The current state of play in a Damian Lillard trade seems pretty simple. Lillard wants a trade from the Portland Trail Blazers, with his heart apparently set on a move to the Miami Heat. The issue is that Miami’s best offer involves sending Tyler Herro to Portland, and he’s just a little too repetitive with the team’s young trio of Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe, and Anfernee Simons. Add in that he’s about to enter the first year of a 4-year, $120 million contract and it makes sense why the Blazers would have some trepidation about just appeasing Lillard without thinking about what’s best for them.
As such, there are a few ways this can go. Portland could just take the Heat’s best offer, or it could send Lillard elsewhere and deal with whatever apparent consequences would come from that. And then, there’s a third option, which is to try and pull other teams in on a multi-team deal, and according to Marc Spears of ESPN, there are several teams that would be interested in helping to facilitate a Lillard-to-Miami trade.
Via ESPN:
Damian Lillard wants to play for Miami and only Miami, I have been continually told since Saturday. Certainly, it’s easier said than done. I’m told that while Portland isn’t happy with potential packages, there are over five teams interested in a potential multiteam trade that could get it done. It won’t be today or tomorrow or perhaps the next day, but I believe it will ultimately end up with Lillard going to Miami. While Lillard does not have a no-trade clause, it doesn’t make sense to trade for a future Hall of Famer who doesn’t want to be there.
While Spears didn’t explicitly say this would mean a team would take Herro to make a deal happen, it would certainly make sense if there are teams out there that would want to acquire his services for the next four years as a high-scoring wing who can add some playmaking and rebounding.
There are few things more magical for a young girl than spending a warm summer night in Paris in front of the lights of the Eiffel Tower. But Joel Redhead, 29, took things up a notch recently when he convinced his daughter, Esmae, that she turned on the lights all by herself.
The father and daughter duo were in Paris celebrating Esmae’s 8th birthday. Sadly, her mother couldn’t be there for health reasons.
Joel, from Yorkshire, England, told his daughter they were going to Liverpool for the weekend, but after spending a night in the city, that next morning, he surprised her with a trip to the City of Light.
“When we woke her up in the hotel the morning of our trip at 5 am and broke the news to her, she was completely overjoyed, but the excitement didn’t end there,” he told The Yorkshire Post.
She asked who made it sparkle so Daddy gave her the job ✨🇫🇷 #eiffeltower #paris #wholesome #tourist #emotionalmoments #loveyou #fypシ
Joel packed a light switch for the trip, and when they arrived at the Eiffel Tower, he told his daughter that she was responsible for turning the lights on that night. He handed her the switch, and she turned her back to the tower. When the lights came on, she flipped the switch, turned around and countless sparkling lights illuminated the city.
Later, the dad told his daughter that the switch wasn’t connected to the tower, but she loved the experience anyway.
“She said she felt magical, and though now she knows that daddy set this up to give her a memory of a lifetime and how the lights really worked, she finds it hilarious that we pranked the people around us who believed she turned them on,” he said.
HBO’s controversial new series The Idol came to an end this past Sunday. While the series has been panned by critics, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, who created the show alongside Sam Levinson and Reza Fahim, stood by the series through its short, five-episode run.
Following its even more polarizing finale, The Weeknd took to Instagram to share a reflective post about the journey to the show.
“the finale,” read the post’s caption. “grateful to share this moment with you all as the season comes to an end. continue to push the vision no matter how bumpy the journey.”
In the photo carousel are pictures of The Weeknd as his character, the cult leader, Tedros — as well as Lily-Rose Depp, who plays pop star Jocelyn, Levinson, and much of the show’s cast.
And of course, The Idol‘s journey has certainly been bumpy, as he notes in the post’s caption. Back in March, the show was the subject of a scathing Rolling Stone exposé which brought to light the alleged toxic working conditions during the show’s production. It also received several negative reviews from critics during its premiere at Cannes Film Festival back in May.
