Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Saturday, July 21, 2018
People Who Like To Be Alone Have These 10+ Special Personality Traits
We all know a loner. They tend to enjoy spending as much time on their own as they can. Of course, they do have friends. It’s not that they dislike people.
They just have less of a need for peer acceptance than most. Often, loners have large groups of friends and have a higher standard for their friendships.
But still, many loners make the conscious decision to get plenty of time on their own. Why? According to a psychologist at Wellesley College, it’s because they don’t need acceptance.
“Some people simply have a low need for affiliation,” says Jonathan Cheek. “There’s a big subdivision between the loner-by-preference and the enforced loner.
Those who choose the living room over the ballroom may have inherited their temperament,” Cheek says.
“Or a penchant for solitude could reflect a mix of innate tendencies and experiences such as not having many friends as a child or growing up in a family that values privacy.”
Of course, it’s possible to be too much of a loner. Some loners close their borders, so to speak, because of anxiety. Some are pathologically shy.
Some have had bad experiences as kids. These types of loners tend to get butterflies around people. Social isolation can even be a health risk.
“Loneliness is like hunger and thirst—a signal to help your genes survive,” says John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
“When you’re lonely, there’s a stress response in your body, and it’s not healthy to sustain that for a long time.”
Of course, it takes all kinds, and loners tend to be smarter, more loyal friends. If you have an outgoing friend who abruptly becomes a loner, that may be cause for concern.
What do you think? Are you a loner? Here are 10+ special personality traits of people who like to be alone:
1. Value Time
If there is anything extremely important to a loner, it is their time. They respect and value time more than anything else. They are well aware time is the most valuable asset to a successful life.
They will do everything in their power to not be late, never waste someone else’s time, and will never allow someone to waste their time. They avoid fake behavior and cannot tolerate people that think they can be played with.
Through their self-awareness, they have developed a huge level of self-respect. Respect their time as they respect yours, and you can expect one of the most incredible friendships imaginable.
2. Self-aware
Many people choose to ignore their thoughts and emotions. Loners choose to embrace these feelings and become fully aware of them. Self-awareness is very important and difficult to achieve.
Loners know themselves better than anyone else, and this allows them to understand those around them better. Everyone has periods of depressive and discouraging thoughts, but loners are able to navigate through them.
3. Level-headed
Loners are amazingly strong willed when tough situations come their way. They have incredible focus and will power as a result of their frequent reflection and alone time.
They can feel overwhelmed by stressful situations, but instead of getting caught up with distractions, they decide to spend some time alone and recharge. During this time, they devise solutions to their problems and ways to cope.
4. Open-minded
Even though they like being alone, this does not make them rigid and close-minded. On the contrary, they are extremely open-minded and are always up for new idea and activities.
They don’t plan to spend their entire lives in their bedroom. They enjoy exploring and going on new adventures. However, you’ll need to make sure you give them their alone time before going anywhere that involves several people.
5. Loyal
Loners do not crave the company of others; however, this does not mean they don’t have friends. Once they get to like someone and want to be your friend, they will be one of the most loyal friends on the planet.
They know their value and worth. They exercise loyalty in all fields of life. Relationships, work, family, you name it.
6. Clear Boundaries
Loners always have healthy boundaries. They understand themselves perfectly. They have strong value. They never feel alone.
They know they always have themselves. They will respect your boundaries and will let you know if you are about to cross theirs. In the end, if you can’t be faithful to yourself, you cannot be faithful to anyone.
7. Aware Of Their Weaknesses/Strengths
Loners are more than aware of what their weaknesses and strengths are. However, they know that there is always room to improve no matter how good they think they’re doing.
Regardless of being self aware with these imperfections, they still hold their heads high to show others that it is okay to be confident with who you are.
8. Very Empathetic
They also tend to be some of the most empathetic people in the entire world. They are able to feel and sympathize with others on the same level as they are. It is a very intense curse to have when you are able to feel everyone else’s sorrow or despair.
However, since they are so empathetic, it is easy for them to find the bright side in almost any negative circumstance. They would rather find a resolution to whatever conflict is making their friends upset.
9. No One Is Perfect
Mentioned before about knowing their weaknesses and strengths, loners know that no one is absolutely one hundred percent perfect.
We all have our own flaws and ways to improve on, however, they know it is better to just go with the flow.
They do what they feel is right for themselves and for others and make sure that they address each flaw within themselves with honesty and how they can maybe improve on some of those imperfections.
10. Guided By Intuition
Your intuition is your constant guide through life, leading you to the next best thing that awaits you on your long journey of growing up.
There is a lot that can be said about you and your gut instincts when it comes to making tough decisions.
You don’t get scared easily because you know that your intuition will lead you somewhere just as amazing as the last adventure you had.
11. Never Codependent
There is never a time in your life where you feel as if you need to depend on someone else for anything at all.
You prefer to be your own person, even if you are in a relationship with someone else you still prefer to do things your own way.
Being dependent on someone else for trivial needs is something you try to avoid and will go great lengths to show others just how capable you are being on your own.
12. Filled With Kindness And Compassion
You love to demonstrate the meaning of compassion as well as kindness to others so that they can understand that spreading love is a necessary piece of your existence.
Showing others just how passionate are with the things that you love to do most as well as being with the people that you love most.
This is one of the best qualities to a personality that not everyone gets to witness.
We all know a loner. They tend to enjoy spending as much time on their own as they can. Of course, they do have friends. It’s not that they dislike people.
They just have less of a need for peer acceptance than most. Often, loners have large groups of friends and have a higher standard for their friendships.
But still, many loners make the conscious decision to get plenty of time on their own. Why? According to a psychologist at Wellesley College, it’s because they don’t need acceptance.
“Some people simply have a low need for affiliation,” says Jonathan Cheek. “There’s a big subdivision between the loner-by-preference and the enforced loner.
Those who choose the living room over the ballroom may have inherited their temperament,” Cheek says.
“Or a penchant for solitude could reflect a mix of innate tendencies and experiences such as not having many friends as a child or growing up in a family that values privacy.”
