The exuberant paranoia of Bob Dylan‘s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” gets a postmodern twist on “Numb.” Above a hypnotic rhythm track and a repetitive, industrial guitar screech, the Edge blankly intones a long string of disconnected injunctions, post-apocalyptic advice (“Don’t move/Don’t talk out of time/Don’t think/Don’t worry everything’s just fine/Just fine”) for stunned survivors. Bono enters like a Mephistophelean seducer, offering jaded pleasures, nurturing dissatisfaction and stoking desire, crooning the pander’s eternal appeal, “What do you want?” That alluring sonic chaos ultimately yields to the wah-wah blast of the Edge’s guitar and the insistent groove of Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums. As the song opens, a stately piano figure, beautiful and foreboding, underlies indecipherable, static-stricken signals from the information-age inferno of Zoo TV. The title track sets the tone from the very start. It is varied and vigorously experimental, but its charged mood of giddy anarchy suffused with barely suppressed dread provides a compelling, unifying thread. Zooropa defuses the daunting commercial expectations set by that album while closing off none of the band’s artistic options. With Zooropa the results are far more satisfying: The album is a daring, imaginative coda to Achtung Baby (1991), U2’s first unqualified masterpiece. In 1988, to get some distance on the prodigious success of The Joshua Tree, U2 perpetrated Rattle and Hum, an album-book-movie media blitz so self-conscious and contrived that it seemed about as unplanned as the invasion of Normandy. Unfortunately, the strategy backfired the last time U2 attempted a “spontaneous” one-off.
Live EPs came hard on the heels of both War (1983) and The Unforgettable Fire (1984), and for the most part, they effectively eased the pressure on the band and left U2 free to explore whatever new aesthetic directions they pleased. Historically, U2 have always attempted to follow up breakthrough albums with less ostensibly ambitious efforts.