At the time of writing, it has not yet been confirmed if HBO will bring The Idol back for a second season.
Keeping track of all the new albums coming out in a given month is a big job, but we’re up for it: Below is a comprehensive list of the major releases you can look forward to in July. If you’re not trying to potentially miss out on anything, it might be a good idea to keep reading.
Friday, July 7
12 Rods — If We Stayed Alive (American Dreams Records)
African Head Charge — A Trip to Bolgatanga (On-U Sound Records)
Aluna — MYCELiUM (Mad Decent)
AMAARA — Child of Venus (Lady Moon Records)
ANOHNI and the Johnsons — My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross (Rough Trade)
Bloodbound — Tales From the North (AFM/Soulfood)
Butcher Babies — Eye For an Eye (Century Media Records)
Butcher Babies — …’Till the World’s Blind (Century Media Records)
Chris Stamey — The Great Escape (Schoolkids Records)
CIEL — Make It Better EP (Jazz Life Records)
Citizen Cope — The Victory March (Rainwater Recordings)
Fit of Body — Far From the Rhythm (2MR)
Delilah Holliday — Invaluable Vol. 1 EP (One Little)
Dominic Fike — Sunburn (Columbia Records)
The Far Outs — The Far Outs (Rebel Waves Records)
Golden Features — Sisyphus (Warner Music Australia/Foreign Family Collective)
Grouplove — I Want It All Right Now (Glassnote)
Gus Dapperton — HENGE (Warner Records)
Hot Tuna — 3 (Grunt)
Jim O’Rourke — Hands That Bind (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (Drag City)
Julie Byrne — The Greater Wings (Ghostly International)
KennyHoopla — BLINK AND YOU’LL MISS IT// EP (Mogul Vision Music/Arista Records)
Lauren Bousfield — Salesforce (Orange Milk)
Laurence Guy — Living Like There’s No Tomorrow, But Killing Yourself In The Process (Laurence Guy)
Little Dragon — Slugs of Love (Ninja Tune)
Local Natives — Time Will Wait for No One (Loma Vista Recordings)
Longings — Dreams In Red (Don Giovanni)
ME LOST ME — RPG (Upset The Rhythm)
The Mighty Bard — Beyond the Gate (Epictronic)
Miles Miller — Solid Gold (Easy Lovin Records)
Misogi — Escape Artist (Pink Noise)
Nita Strauss — The Call of the Void (Sumerian Records)
Noble Oak — When It Finds You (Last Gang/MNRK)
Nothing But Thieves — Dead Club City (RCA/Sony Music)
Penguin Cafe — Rain Before Seven… (Erased Tapes)
Pigeon Wigs — Rock By Numbers (Clwb Music)
PJ Harvey — I Inside the Old Year (Partisan Records)
Sad Park — No More Sound (Pure Noise Records)
Taylor Swift — Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (Republic Records)
Tony Allen — JID018 (Jazz Is Dead)
Yellowcard — Childhood Eyes EP (Equal Vision)
Friday, July 14
a kid named rufus — whatever works (Nettwerk Music Group)
Alana Springsteen — Twenty Something: Figuring It Out (Columbia Records NY/Sony Music Nashville)
Alaska Reid — Disenchanter (Luminelle Recordings)
Being Dead — When Horses Would Run (Bayonet Records)
Birdy — Portraits (Atlantic)
Blake Mills — Jelly Road (New Deal/Verve)
Blondes — In Separation EP (C3 Records/Lab Records)
Blusher — Should We Go Dance? EP (Atlantic Records/Warner Music Australia)
Cinema Cinema — Mjölnir (Nefarious Industries)
Claud — Supermodels (Saddest Factory Records)
Colter Wall — Little Songs (La Honda Records)
Current Affairs — Off the Tongue (Tough Love)
Duane Betts — Wild & Precious Life (The Royal Potato Family)
Far Caspian — The Last Remaining Light (Tiny Library Records)
George Benson — Live At Montreux 1986 (Eagle Vision)
glaive — i care so much that i dont care at all (Interscope Records)
Gordon Lightfoot — At Royal Albert Hall (Linus Entertainment)
IDMAN — Risk EP (Artista Records)
John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy — Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse! Records)
Kevitch — Secrets EP (Nettwerk)
Kool & the Gang — People Just Wanna Have Fun (Astana Music)
Lauren Spencer Smith — Mirror (Republic)
Lil Tjay — 222 (Columbia Records)
Lindstrøm — Everyone Else is a Stranger (Smalltown Supersound)
Lukas Nelson + Promise of the Real — Sticks and Stones (Thirty Tigers)
Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog — Connection (Knockwurst Records)