Of course, it’s possible to be too much of a loner. Some loners close their borders, so to speak, because of anxiety. Some are pathologically shy.
Some have had bad experiences as kids. These types of loners tend to get butterflies around people. Social isolation can even be a health risk.
“Loneliness is like hunger and thirst—a signal to help your genes survive,” says John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
“When you’re lonely, there’s a stress response in your body, and it’s not healthy to sustain that for a long time.”
Of course, it takes all kinds, and loners tend to be smarter, more loyal friends. If you have an outgoing friend who abruptly becomes a loner, that may be cause for concern.
What do you think? Are you a loner? Here are 10+ special personality traits of people who like to be alone:
1. Value Time
If there is anything extremely important to a loner, it is their time. They respect and value time more than anything else. They are well aware time is the most valuable asset to a successful life.
They will do everything in their power to not be late, never waste someone else’s time, and will never allow someone to waste their time. They avoid fake behavior and cannot tolerate people that think they can be played with.
Through their self-awareness, they have developed a huge level of self-respect. Respect their time as they respect yours, and you can expect one of the most incredible friendships imaginable.
2. Self-aware
Many people choose to ignore their thoughts and emotions. Loners choose to embrace these feelings and become fully aware of them. Self-awareness is very important and difficult to achieve.
Loners know themselves better than anyone else, and this allows them to understand those around them better. Everyone has periods of depressive and discouraging thoughts, but loners are able to navigate through them.
3. Level-headed
Loners are amazingly strong willed when tough situations come their way. They have incredible focus and will power as a result of their frequent reflection and alone time.
They can feel overwhelmed by stressful situations, but instead of getting caught up with distractions, they decide to spend some time alone and recharge. During this time, they devise solutions to their problems and ways to cope.
4. Open-minded
Even though they like being alone, this does not make them rigid and close-minded. On the contrary, they are extremely open-minded and are always up for new idea and activities.
They don’t plan to spend their entire lives in their bedroom. They enjoy exploring and going on new adventures. However, you’ll need to make sure you give them their alone time before going anywhere that involves several people.
5. Loyal
Loners do not crave the company of others; however, this does not mean they don’t have friends. Once they get to like someone and want to be your friend, they will be one of the most loyal friends on the planet.
They know their value and worth. They exercise loyalty in all fields of life. Relationships, work, family, you name it.
6. Clear Boundaries
Loners always have healthy boundaries. They understand themselves perfectly. They have strong value. They never feel alone.
They know they always have themselves. They will respect your boundaries and will let you know if you are about to cross theirs. In the end, if you can’t be faithful to yourself, you cannot be faithful to anyone.
7. Aware Of Their Weaknesses/Strengths
Loners are more than aware of what their weaknesses and strengths are. However, they know that there is always room to improve no matter how good they think they’re doing.
Regardless of being self aware with these imperfections, they still hold their heads high to show others that it is okay to be confident with who you are.
8. Very Empathetic
They also tend to be some of the most empathetic people in the entire world. They are able to feel and sympathize with others on the same level as they are. It is a very intense curse to have when you are able to feel everyone else’s sorrow or despair.
However, since they are so empathetic, it is easy for them to find the bright side in almost any negative circumstance. They would rather find a resolution to whatever conflict is making their friends upset.
9. No One Is Perfect
Mentioned before about knowing their weaknesses and strengths, loners know that no one is absolutely one hundred percent perfect.
We all have our own flaws and ways to improve on, however, they know it is better to just go with the flow.
They do what they feel is right for themselves and for others and make sure that they address each flaw within themselves with honesty and how they can maybe improve on some of those imperfections.
10. Guided By Intuition
Your intuition is your constant guide through life, leading you to the next best thing that awaits you on your long journey of growing up.
There is a lot that can be said about you and your gut instincts when it comes to making tough decisions.
You don’t get scared easily because you know that your intuition will lead you somewhere just as amazing as the last adventure you had.
11. Never Codependent
There is never a time in your life where you feel as if you need to depend on someone else for anything at all.
You prefer to be your own person, even if you are in a relationship with someone else you still prefer to do things your own way.
Being dependent on someone else for trivial needs is something you try to avoid and will go great lengths to show others just how capable you are being on your own.
12. Filled With Kindness And Compassion
You love to demonstrate the meaning of compassion as well as kindness to others so that they can understand that spreading love is a necessary piece of your existence.
Showing others just how passionate are with the things that you love to do most as well as being with the people that you love most.
This is one of the best qualities to a personality that not everyone gets to witness.
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
I think it's silly that scientists got rid of God because it's a fairy tale with no evidence to support it and then replaced it with another fairy tale with no evidence to support it. Anyone else find it funny how so called rational empiricists fail to see the irony in their reinvention of God as an AI singularity or an alien simulating us in a computer matrix? "I don't believe in fairy tales like Christianity! I, sir, believe in fairy tales like The Matrix!" Okay, Morpheus. Whatever you say, bruh.
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Even Robert Smith himself was astonished that he didn’t evaporate immediately the second he stepped onto the surprisingly hot stage at London’s Hyde Park Saturday evening. It was about a quarter past 8 and the sun was still bearing down in full force – about 83 degrees Fahrenheit – and beaming right at the Cure frontman. “I honestly can’t talk until the sun goes down,” said the singer, who was covered entirely in black, save for his head and hands. “It’s taking all my energy not to dissolve into a pile of dust.” And he wasn’t kidding.
Until about 9:30, when the sky behind the 65,000 or so equally black-clad concertgoers finally turned pink and his sworn astronomical enemy dipped behind the horizon, Smith was relatively reserved. He sang passionately, played his guitar and wiggled his arms like loose strands of squid-ink linguini. But when the sun went down, and he put his guitar down for “Close to Me,” he was a goth set free – dancing, swooning, swirling and blushing, as though he were reborn. “Finally, the sun goes down,” he proclaimed after “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep.” It was a two-hour (and 29-song) transformation, and despite the challenge he was facing internally, he kept spirits high. After all, it was a celebration.
