geoMp3 of The Week: U2’s “Zoo Station” (live from Berlin, 2005)
(backdated to 2008.June.16)
Catching up from the trip to Germany for Geoinformatics 2008. I mentioned that the conference was great, Germany good (maybe not the disintegrating spargel, but certainly biking through Berlin), but that the trip home was a comical exercise in everything that’s wrong with air travel. And because I rediscovered Lou Reed’s Berlin, I haven’t listened to much else save for T-Bone Burnett’s new Tooth of Crime which, while a decent album, hasn’t revealed anything terribly locatable to me.So to wrap up the Germany trip with one more musical ode to Deutschland, this week’s track will be U2’s “Zoo Station.”
…For obvious reasons, I suppose, since we rode into and out of the real Zoo Station (Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten), busing from and to our miserable flights. Of course U2 didn’t just write a song about a train station; they were at the beginning of a period where they thought it wise to examine the band itself and by extension what it meant to be “rock band U2.” Zoo Station, then, where the train of time makes the future the past, was perfectly iconic of what the band was trying to do – carry U2 and, presumably, rock and roll full-force into a future that was already looking awfully inhospitable to conscience rock of the sort that certainly flew in the 60s and 70s but was waning during the grossly misproduced 1980s.
But back to me: Zoo Station proved just the opposite for us. Our travels refused to make the future the past, in fact Continental Airlines seemed uncannily able to keep the future – when we would return to the U.S. and our jobs and lives – at a safe distance.
What I learned: if you’re a rock star Zoo Station will take you to new heights of unabashedly oversized rock and roll deism. If you’re me and wife idiolecto, you’re a couple of lumpy suitcases full of bones that go where you’re put and you’d best just let the body endure it while your brain checks out to happier times.
So it’s U2’s “Zoo Station,” performed live in Berlin in 2005. Sound quality isn’t great, but I thought it nice to put up a show from Berlin about Berlin./p>
And the kml for all mp3s of the week, and notice the new pipe of the most recent 10 (upper right)