Since the evening I saw it, now, as I type this, almost two weeks ago, I’ve been pretty obsessed with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One from a screenwriting standpoint. Director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie pretty obviously wanted to make a movie about the dangers of artificial intelligence – in this movie referred to as “The Entity” – and the ideas presented are so ambitious it needs two full movies to properly show. Okay, fair enough, AI is certainly a hot-button issue right now. (So much of a hot-button issue I wonder if the filmmakers are surprised. If Dead Reckoning Part One would have come out in 2021 when it was originally intended, a lot of the plot points would probably come off a little more futuristic as opposed to, yeah, this all seems correct.)
But reverse engineering a bit, how do you have Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force do battle with AI? Well, there’s the obvious solution of the AI manifesting itself into something like a Terminator, but McQuarrie doesn’t want to go down that road. He plays it much more realistic here – which certainly adds a real sense of foreboding knowing the real-life stakes aren’t that far off from what we are watching. But how do you have Ethan fight a computer?
This seems like a real problem that I suspect wasn’t the easiest plot point to crack. Fighting AI seems either way too easy or way too hard. In that, Ethan could just show up at Google, or whatever, and say, “We need to turn this off.” Or, the AI now lives on every single electronic device and, at that point, what can Ethan really do? Here’s what they did…
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens up on a Russian submarine, Dead Reckoning, and we are told it’s the most advanced stealth sub in the world. (And borrowing a trick from The Hunt For Red October where the English subtitles eventually go away and everyone just starts speaking English.) But the submarine’s computer systems go haywire, eventually plunging the vessel into the icy depths of the Bering Sea. On board that submarine is a room where the computer systems are housed. To access the submarine’s computer system a user would need two keys that slide into one another forming a four-sided key. The Entity now lives in that room at the bottom of the sea. (Look, the plot of this movie is pretty dense and a lot of time is used trying to explain it. I realize this is a lot of information, but after this movie I was assembling charts and graphs trying to figure out exactly was going on, so hopefully this saves you some time.) Okay, having explained that…
The Entity has now infected pretty much all the world’s important computer systems: defense systems, banks … you name it. But, has yet to do anything nefarious – its goal seemed to be just to let everyone know what it’s capable of doing. Now, every country and organization seeking power wants to be in control of The Entity since The Entity has its grip on literally everything. And the way to control The Entity is by obtaining those two aforementioned keys. Kittridge (Henry Czerny)* sends Ethan Hunt on a mission to retrieve these keys. And his first stop is finding Ethan’s old flame, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who intelligence believes has one of the keys. For what reason, no one knows.
(*It’s so great to have Czerny back as Kittridge. I just recently watched the first Mission: Impossible and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he’s not in all of these. His monologue at the beginning of that first film when he finally tells Ethan, “I understand you’re very upset,” is still so wonderful. He’s got this excellent mix of swarm and authority that’s really hard to do. Where we as an audience think, “This guy is the worst, but also he really seems to know what he’s doing and I can’t help but respect that.” That’s a difficult combination to pull off. It’s usually one or the other. There’s a great scene in Dead Reckoning where Kittridge tries to explain to the National Security Director (Cary Elwes) what IMF even is that’s really funny and doesn’t work without Czerny. “What do you mean they can turn it down?”)