Smith, whose lyrics smack of wistfulness, chose tonight’s show to recognize the group’s 40th anniversary. The electric guitar Smith played for most of the show bore the dates “1978 – 2018,” and he acknowledged the milestone before playing the night’s last few songs. “Forty years ago this weekend was the first time we played as the Cure,” he said. “And if you’d asked me then what I’d be doing in 40 years, I would be wrong. But it’s thanks to everyone around me that we’re still here, and to you all as well, so thank you very much.”
Although the group’s “Curætion 25” setlist from the Meltdown Festival a couple of weeks ago was a better snapshot of the group’s history, since they played songs from every album they put out, tonight’s was one for the fans. (This was probably also because the gig was the Cure’s last scheduled European gig this year.) The band focused the set list heavily on its watershed 1989 album, Disintegration, and Smith and company indulged both deep cuts and big hits throughout.
The song selection provided mixed results. Less than halfway into the night, the band had already won over the crowd with two of their biggest songs – “Lovesong” and “Just Like Heaven” – but they spaced them out with deep cuts and Eighties gems. Since tunes like “The Walk” and “The Caterpillar” were radio hits in the U.K., some of the older fans sang along to the melodies while the younger fans nodded along. But when songs like “Fascination Street” or “Never Enough” – tracks that charted well around the world – you could hear the many thousands in the throngs join in. And when the moon came out, and the Cure turned to some of their biggest songs in the encore – “Friday, I’m in Love,” “Why Can’t I Be You?” “Boys Don’t Cry” – the jubilation stretched all the way to the back of the British Summer Time festival ground, where Interpol, Goldfrapp and Slowdive, among others, had performed earlier in the day.
In some ways, the concert felt minimalistic – especially compared to Roger Waters’ blockbuster the night before. The visuals were mostly shots of the band – sometimes with a fisheye lens, sometimes with a purple-and-green woods shot superimposed over them (“A Forest”) and sometimes with a spiderweb (“Lullaby,” whose lyrics warn of a spiderman having Smith for dinner). The only stage effects, much like early Cure shows, were clouds of smoke that enfolded the band throughout the night. And other than some pacing, the band members other than Smith were relatively low-key.
But there was still a unique power in the Cure’s live performance. Even with so many people watching them, Smith’s bashfulness and earnestness creates an intimacy that’s rare for shows of this size. But because the band has a dedicated fanbase of hardcore fans eager to hear deep cuts like their The Crow soundtrack contribution “Burn” as much as “High,” it’s easy to get swept up in the moment. That was most obvious in the way the audience reacted to the night’s final two songs, which both made up the Cure’s first single: “10:15 Saturday Night” and “Killing an Arab.” Smith smiled from ear to ear when he was playing the guitar solo to the former, and the springiness of the controversial latter song inspired the audience to jump up and down and sing along (and it’s still a bit odd to hear people en masse singing that title so gleefully, even if Smith has always underscored that it was a reference to Camus). It was a moment Smith seemed to enjoy sharing with the crowd – everyone was in on it, and he’d finally come full circle.
When the concert was done, Smith thanked the crowd, teased a return to playing live in England “soon” and then exited stage left where he disappeared into the smoke only for the audience to see his spiky hair fade away. After all, the moon was finally out, and he had been rejuvenated.
The Cure set list:
“Plainsong”
“Pictures of You”
“High”
“A Night Like This”
“The Walk”
“The End of the World”
“Lovesong”
“Push”
“In Between Days”
“Just Like Heaven”
“If Only Tonight We Could Sleep”
“Play for Today”
“A Forest”
“Shake Dog Shake”
“Burn”
“Fascination Street”
“Never Enough”
“From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea”
“Disintegration”
Encore:
“Lullaby”
“The Caterpillar”
“Friday I’m in Love”
“Close to Me”
“Why Can’t I Be You?”
“Boys Don’t Cry”
“Jumping Someone Else’s Train”
“Grinding Halt”
“10:15 Saturday Night”
“Killing an Arab”
Saturday, July 07, 2018
“Subtle” has rarely been a word used to describe U2. But on July 5th, 1993, the band released Zooropa, a surprise EP-turned-LP that traded bombastic declarations and stadium-ready riffs for introspective lyrics and moody electric grooves. Zooropa went to Number One and was initially a critical success, but these days, it’s often overlooked. Neither an obvious highlight nor a clear misstep in the band’s discography, Zooropa is something weirder – a very good, occasionally great and unusually consistent U2 record with no top-tier singles. Maybe because of that last fact, along with the awkward Pop years that followed, the band seems to view the album as a strange detour. Bono would later refer to Zooropa as part of their “art rock phase”; in the band’s autobiography, U2 by U2, Adam Clayton calls it “an odd record” but also one of his favorites.
Yet the music has aged well. The band took genuine leaps in songwriting by embracing more of the electronic music playing in clubs and entering the mainstream. If Achtung Baby was Bono’s biblical vision of a discotheque at the end of the world, Zooropa is just a solid collection of songs to play alongside tracks by the Prodigy, Aphex Twin and the Orb. “It has captured the moment, for me at any rate,” the Edge told Pulse! a few months after the album came out. “Of all our records it probably is the most vital and current. It’s like a Polaroid of what was happening to us and what was happening around Europe at that time.”
To celebrate Zooropa‘s 25th anniversary, here are 10 things you might not know about this underrated gem.
1. The album was originally supposed to be an EP to support the Zoo TV tour.
In early 1993, U2 were coming off the first leg of their worldwide Zoo TV tour, an ambitious show that blew up the band’s video for “The Fly” into a postmodern, stadium-sized feast of sensory overload. The band wrote new material based on Zoo TV’s themes of advancing technology and mass-media saturation. They decided to keep their momentum going by recording the new tracks instead of taking a break before the remaining shows. “We thought we could go into a decompression chamber and come out the other end normal,” Bono told Spin in 1993. “But it turns out that your whole way of thinking, your whole body has been geared toward the madness of Zoo TV … so we decided to put the madness on a record.”
