My blog title, Year ZOOthousand, comes mostly from my obsession with U2. It also comes from wanting a sort of “brand name” to attach to my projects, and trying to branch out from the tag “drexmo” that my family had adopted.
When my brother Chris was in high school, someone shortened his (our) last name to “Drexmo.” This quickly became a family moniker, especially online. I loved using it, but in recent years I felt as though I was taking something that belonged to the whole family and trying to make it exclusively mine. So I wanted a new, distinct, personal brand, and I wanted it to be diverse enough for all my projects. In my dream world, I make music, movies, books, plays, thousands of things. I wanted a name that linked all such productions.
I was thinking about U2’s theme of the word “zoo.” It started with their 1991 album Achtung Baby, which led with the song “Zoo Station.” It was inspired in part by a story that the animals broke out of the Berlin zoo when it was bombed during World War II. There is a subway station that stops there called Zoo Station. Bono intended to invoke a feeling of the wild breaking loose into the world. It’s also said to stand for the reunification of Europe after the Berlin Wall was destroyed, the zoo being a menagerie of cultures and peoples, and the station being the crossroad Europe, as a union and as a collection of diverse individuals, stood at when making the end of an era into the chance to start again.
The tour that accompanied Achtung Baby was called Zoo TV, but with a mostly different meaning. Here they intended to capture the sensory overload of the modern world, especially as technology flourished worldwide. The theme of the tour was characterized by bombardment with images and slogans that spanned the history of pop culture, changing in random order at shutter-speed, simultaneously (though not synchronized) on over thirty television screens at the live venue. This is also when the band developed what has become their signature style of theatrics. One of the album’s over-arching themes was an ironic, perhaps cynical perspective of life in the modern world, so they mocked the premise of indulgent superstar entertainers with that same irony by creating lavish stage designs, dressing in opulent clothes of a hard-edged, avant-garde fashion to a practically clownish degree. Bono developed a handful of stage personas, most recognizably The Fly, a Hollywood, bigger-than-life rock star archetype with the debut of Bono’s trademark, goggle-like sunglasses.
They wrote and recorded the follow-up album Zooropa during Zoo TV, calling later legs of the tour Zooropa and Zoomerang. Zooropa kept the previous album’s musical themes of electronic sounds, blending them with what were popular European musical styles at the time. “Zooropa” is a porte-manteau of “Zoo” and “Europa,” signifying more directly the new age of Europe. The album, especially its title track, added a couple of new themes: Technology, specifically the ways that it unites us and separates us, and Europe’s attempt to fill their lack of direction with uncertainty itself as the substitute. The cover features a cartoonish baby in a space helmet, surrounded by the stars of the European Union flag. Backing these pictures are chopped and discolored pictures overlaid with interference static, much like the images from Zoo TV. Mixed into the interference patterns are the names of three songs that didn’t make the album but appeared on later releases.
What I developed was Z000 (a porte-manteau of ZOO and 2000), a year in the near future when the world persists at developing technology to aid us while it continues to hinder us. A world of metropolis. An era when the privileged citizen thirsts unendingly for further overstimulation. A time and place that in many ways has already arrived in the so-called “first world” countries.
One thing I particularly like about Zoo Thousand is that it’s a number, which gives the phrase diverse application. I could produce music as Zoo Thousand Records, film as Zoo Thousand Pictures, etc.