I truly get that McQuarrie really wanted to take on this AI idea and that, he’s correct in thinking so, it does feel like a very pertinent issue – at least more than another movie where someone wants to blow something up. This does seem like McQuarrie’s meditation on AI and the dangerous direction we are headed. But it does take a lot of setup and a long way to get there, which after a while does start to feel heavy on the exposition and a bit confusing. (Or, at least, about as confusing as most James Bond movies.) But once all the teams all start chasing the keys, it’s a lot of fun. Ethan runs into a lot of old friends along the way. Of course, Luther and Benji are back (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) and Ethan, once again, has to deal with the arms dealer Alanna (Vanessa Kirby, having a great time), who also very much wants these keys. And we meet Grace (Hayley Atwell) a master pickpocket hired to steal the keys who doesn’t seem to quite know what she’s involved in here. (Also, it is kind of funny, for as important these two keys are, a lot of the characters just slip them into their casual slacks pocket, or whatever. I am more guarded about my key to my apartment building’s trash bins than some of the characters are about these keys that control the world.)
Oh, and there’s Esai Morales’s Gabriel, who has a past with Ethan Hunt — most of his motivations seem mysterious, even up until the end. His affiliation only seems to be to The Entity, but what he’s gaining from any of this isn’t quite clear.
And I say “up until the end” because, once again, we are not getting a full movie. This is quite a recent trend. And I truly don’t think audiences like it. A friend of mine saw Across the Spider-Verse recently, knowing full well it was the first of two halves, but most of the rest of the audience sure didn’t and were not happy. The good news is Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t as egregious with its ending. This movie is about the keys. The next (I’m guessing) seems like it will be what to even do with those keys. So there are two clear missions here and this movie covers the first of those, but it’s still not a complete story and because of that is nowhere near as satisfying as Fallout. A lot of Mission: Impossible movies have a lot of exposition and can be complicated. Brian de Palma’s first movie (still my personal favorite, with Fallout a close second) is pretty complicated! But a terrific finale can cure all of that. And Dead Reckoning Part One has a really great sequence on a train to close the movie out, it doesn’t resolve anything, like that incredible fight with Henry Cavill does in Fallout.
And that’s the thing about Mission: Impossible movies: Their nature is to be “satisfying“! That feels like kind of the point – that extra oomph of adrenaline. But with the inherent nature of a two-part story, I guess we will have to wait for next year (hopefully) for that.
‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ opens July 12th. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
Josh Hawley used to be a law professor, which leads one to believe that he checks his facts. Not so much. The Missouri senator has been getting severely roasted after he fired off a “Patrick Henry quote” that’s not actually from Patrick Henry.
“It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians,” Hawley tweeted while erroneously citing Henry. “Not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.”
However, it turns out Hawley’s mistake goes even further. On top of the Henry quote being fake, the source of the text is not great:
“Not only is this a fake quote from Henry, the source is the April 1956 edition of the virulently antisemitic & white nationalist magazine ‘The Virginian,’” historian Seth Cotlar noted. “It was reprinted in The American Mercury in 1956, the year that antisemitic rag hired George Lincoln Rockwell.”
Not only is this a fake quote from Henry, the source is the April 1956 edition of the virulently antisemitic & white nationalist magazine “The Virginian.” It was reprinted in The American Mercury in 1956, the year that antisemitic rag hired George Lincoln Rockwell. pic.twitter.com/xJyzaicTIB
— Seth Cotlar, mostly now at the other places (@SethCotlar) July 5, 2023
There’s also the fact that the Founding Fathers were big on America not being a Christian nation and wrote official documents saying as much.
In the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli ending war between the United States and the Barbary pirates, John Adams wrote, “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” Thomas Jefferson — who was as bitter an ideological rival to Adams as modern-day Democrats are to Republicans — agreed, writing, “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law,” and saying the First Amendment establishes “a wall of separation between church and state.”