The Edge was happy for the project to exist as an EP, and at first, that was the plan. However, as more songs were written and recorded, the band realized they were now making a full-length. When they ran out of time, they flew to and from Dublin in between shows to finish the LP in sprints. “I’d be in the studio until 3 or 4 in the morning,” the Edge explained in 2002, “and then going home, getting up the next day and getting on a plane at lunchtime, going off doing a show, coming back at 1 a.m., staying up again till 4 a.m. [It] was pretty mind-numbing by the end.” But they pulled it off. Notorious for their meticulous planning, U2 surprised everyone – including their label – by dropping a new album out of nowhere.
2. The songs were constructed using a series of recorded samples and loops, a first for the band.
An unsung hero of Zooropa is Robbie Adams, an assistant engineer on Achtung Baby who was brought on to Zoo TV to record the tour’s soundchecks and satirical TV messages and turn the most interesting bits into loops, which the band made into demos. “U2 don’t use loops taken from other people’s records,” Adams told Sound on Sound in 1994, “so instead I made loops of Larry drumming. That worked quite well and several of the loops ended up on the record.” This approach was an exciting technical shift – guitar riffs aren’t nearly as prominent on Zooropa – and it intentionally matched Zoo TV’s theme of audiovisual expression as the new normal. “It’s always technology that spurs [rock & roll’s] mutations,” Bono told Hot Press in 1993. “It’s the fuzzbox that gave us the electric guitar, the sampler that gave us rap music and so on. And while I have respect for people who wish to ignore that ‘filthy modern tide’ I don’t want to, I couldn’t.”
The shift in songwriting was also philosophical. “A lot of what’s in this album comes from reading the work of William Gibson,” said Bono regarding the specific influence of the cyberpunk author’s “sort of fucked-up sci-fi.” The band shifted their narrative setting from real-life Berlin – where Achtung Baby was partially recorded – to an imagined sprawl they dubbed “Zooropa” after the name of their European tour. They wanted the writing process to reflect how art is born in a possible future controlled by media distortion and indulgent escapism.
The opening title track is the clearest example of U2’s new approach. “Zooropa” is a hodgepodge of Jacques Brel–like piano, industrial beats, and trippy airport sheen that build into a faux-Madchester dance, with Bono repeating “what do you want?” and quoting Audi’s slogan to find his place in the world (“I have no compass/And I have no map/And I have no reasons/No reasons to get back”).
3. The Edge received his first production credit on a U2 record.
Daniel Lanois, one of U2’s go-to producers, was too busy touring his solo album to help with Zooropa, so the Edge took his place and earned co-production credit alongside Brian Eno and Flood. “I suppose I took on a level of responsibility that I haven’t on previous records,” the Edge told Rolling Stone in 1993. “That meant sitting in with Bono on lyric-writing sessions – just being the foil, the devil’s advocate, bouncing couplets around – down to completely demoing some pieces, establishing their original incarnations. … And then, generally, just worrying more than everyone else.” The Edge was still fresh from a divorce, so he had plenty of inspiration to draw from as his personal life matched the numbness Bono wanted to convey on Zoo TV. He also now fully embraced the drum machine, which he began playing with for The Unforgettable Fire and used more prominently on Achtung Baby. All this and his love of Massive Attack, Young Disciples and Sounds of Blackness inspired the Edge to use loops and hip-hop beats as instruments rather than just songwriting tools. “Edge was still exploring dance and hip-hop culture, club mixes, all that kind of thing,” Mullen said in 2006. “He was experimenting and U2 were his guinea pigs.”
The Edge is at the center of the album’s first single, “Numb.” Originally titled “Down All the Days” and born during the Achtung Baby sessions, the Kraftwerk-like leftover was updated by the Edge with a spontaneous mumble rap listing off several forbidden actions (“Don’t move/Don’t talk out of time/Don’t think/Don’t worry”) juxtaposed with Mullen’s vocal hook (“I feel numb”), Bono’s falsetto and Eno’s keys. “The song is about a monotone vocal with a cacophony of music and noises in the background,” said Robbie Adams. “That was quite a ballady song and in the end it was decided that it didn’t fit on Achtung Baby. Then Edge had this vocal idea that took the song in a different direction.” The Edge also got the rare spotlight in the track’s quirky music video, inspired by Elvis Costello’s “I Wanna Be Loved” clip, and during his first ever live solo performance when he played “Numb” at the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards.
4. “Numb” samples footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
Zooropa is a sneaky political record in its views of a post–Cold War Europe grappling with the collapse of Communism, the rise of Neo-Nazism, the beginnings of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the EC’s uncertain future. If Achtung Baby journeyed behind the old Berlin Wall, Zooropaquestioned what would take its place. “Looking at all that,” said Bono, “Zooropa seemed like a great image of a European location that was surreal.” But rather than Bono screaming those questions from a mountaintop or dystopian concert stage, Zooropa would let the music do the talking.
An example is a sample in “Numb” of a Hitler Youth member playing drums during Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous and influential 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. “We [started] playing around with ideas from the Leni Riefenstahl film footage of Nazi Germany that we used on Zoo TV,” said the Edge. “[We were] really trying to ask the question of ourselves I suppose, as well as everyone else in Europe: ‘What do you want?’ That seemed to be the question that kept coming back to us during the making of the album. Suddenly we were back on the road, touring in Germany, and the whole racist xenophobia issue exploded while we were there.”
Zooropa is known for being U2’s “spontaneous” album, yet the band planned the Nazi sample from the start. Knowing they were going to play Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, which Hitler built for the Olympics, Bono wanted to play footage from Triumph of the Will and Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia as Dadaist-like slaps at macho fascism. “I think it’s important to go to these places,” said Bono. “We had the sense that if there had been any demons, music had driven them out. I think fear of the devil leads to devil worship. And I don’t want to give fascists power to the extent that you might be afraid to go into a building where they once were.”
