create puzzle games of choirs, head voices and synthesizers.
The pieces are all long and full of sounds, but they sound empty. Mixer Flood has done a great job: Six years after the melodic masterpiece "The Joshua Tree", U2 sound like a mixture of Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd and the Queen of the "Hot Space" phase.
The hits here are called “Stay”, “Lemon” and “Numb”. Does anyone else remember? Even the hard-working ballad “The First Time” doesn’t save anything. When "Zooropa" gives the Irish "advancement through technology" (text quote), one can only become fearful about the future of rock music.