Following in the footsteps of his fellow conservative Ted Cruz, Hawley has been getting ruthlessly dunked on over the past 24 hours. You can see some of the reactions below:
You will be unsurprised to hear that Patrick Henry never said this. It comes from a 1956 article in a magazine called The Virginian. But what’s a fake quote between friends? https://t.co/PZCEhfNlqW
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) July 5, 2023
Not Josh Harley sharing a fake quote that actually originated in a 1956 issue of the white supremacist magazine The Virginian. https://t.co/kp5iqnZHKE
15 hours and this fake quote is still up. Christian Nationalists’ identity depends on deliberately spreading disinformation about American history, especially the founders and the founding. https://t.co/z6bRSUYnQW
Nothing describes the idiocy of the current Republican Party like a Yale law grad who clerked with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court using a fake quote from a guy who opposed the US Constitution. https://t.co/pmTDQOZW5p
My high school freshman world history students take greater care in quoting historical sources than a U.S. senator with degrees from Yale and Stanford. I am both proud and disturbed. https://t.co/lRNAbPv6Xw
Christian theocrat uses a fake quote to make his case. Many of the founding fathers were deists and the constitution establishes a secular government. Your version of christian Saudi Arabia is authoritarian and unpopular. Give it up https://t.co/SCu5MFAWjg
Holograms of artists who have passed away have become a trend in the music industry, as acts like ABBA and Whitney Houston are able to perform posthumously on various residencies and tours. However, Dolly Parton wants to make it clear that when that time comes, she does not want to be included in it.
“I think I’ve left a great body of work behind,” Parton told The Independent. “I have to decide how much of that high-tech stuff I want to be involved [with] because I don’t want to leave my soul here on this Earth.”
Instead of getting the hologram treatment, she thinks her music alone should carry on her legacy. “I think with some of this stuff I’ll be grounded here forever,” she added. “I’ll be around, we’ll find ways to keep me here.”
The interview dropped a few months ahead of Parton’s next album, Rockstar, which finds her working with a lot of legendary acts in the genre. She gave her husband, Carl Dean, a full listen of the record — as she tried to choose covers of some of his favorite songs.
“At the end, he said, ‘It’s really good,’” she explained. “To me, that was like somebody else jumping up and down saying, ‘That’s the best thing I’ve heard.’ So that made me feel good. I wanted to please him, to be honest more than anybody else.”
While Parton might have a tiny possibility of touring for the album, one thing is for sure — it will not be in hologram form.
Beyoncé fans in Pittsburgh received some disappointing news today. When the superstar’s long-awaited Renaissance World Tour finally makes its North American swing this week, it’ll do so one show shorter. The August 3rd Pittsburgh stop has been removed from the schedule as the Acrisure Stadium announced that due to production logistics and scheduling issues, the date there will not be taking place. Refunds are being automatically issued — but that hasn’t stopped the BeyHive from expressing some serious discontent.
Even knowing this, there’s still a stan war brewing in the quotes on Acrisure Stadium’s tweet, as Swifties boast about the perceived “win” as Taylor Swift continues to add new dates to her ongoing Eras tour.
Donald Trump Jr. seemed pretty fired up over the weekend as he tweeted about the suspected cocaine found at the White House while President Biden and fam were not on the premises. As it turns out, however, the eldest boy was actually supposed to be traveling to Australia for a three-city Down Under tour due to begin on Sunday. What happened?
There has been no official reason yet, only vagaries, but a few weeks ago, word began circulating that Turning Point Australia would host Don Jr. and Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage in “Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane” for speaking engagements. However, a fair amount of Aussies signed an activist petition that protested the tour while claiming, “Donald Trump Jr is an illegal [redacted] bigoted person who should not be allowed to enter Australia for the purpose of earning himself and possibly his father any ‘Campaign Contributions.’”