Bono got his wish on June 15th, 1993, when the band played Riefenstahl’s footage in the same stadium where it was recorded. The audience’s reception was cool – the younger people had probably never seen the footage – but everyone got the message during “Bullet the Blue Sky” when the Zoo TVs transformed the burning crosses (“see the flames higher and higher”) into flaming swastikas. “This will never happen again!” Bono yelled to 40,000 stunned Germans. “It was a trip,” he said. “There was an uproar. There were people at the gig who could be – and probably were – the sons and daughters of the people in the film. But we wanted to point out, before anyone else did, the similarities between rock gigs and Nazi rallies.”
5. “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” was a tribute to Frank Sinatra.
The most traditionally U2-sounding song on Zooropa is also one of the band’s best, and it was a tribute to Ol’ Blue Eyes. The track was also born from the Achtung Baby sessions and was titled “Sinatra,” named after the Edge’s attempt to “summon up [the singer’s] spirit” with a Tin Pan Alley piano melody. The song found a home when German filmmaker Wim Wenders – for whom the band had remixed “Until the End of the World” to feature in his 1991 film of the same name – asked them to write the theme for his 1993 film, Faraway, So Close! “The film was about angels who want to be human and want to be on Earth,” said Bono. “But to do so, they have to become mortal. That was a great image to play with – the impossibility of wanting something like this, and then the cost of having it.” The song was added to Zooropa and became the album’s third and final single. Wenders also directed the song’s mostly black-and-white music video, which featured the band as angels in Berlin and footage from the film. (The film was panned, but the song was nominated for a Best Original Song Golden Globe.)
6. “The Wanderer” features guest vocals from Johnny Cash, before his Rick Rubin–produced comeback.
U2 tapping Johnny Cash to appear on their record could have been as dicey a move as Bono wearing a cowboy hat while screaming at poor B.B. King to play “the blues, man!” in Rattle and Hum. In 1993, however, before the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings and “Hurt,” featuring Cash on a rock song was a bold gesture and not a guaranteed success. But while Bono was struggling to come up with a vocal part for a keyboard arrangement written by the Edge already titled “The Wanderer,” he realized Cash would be perfect for the part. (At one point, the song was even called “Johnny Cash on the Moon.”)
Bono and Cash had collaborated before, and as luck would have it, the Man in Black was playing Dublin soon. The band met him backstage and asked him to come to their studio to try out the song. Cash agreed, and everything clicked. In the song, Cash sings as an Old Testament survivor out of the book of Ecclesiastes, wandering “under an atomic sky” and preaching over a synth bass played by what the Edge described as “the Holiday Inn band from hell.” The album closer brings Zooropa full circle as Cash seems to portray a version of Bono’s “I don’t have a compass” character from the opening track but as an older and wiser man who decides to carry on into the unknown – a traveler Bono calls “the antidote to the Zooropa manifesto of uncertainty.”
“If you imagine the album being set in this place, Zooropa,” said Flood, “just when you’re expecting the norm to finish the album, you get somebody who’s outside the whole thing, wandering through, discussing it. It’s like the perfect full stop. It throws a whole different light on the conceptualization of the record.”
The following year, Cash released the first of many Rubin collaborations, kickstarting a career revival that lasted until his death in 2003. However, U2 gave Cash a place in the new world before a new generation caught on; Cash would return the favor in 2000 with his cover of “One.”
7. The album cover features Achtung Baby‘s “Astrobaby” and recreates the European flag on top of images of famous European leaders.
Charlie Whisker’s Astrobaby cartoon first appeared on Achtung Baby‘s CD cover and served, along with the candy-colored Trabant, as the unofficial symbol of the new U2. (In his 1995 U2 biography, Bill Flanagan also claims the cartoon is Cosmo, the Soviet cosmonaut who was in space when the USSR fell and was left floating for weeks while the new government figured out who should bring him home.) On Zooropa, the cartoon is front and center, surrounded by 12 stars imitating the European flag and laid over a collage of distorted images of European leaders including Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini and Nicolae Ceaușescu. The album’s themes of technological uncertainty and European unrest blend into what the design team Works Associates called an “electronic flag.” “The logo has a whimsy and intrigue that is appealing,” the team later explained. “It can be understood without words and somehow its human smallness nicely represents the largesse and technicality of the Zooropa tour.”
The cover could also be seen as a recreation of “Babyface,” a song inspired by the growing ease of feeling close to strangers through TV (“Watching your bright blue eyes/In the freeze frame/I’ve seen them so many times/I feel like I must be your best friend”). “It’s a song about watching and not being in the picture,” said Bono. “About how people play with images, believing you know somebody through an image.”
8. The album cover also accidentally includes tracks recorded for Zooropa but left off at the last minute.
Also like Achtung Baby, Zooropa‘s album cover includes layers of text manipulated on top of a series of photographs. The cover’s purple lettering included the album’s track list along with “Wake Up Dead Man,” “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” and “If You Wear That Velvet Dress.” However, those three tracks didn’t make it onto the record – the final album track list was updated after the designers finished the cover. “This text was comprised of the upcoming album’s track titles provided to us as we were designing the sleeve,” the designers wrote. “Somehow lost in the rush, we managed to not to update this track list so that several songs that didn’t make the final cut got left behind in the embedded piece.”
These songs would eventually find life after Zooropa. Both “Wake Up Dead Man” and “If You Wear That Velvet Dress” ended up on Pop, and “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” was rewritten for the Batman Forever soundtrack. Ironically, “Hold Me” became a bigger hit than anything off Zooropa.
