Mike Fisher...

[stinkbait]

at least I'll get to se my favorite hater before you croak me...

[MaximumFluoride]

Bono with fish? That's simply the worst image ever.

[stinkbait]

I picture you making this face when you saw that bono pic

[MaximumFluoride]

Ooof!

[loco]

-loco

[VonDada]

Zooropa is the eighth studio album by the Irish rock band U2. Originally slated to be an EP, it was recorded between legs on the Zoo TV Tour and released on 6 July 1993 by Island Records as a full-length album. The album's title is a portmanteau of "Zoo TV" and "Europa."

It was very much an "alternative rock" album in the climate of 1993. In North America, grunge was at its peak - meanwhile, U2 released an album without angst or even a single guitar solo. In Europe, Britpop was beginning to conquer the charts, yet Zooropa owed more to the experimentation of David Bowie and Brian Eno than to the melodic pop of The Beatles and The Kinks. In fact, though Brian Eno's primary credit is as a producer on this album, he also appears as a performer/contributor on several of the songs, including "Babyface" and "Lemon".
Zooropa was a successful release, perhaps riding the wave of popularity started by Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV Tour, winning a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album the year of its release and spending two weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200, despite lacking a strong single. It has subsequently sold 8 million copies worldwide.
As the title suggests, the album has a distinctly European texture (in contrast to the distinctly American roots of their late eighties work), continuing the band's experimentation with electronica, techno, and other predominantly European forms of music. Heavy on samples and irony, it also ties the "media overload" themes of the Zoo TV Tour into the context of a post-Berlin Wall Europe. The lyrics seem fascinated with the way technology unites as well as separates us. The spacey title track, for instance, laced with ad slogans like "Better by design" and "Vorsprung durch Technik," paints a babel-filled vision of a single Europe united by satellite television.

But largely, the album's vision of technology is a cynical one. On the techno-rap "Numb", guitarist The Edge's drones a list of "don'ts," overwhelmed by a noisy backdrop of arcade sounds and "fat lady vocals." The Edge notes that the inspiration for this song came from "that sense that you were getting bombarded with so much that you actually were finding yourself shutting down and unable to respond because there was so much imagery and information being thrown at you."[1]
The dreamy German disco of "Lemon", sung by Bono in a longing falsetto and The Edge amidst waves of almost unrecognizably distorted guitar, documents man's futile attempts to preserve time through technology, as well as the importance of private voyeurism to a band living in a constant spotlight (the song was actually about a film-to-video transfer received by Bono from some family friends; in the video, his mother was seen wearing a lemon-yellow dress, hence the title and subject matter):

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

The closing track, "The Wanderer", features country music legend Johnny Cash on lead vocals. It lays his haggard voice over a wobbly synth line, a bizarre juxtaposition in line with the album's central irony: that the band's most synthesized and postmodern album would be a condemnation of technology. The song's narrator wanders through a soulless world "in search of experience", ultimately finding meaning in the spiritual rather than the superficial.

Track listing

Music by U2, words by Bono except "Dirty Day" (by Bono and The Edge) and "Numb" (by The Edge).
"Zooropa" – 6:31
"Babyface" – 41
"Numb" – 4:20
"Lemon" – 6:58
"Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" – 4:58
"Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" – 5:20
"Some Days Are Better Than Others" – 4:17
"The First Time" – 3:45
"Dirty Day" – 5:24
"The Wanderer" (featuring Johnny Cash) – 4:44

There is also a "hidden track" after "The Wanderer" featuring an alarm going off; that is the alarm that some radio disc jockeys hear when there is 10 seconds of dead air. Because of this, track 10 lasts 5:41, while "The Wanderer" ends 4:44 into the track.
The names of three unfinished songs from the sessions — "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", "Wake Up Dead Man", and "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" — appear superimposed on the album cover. [2] They would be finished and released later in the decade: "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" was used in the film Batman Forever and hence included on the Batman Forever soundtrack. "Wake Up Dead Man", and "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" were included on the 1997 Pop album.

This reads like a chapter from American Psycho.