As the HuffPost now notes, Turning Point announced that the tour has been “postponed.” No crystal clear explanation was given on the promotional website, other than that “unforeseen circumstances” were to blame. The organization then elaborated a bit more on Facebook with a “#CancelCulture” hashtag and more:
“It seems America isn’t the only country that makes it difficult for the Trumps…
Announcement & more info coming soon about the postponement of the tour.
Hold onto your tickets, this is a short delay nothing more. #CancelCulture
The dates will be changing for all shows to a later date.”
Could there possibly have been a visa SNAFU? There’s no telling, but Don Jr. hasn’t tweeted about whatever mysterious incident caused the delay. Maybe he shall unleash one of his rants sooner or later. Previously as well, Newsweek reported that Don Jr. claimed to have a “huge fan base in Australia.”
This fall, U2 will play a series of concerts inside of a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas. Dubbed The Sphere, the bowling ball costs an estimated $2 billion and has been dubbed the “world’s largest spherical structure,” which suggests that it is even larger than Joe Rogan’s skull. Actually, The Sphere is much larger than Joe Rogan’s skull — it is 26 stories tall and 37 stories wide, which is big enough to fit 164,000 speakers and around 18,000 people.
Because this story involves 1) a giant bowling ball in Las Vegas and 2) the internationally famous rock band U2, people naturally goofed on the residency when it was originally teased during the Super Bowl in February. But as The Edge explained to Rolling Stone, “We’re always on the lookout for emerging technologies in the world of concerts and audio.” That is absolutely true, particularly as it pertains to U2’s most famous concert experience, The Zoo TV Tour of the early ’90s, which utilized a barrage of video screens to create a multi-media experience that simultaneously harnessed and satirized the seductive qualities of television. The Sphere run is directly linked to Zoo TV by branding that centers on U2’s landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby, which will be the focal point of the shows.
But when I ponder the reality of a giant, state-of-the-art bowling ball in Las Vegas, the U2 album that feels more appropriate for this gaudy/campy sci-fi scenario isn’t the one that opened Zoo TV, but rather the one that concluded it. I refer to the seventh U2 LP, Zooropa, which was released 30 years ago today.
On that record, U2 dared to imagine something that in the present moment seems to be of little common interest: the future. When I say “the future,” I don’t mean the future as we have come to understand it, which is a slightly removed version of the present that’s scarcely different save for some incremental iPhone updates and steadily worse weather. I mean the future as it stood in the ’90s, when people looked beyond the 20th century and envisioned a radically different world emerging from a period of political and cultural uncertainty. Zooropa came out of that moment, and its version of the future makes a lot more sense in 2023 than it did in 1993.
I’ll give you an example: On the back half of the Zoo TV tour, Bono adopted a devilish persona he called MacPhisto. When playing this character, he applied white facepaint and lipstick in a manner that recalled Joel Grey’s emcee character from the 1972 Nazi musical Cabaret, and affected a mock British accent that resembled David Bowie at his most gacked-out. He wore a golden leisure suit, a puffy red shirt, and devil horns, as if he were a lounge singer from Hell (or Las Vegas). In 1993, this confounded a lot of U2 fans, because Bono was acting like the singer of a band who might one day play inside of the world’s largest bowling ball. Now we know he was just foreshadowing.
Of course, I understand why Zooropa is not the focus of a Las Vegas residency for which U2 will be paid $10 million on top of taking 90 percent of the gate at every gig. Achtung Baby is one of U2’s best-selling and most critically acclaimed records, and Zooropa … is not. At the time, it was their worst-selling record since their second, 1981’s pre-fame October, and was widely perceived as an inessential tangent from its predecessor. (Their next album, 1997’s Pop, sold even worse.)
Even the members of U2 have classified Zooropa as an arty indulgence that came in the midst of their least accessible era. (1995’s Original Soundtracks 1 by the Brian Eno-assisted side project Passengers took this experimentation to its furthest extreme.) By the dawn of the 21st century, U2 ceased reimagining the future and re-embraced its past, and immediately revitalized itself as one of the world’s top stadium-rock attractions.