9. Zooropa won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 1994 – and Bono was not happy.
Whereas most artists would be OK with winning one Grammy, Bono begrudgingly accepted the band’s sixth Grammy while dropping a rare F-bomb. “Yeah, ‘alternative,'” began Bono, rolling his eyes with the “Best Alternative Album” award in hand. After shouting out the Smashing Pumpkins and college radio, Bono delivered what he believed to be Zooropa‘s mission. “I think I’d like to give a message to the young people of America, and that is we shall continue to abuse our position and fuck up the mainstream. God bless you.” Bono’s issue wasn’t winning – Zooropa beat out Nirvana’s In Utero, R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, the Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, and Belly’s Star – but that his band didn’t even get nominated for Album of the Year. (This was Whitney Houston’s year thanks to the Bodyguard soundtrack.) “I thought of Zooropa at the time as a work of genius,” said Bono in 2006. “I really thought our pop discipline was matching our experimentation and this was our Sgt. Pepper. I was a little wrong about that.”
Zooropa was a success, but not by U2 standards. “Lemon” and “Numb” went Top Five, but only on the Modern Rock radio chart, and “Lemon” went Number One only on the Billboard Dance Club Play charts. “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” was the only song to make the Billboard Top 100, but it only reached Number 61. (Achtung Baby managed to land five tracks onto the Billboard Top 100.) U2 aimed to fuck up the mainstream, but instead, after a brief moment at Number One, Zooropaending up becoming their worst-selling album in the U.S. since October, though they would later beat that dubious record with Pop.
10. David Bowie praised U2 for Zooropa.
“They might be all shamrocks and deutsche marks to some,” Bowie said of U2 to The Irish Times in 1993, “but I feel that they are one of the few rock bands even attempting to hint at a world which will continue past the next great wall – the year 2000.” Bowie wasn’t always friendly towards U2’s music – he visited the band after they finished recording “The Fly” and told them to redo it – but he praised the band for how both Achtung Baby and Zooropa picked up where his own Berlin trilogy left off.
Bowie’s influence on Zooropa goes deeper. Willie Williams, U2’s longtime set designer who created the sensory overload of Zoo TV, helped design Bowie’s 1990 Sound+Vision Tour, which featured new transparent projection screens playing pre-recorded images along to Bowie’s songs. Williams would take this new technology and multiply it by 40 oversized screens to create a Blade Runner–like landscape for U2. And like Bowie, Bono created characters like the Fly, MacPhisto and the Mirrorball Man to free himself through outlandish performances. “I’ve played at being a rock & roll star,” said Bono in Rolling Stone just after Bowie’s passing, “but I’m really not one. David Bowie is my idea of a rock star.” Bono also thanked Bowie for opening the doors to Brian Eno, Berlin and Hansa Studios, all factors that led to U2’s growth, their eventual Nineties reinvention and Zooropa itself.
Yet the music has aged well. The band took genuine leaps in songwriting by embracing more of the electronic music playing in clubs and entering the mainstream. If Achtung Baby was Bono’s biblical vision of a discotheque at the end of the world, Zooropa is just a solid collection of songs to play alongside tracks by the Prodigy, Aphex Twin and the Orb. “It has captured the moment, for me at any rate,” the Edge told Pulse! a few months after the album came out. “Of all our records it probably is the most vital and current. It’s like a Polaroid of what was happening to us and what was happening around Europe at that time.”
To celebrate Zooropa‘s 25th anniversary, here are 10 things you might not know about this underrated gem.
1. The album was originally supposed to be an EP to support the Zoo TV tour.
In early 1993, U2 were coming off the first leg of their worldwide Zoo TV tour, an ambitious show that blew up the band’s video for “The Fly” into a postmodern, stadium-sized feast of sensory overload. The band wrote new material based on Zoo TV’s themes of advancing technology and mass-media saturation. They decided to keep their momentum going by recording the new tracks instead of taking a break before the remaining shows. “We thought we could go into a decompression chamber and come out the other end normal,” Bono told Spin in 1993. “But it turns out that your whole way of thinking, your whole body has been geared toward the madness of Zoo TV … so we decided to put the madness on a record.”
The Edge was happy for the project to exist as an EP, and at first, that was the plan. However, as more songs were written and recorded, the band realized they were now making a full-length. When they ran out of time, they flew to and from Dublin in between shows to finish the LP in sprints. “I’d be in the studio until 3 or 4 in the morning,” the Edge explained in 2002, “and then going home, getting up the next day and getting on a plane at lunchtime, going off doing a show, coming back at 1 a.m., staying up again till 4 a.m. [It] was pretty mind-numbing by the end.” But they pulled it off. Notorious for their meticulous planning, U2 surprised everyone – including their label – by dropping a new album out of nowhere.
2. The songs were constructed using a series of recorded samples and loops, a first for the band.
An unsung hero of Zooropa is Robbie Adams, an assistant engineer on Achtung Baby who was brought on to Zoo TV to record the tour’s soundchecks and satirical TV messages and turn the most interesting bits into loops, which the band made into demos. “U2 don’t use loops taken from other people’s records,” Adams told Sound on Sound in 1994, “so instead I made loops of Larry drumming. That worked quite well and several of the loops ended up on the record.” This approach was an exciting technical shift – guitar riffs aren’t nearly as prominent on Zooropa – and it intentionally matched Zoo TV’s theme of audiovisual expression as the new normal. “It’s always technology that spurs [rock & roll’s] mutations,” Bono told Hot Press in 1993. “It’s the fuzzbox that gave us the electric guitar, the sampler that gave us rap music and so on. And while I have respect for people who wish to ignore that ‘filthy modern tide’ I don’t want to, I couldn’t.”
The shift in songwriting was also philosophical. “A lot of what’s in this album comes from reading the work of William Gibson,” said Bono regarding the specific influence of the cyberpunk author’s “sort of fucked-up sci-fi.” The band shifted their narrative setting from real-life Berlin – where Achtung Baby was partially recorded – to an imagined sprawl they dubbed “Zooropa” after the name of their European tour. They wanted the writing process to reflect how art is born in a possible future controlled by media distortion and indulgent escapism.
The opening title track is the clearest example of U2’s new approach. “Zooropa” is a hodgepodge of Jacques Brel–like piano, industrial beats, and trippy airport sheen that build into a faux-Madchester dance, with Bono repeating “what do you want?” and quoting Audi’s slogan to find his place in the world (“I have no compass/And I have no map/And I have no reasons/No reasons to get back”).
