Thinking about U2’s Zooropa – exile and restoration

I found myself awake a lot last night so I popped in my earbuds, hit play on my iPod and listened to Zooropa, perhaps the U2 album I have had the least affinity to. That may have changed after my careful listen last night.

I realized that you can view this album as being two halves – the first half about the shallowness of the world and the second half about restoration, a theme that shows up in scripture as exile and restoration in the overarching story of Israel and in smaller stories like the Prodigal Son.

Let's take a quick walk through the album and see what's there. (You can find all the lyrics here.) In “Zooropa” we hear “And I have no compass and I have no map / And I have no reasons, no reasons to get back / And I have no religion and I don't know what's what / And I don't know the limit, the limit of what we got” which indicate that the singer has no direction.

“Babyface” reduces the woman that Bono sings about to little more than tinfoil and lace. Perhaps the most obvious example is “Numb” with its litany of excesses in the current age. “Lemon” is a reflection on how the image is preferable to the actual person. Building the car itself becomes the destination – we’re really going nowhere. “Stay” tells the story of yet another aimless person: “Red light, grey morning / You stumble out of a hole in the ground / A vampire or a victim / It depends on who's around.”

This brings us through the first half of the album – a half that’s frankly, pretty depressing. It is an unflinching look at a world that has little going for it except an onslaught of excess.

In the second half things start to look up. We begin, surprisingly enough, with a song about a crashed car. Who “Daddy” is is never explicit but it must be a song about grace. We crash the car and God pays for it. When I first heard “some days are better than others” I thought about the bad days that are referred to. Now I think that it’s a song about the good ones. “Some days you hear a voice taking you to another place / Some days are better than others.”

“The First Time” is a song with the Trinity built into it, the Holy Spirit in verse one, the Son in the second verse and then the Father in the third. I was puzzled by the throwing away of the keys in the third verse for a while, thinking that Bono was talking about leaving the church. Now I don’t think that’s the case. The key in question is not the key to church – in all three verses we see that God has reached out and the singer has not been able to fully grasp what’s being offered – in the third verse it’s the keys to the coming kingdom but the singer is too caught up in the stuff from the first half of the album to accept them. But he still recognizes that he feels loved.

I wonder if the voice of “Dirty Day” is the voice of Jesus. Here’s why: the father to son talk, the talk about “kissin’ time” and this verse: "Get it right
/ There's no blood thicker than ink
/ Hear what I say
/ Nothing's a simple as you think
/ Wake up
/ Somethings you can't get around
/ I'm in you 
/ More so when they put me in the ground."

If, in “Dirty Day,” redemption is made explicit, then it’s made personal in the “The Wanderer.” This album is a journey – a journey from the crassness and excesses of society to the redemption offered by Christ and accepted by flawed people. It’s a story of grace. I like this album a lot better now!