More than any other U2 album, Zooropa has a muddled legacy. It has inspired thoughtful reappraisals, and it has also been called the U2 record that “almost killed their career.” But what fans and detractors agree on is that Zooropa ranks as the riskiest record U2 ever made, and that’s due entirely to the period from which it came. The process of making Zooropa began in early 1993 between legs of the Zoo TV Tour. Originally conceived as an EP, the album’s amalgam of sardonic media commentary and dead-serious spiritual crisis reflected the tone of the Zoo TV shows. On stage, U2 mixed cheeky pranksterism (like ordering 10,000 pizzas from a local pie shop in Detroit) with post-modern quasi-journalism (like the live remotes from Sarajevo with war-scarred locals during the tour’s European leg). Off stage, the band was shuttling around the world in their own “Zoo Plane” private jet and blasting ABBA songs nonstop. Their collective head space was not, as they say, normal.
The outside world was also in a state of flux. “The old ideologies have fallen away,” The Edge opined to Rolling Stone in a 1993 cover story. “Capitalism won out. You can’t even say it was democracy, because ultimately the ground upon which the battle was fought was economics — it was about money. And the West’s economy won, and communism is pretty much over.”
In the story’s next paragraph, The Edge — who was credited as Zooropa‘s co-producer, which nodded to his commanding role in guiding the music and even collaborating on the lyrics — essentially articulates the album’s central theme. “People are perplexed. Maybe the stability that the Cold War created was the foundation of the West’s movement forward, and now that that’s gone and we have the resurgence of radical nationalism, people in Europe don’t know who they are trying to be. Not only do they not know who they are, they don’t know who they want to be. They don’t know whether they want to be Europeans, part of the European community or whether they should be fighting to protect their national and ethnic identities.
“Even national boundaries don’t mean much anymore. You’ve got the movement in Italy to partition the country into two or three autonomous states. There’s the Basque-separatist movement that’s alive and kicking. Northern Ireland is still no closer to a real solution. And Yugoslavia is the most obvious example of where things are starting to dissolve. Sarajevo has been a symbol of this.”
This breakdown in boundaries and traditional roles is what Zooropa addresses, both lyrically and musically, throughout the record. U2’s mission, for once, is to constantly bewilder the listener. The album-opening title track is an update of “Where The Streets Have No Name,” only the desire for spiritual transcendence is expressed via the bland language of advertising-speak. (“Zooropa better by design / Zooropa fly the friendly skies / Through appliance of science / We’ve got that ring of confidence.”) On the album’s first single, the monotone oddity “Numb,” Bono abandons the lead singer role so that The Edge can intone a long list of “don’ts.” (This happens again at the end of the album in more dramatic fashion when Johnny Cash guests on the minimalist electronic epic “The Wanderer.”) For the second single, “Lemon,” the album’s most crushing personal narrative — Bono mournfully addresses the death of his mother — is set to its poppiest, most ABBA-like music.
Meanwhile, car crash imagery — an everyday form of technological disorientation and destruction — recurs in multiple songs. Even the most conventional U2-sounding track, “Stay (Faraway So Close),” double-backs on itself twice in the title. “Uncertainty can be a guiding light” is Zooropa‘s defining lyric, and yet another contradiction. Uncertainty guided U2, but there is very little light on this esoteric record made by the era’s broadest guitar-rock band.
Zooropa was artistically successful in that it set out to evoke an increasingly incoherent world by making anyone who heard it also feel incoherent. But that kind of artistic success plainly put it at cross-purposes with commerciality. (It is unlikely that the majority of listeners will ever appreciate the difference between deliberate confusion and confusion-confusion.) In 2023, however, Zooropa sounds different than it did in 1993. Unlike a lot of big-time alt-rock records from that year, it doesn’t feel dated. It, in fact, seems more relevant now than it did then.