3. The Edge received his first production credit on a U2 record.
Daniel Lanois, one of U2’s go-to producers, was too busy touring his solo album to help with Zooropa, so the Edge took his place and earned co-production credit alongside Brian Eno and Flood. “I suppose I took on a level of responsibility that I haven’t on previous records,” the Edge told Rolling Stone in 1993. “That meant sitting in with Bono on lyric-writing sessions – just being the foil, the devil’s advocate, bouncing couplets around – down to completely demoing some pieces, establishing their original incarnations. … And then, generally, just worrying more than everyone else.” The Edge was still fresh from a divorce, so he had plenty of inspiration to draw from as his personal life matched the numbness Bono wanted to convey on Zoo TV. He also now fully embraced the drum machine, which he began playing with for The Unforgettable Fire and used more prominently on Achtung Baby. All this and his love of Massive Attack, Young Disciples and Sounds of Blackness inspired the Edge to use loops and hip-hop beats as instruments rather than just songwriting tools. “Edge was still exploring dance and hip-hop culture, club mixes, all that kind of thing,” Mullen said in 2006. “He was experimenting and U2 were his guinea pigs.”
The Edge is at the center of the album’s first single, “Numb.” Originally titled “Down All the Days” and born during the Achtung Baby sessions, the Kraftwerk-like leftover was updated by the Edge with a spontaneous mumble rap listing off several forbidden actions (“Don’t move/Don’t talk out of time/Don’t think/Don’t worry”) juxtaposed with Mullen’s vocal hook (“I feel numb”), Bono’s falsetto and Eno’s keys. “The song is about a monotone vocal with a cacophony of music and noises in the background,” said Robbie Adams. “That was quite a ballady song and in the end it was decided that it didn’t fit on Achtung Baby. Then Edge had this vocal idea that took the song in a different direction.” The Edge also got the rare spotlight in the track’s quirky music video, inspired by Elvis Costello’s “I Wanna Be Loved” clip, and during his first ever live solo performance when he played “Numb” at the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards.
4. “Numb” samples footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
Zooropa is a sneaky political record in its views of a post–Cold War Europe grappling with the collapse of Communism, the rise of Neo-Nazism, the beginnings of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the EC’s uncertain future. If Achtung Baby journeyed behind the old Berlin Wall, Zooropaquestioned what would take its place. “Looking at all that,” said Bono, “Zooropa seemed like a great image of a European location that was surreal.” But rather than Bono screaming those questions from a mountaintop or dystopian concert stage, Zooropa would let the music do the talking.
An example is a sample in “Numb” of a Hitler Youth member playing drums during Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous and influential 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. “We [started] playing around with ideas from the Leni Riefenstahl film footage of Nazi Germany that we used on Zoo TV,” said the Edge. “[We were] really trying to ask the question of ourselves I suppose, as well as everyone else in Europe: ‘What do you want?’ That seemed to be the question that kept coming back to us during the making of the album. Suddenly we were back on the road, touring in Germany, and the whole racist xenophobia issue exploded while we were there.”
Zooropa is known for being U2’s “spontaneous” album, yet the band planned the Nazi sample from the start. Knowing they were going to play Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, which Hitler built for the Olympics, Bono wanted to play footage from Triumph of the Will and Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia as Dadaist-like slaps at macho fascism. “I think it’s important to go to these places,” said Bono. “We had the sense that if there had been any demons, music had driven them out. I think fear of the devil leads to devil worship. And I don’t want to give fascists power to the extent that you might be afraid to go into a building where they once were.”
Bono got his wish on June 15th, 1993, when the band played Riefenstahl’s footage in the same stadium where it was recorded. The audience’s reception was cool – the younger people had probably never seen the footage – but everyone got the message during “Bullet the Blue Sky” when the Zoo TVs transformed the burning crosses (“see the flames higher and higher”) into flaming swastikas. “This will never happen again!” Bono yelled to 40,000 stunned Germans. “It was a trip,” he said. “There was an uproar. There were people at the gig who could be – and probably were – the sons and daughters of the people in the film. But we wanted to point out, before anyone else did, the similarities between rock gigs and Nazi rallies.”
5. “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” was a tribute to Frank Sinatra.
The most traditionally U2-sounding song on Zooropa is also one of the band’s best, and it was a tribute to Ol’ Blue Eyes. The track was also born from the Achtung Baby sessions and was titled “Sinatra,” named after the Edge’s attempt to “summon up [the singer’s] spirit” with a Tin Pan Alley piano melody. The song found a home when German filmmaker Wim Wenders – for whom the band had remixed “Until the End of the World” to feature in his 1991 film of the same name – asked them to write the theme for his 1993 film, Faraway, So Close! “The film was about angels who want to be human and want to be on Earth,” said Bono. “But to do so, they have to become mortal. That was a great image to play with – the impossibility of wanting something like this, and then the cost of having it.” The song was added to Zooropa and became the album’s third and final single. Wenders also directed the song’s mostly black-and-white music video, which featured the band as angels in Berlin and footage from the film. (The film was panned, but the song was nominated for a Best Original Song Golden Globe.)
6. “The Wanderer” features guest vocals from Johnny Cash, before his Rick Rubin–produced comeback.
U2 tapping Johnny Cash to appear on their record could have been as dicey a move as Bono wearing a cowboy hat while screaming at poor B.B. King to play “the blues, man!” in Rattle and Hum. In 1993, however, before the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings and “Hurt,” featuring Cash on a rock song was a bold gesture and not a guaranteed success. But while Bono was struggling to come up with a vocal part for a keyboard arrangement written by the Edge already titled “The Wanderer,” he realized Cash would be perfect for the part. (At one point, the song was even called “Johnny Cash on the Moon.”)