To explain this, allow me to go on a brief, personal tangent: In August of 1993, more than a month after Zooropa was released, I reviewed the album for my local hometown newspaper. I was 15, and this was my first paid music-writing gig. I gave the album an “A” and wrote that it was composed of “pop songs that sound nothing like pop songs.” (I believe I was paid $15 for this incisive prose.)
My family did not own a computer in 1993. I wrote this review out longhand on notebook paper. I then asked my mother to drive me downtown to the newspaper office, at which point I slipped my folded-up notebook paper sheets with the fringes on the side into the mail slot. An editor then entered this data into a computer as big as 50 iPhones, and it wound up in the newspaper a week or so later.
That is how technology worked in 1993. Technology was slow, cumbersome, and ancient. But unbeknownst to me or my mother, the world as we knew it was already finished. About four months before I wrote that review — on April 30, 1993 — a world-changing innovation dreamt up by a 37-year-old Swiss physics researcher named Tim Berners-Lee entered the public domain. It was called the World Wide Web, and it was a new information system that made it possible for the average person with little or no computer knowledge to explore the Internet with ease. The effect of this, obviously, was seismic. In 1993, only 1 percent of all information moving through telecommunication networks came from the Internet. By 2007, it was 97 percent.
When U2 made Zooropa, they weren’t thinking about the World Wide Web, because virtually nobody was thinking about the World Wide Web in 1993. They were instead concerned with things like satellite television, that thrilling and overbearing new-ish innovation that allowed you “to go anywhere,” as Bono croons in “Stay (Faraway So Close).” Even though technology in 1993 was slow, cumbersome, and ancient, it felt quick, easy, and overwhelmingly immediate. The preoccupation with satellite TV should make Zooropa seem dated. But, incredibly, it does not. And that’s because the world U2 thought they were commenting on in 1993 was in reality just coming into existence, and it’s the world we’re living in now.
Zooropa is often uncanny in how it accidentally comments on online culture. The industrial guitar hook in “Numb” resembles the squawk of an Internet dial-up. “Babyface” is a good song about obsessing over a TV starlet, but it’s a great song about how internet porn disconnects chronic users from reality. And then there are the songs that unfold like lists (“Zooropa,” “Numb,” “Some Days Are Better Than Others”), which replicate the disconnected data dumps that populate social media feeds.
Above all, Zooropa summons the modern desire to unplug from the grid and reconnect with something “real” or “authentic.” The trilogy of songs that close the record (“The First Time,” “Dirty Day,” “The Wanderer”) meld the shadowy iconography of ’40s film noir and ’70s anti-westerns with Old Testament sermonizing about a godless society wracked by climate disasters and familial dysfunction where “sons turn their fathers in.”
The most remarkable track on Zooropa is also the most forward-looking: For “The Wanderer,” U2 was once again ahead of the curve in their appreciation of Johnny Cash, who was a year away from his Rick Rubin-assisted comeback with 1994’s American Recordings. Unlike Rubin, who stripped Cash’s music down to the studs, U2 mashed him up with a backing track that resembled the alien soundscapes of Another Green World. Thirty years ago, this might have seemed like a gimmick. But now, given the flattening of cultural boundaries online and the power of A.I. to situate deceased musical legends in any context we wish, putting Johnny Cash on the moon is plausible to the point of seeming barely noteworthy.
Listening to the song, you can picture Johnny traversing a post-apocalyptic hellscape. “Now Jesus, don’t you wait up,” he says. “Jesus, I’ll be home soon.” He’s out here “in search of experience.” He wants to feel as much as a man can before he repents, which is another way of saying that he wants tomorrow to be more exciting than today. In 1993, tomorrow presented real possibilities. No one could see what was around the corner. What we didn’t know is that the future wound up being scarier, and more banal (and definitely more spherical), than we could possibly imagine.
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Jon Schwarz 