Bono and Cash had collaborated before, and as luck would have it, the Man in Black was playing Dublin soon. The band met him backstage and asked him to come to their studio to try out the song. Cash agreed, and everything clicked. In the song, Cash sings as an Old Testament survivor out of the book of Ecclesiastes, wandering “under an atomic sky” and preaching over a synth bass played by what the Edge described as “the Holiday Inn band from hell.” The album closer brings Zooropa full circle as Cash seems to portray a version of Bono’s “I don’t have a compass” character from the opening track but as an older and wiser man who decides to carry on into the unknown – a traveler Bono calls “the antidote to the Zooropa manifesto of uncertainty.”
“If you imagine the album being set in this place, Zooropa,” said Flood, “just when you’re expecting the norm to finish the album, you get somebody who’s outside the whole thing, wandering through, discussing it. It’s like the perfect full stop. It throws a whole different light on the conceptualization of the record.”
The following year, Cash released the first of many Rubin collaborations, kickstarting a career revival that lasted until his death in 2003. However, U2 gave Cash a place in the new world before a new generation caught on; Cash would return the favor in 2000 with his cover of “One.”
7. The album cover features Achtung Baby‘s “Astrobaby” and recreates the European flag on top of images of famous European leaders.
Charlie Whisker’s Astrobaby cartoon first appeared on Achtung Baby‘s CD cover and served, along with the candy-colored Trabant, as the unofficial symbol of the new U2. (In his 1995 U2 biography, Bill Flanagan also claims the cartoon is Cosmo, the Soviet cosmonaut who was in space when the USSR fell and was left floating for weeks while the new government figured out who should bring him home.) On Zooropa, the cartoon is front and center, surrounded by 12 stars imitating the European flag and laid over a collage of distorted images of European leaders including Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini and Nicolae Ceaușescu. The album’s themes of technological uncertainty and European unrest blend into what the design team Works Associates called an “electronic flag.” “The logo has a whimsy and intrigue that is appealing,” the team later explained. “It can be understood without words and somehow its human smallness nicely represents the largesse and technicality of the Zooropa tour.”
The cover could also be seen as a recreation of “Babyface,” a song inspired by the growing ease of feeling close to strangers through TV (“Watching your bright blue eyes/In the freeze frame/I’ve seen them so many times/I feel like I must be your best friend”). “It’s a song about watching and not being in the picture,” said Bono. “About how people play with images, believing you know somebody through an image.”
8. The album cover also accidentally includes tracks recorded for Zooropa but left off at the last minute.
Also like Achtung Baby, Zooropa‘s album cover includes layers of text manipulated on top of a series of photographs. The cover’s purple lettering included the album’s track list along with “Wake Up Dead Man,” “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” and “If You Wear That Velvet Dress.” However, those three tracks didn’t make it onto the record – the final album track list was updated after the designers finished the cover. “This text was comprised of the upcoming album’s track titles provided to us as we were designing the sleeve,” the designers wrote. “Somehow lost in the rush, we managed to not to update this track list so that several songs that didn’t make the final cut got left behind in the embedded piece.”
These songs would eventually find life after Zooropa. Both “Wake Up Dead Man” and “If You Wear That Velvet Dress” ended up on Pop, and “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” was rewritten for the Batman Forever soundtrack. Ironically, “Hold Me” became a bigger hit than anything off Zooropa.
9. Zooropa won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 1994 – and Bono was not happy.
Whereas most artists would be OK with winning one Grammy, Bono begrudgingly accepted the band’s sixth Grammy while dropping a rare F-bomb. “Yeah, ‘alternative,'” began Bono, rolling his eyes with the “Best Alternative Album” award in hand. After shouting out the Smashing Pumpkins and college radio, Bono delivered what he believed to be Zooropa‘s mission. “I think I’d like to give a message to the young people of America, and that is we shall continue to abuse our position and fuck up the mainstream. God bless you.” Bono’s issue wasn’t winning – Zooropa beat out Nirvana’s In Utero, R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, the Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, and Belly’s Star – but that his band didn’t even get nominated for Album of the Year. (This was Whitney Houston’s year thanks to the Bodyguard soundtrack.) “I thought of Zooropa at the time as a work of genius,” said Bono in 2006. “I really thought our pop discipline was matching our experimentation and this was our Sgt. Pepper. I was a little wrong about that.”
Zooropa was a success, but not by U2 standards. “Lemon” and “Numb” went Top Five, but only on the Modern Rock radio chart, and “Lemon” went Number One only on the Billboard Dance Club Play charts. “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” was the only song to make the Billboard Top 100, but it only reached Number 61. (Achtung Baby managed to land five tracks onto the Billboard Top 100.) U2 aimed to fuck up the mainstream, but instead, after a brief moment at Number One, Zooropaending up becoming their worst-selling album in the U.S. since October, though they would later beat that dubious record with Pop.
10. David Bowie praised U2 for Zooropa.
“They might be all shamrocks and deutsche marks to some,” Bowie said of U2 to The Irish Times in 1993, “but I feel that they are one of the few rock bands even attempting to hint at a world which will continue past the next great wall – the year 2000.” Bowie wasn’t always friendly towards U2’s music – he visited the band after they finished recording “The Fly” and told them to redo it – but he praised the band for how both Achtung Baby and Zooropa picked up where his own Berlin trilogy left off.
Bowie’s influence on Zooropa goes deeper. Willie Williams, U2’s longtime set designer who created the sensory overload of Zoo TV, helped design Bowie’s 1990 Sound+Vision Tour, which featured new transparent projection screens playing pre-recorded images along to Bowie’s songs. Williams would take this new technology and multiply it by 40 oversized screens to create a Blade Runner–like landscape for U2. And like Bowie, Bono created characters like the Fly, MacPhisto and the Mirrorball Man to free himself through outlandish performances. “I’ve played at being a rock & roll star,” said Bono in Rolling Stone just after Bowie’s passing, “but I’m really not one. David Bowie is my idea of a rock star.” Bono also thanked Bowie for opening the doors to Brian Eno, Berlin and Hansa Studios, all factors that led to U2’s growth, their eventual Nineties reinvention and Zooropa itself.
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