#365songs (172 / 365)

I guess it's similar to my arc with R.E.M. that my most enduring love of U2 is their weirdest and least straightforwardly earnest three-album sequence: Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Pop. "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" has a lot of the very weird stuff that made these albums so compelling, and for someone used to, I don't know, "With or Without You" it's nearly unrecognizable as U2 aside from Bono's voice. The sample? These funky as hell drums? The glitchy, looped-sounding fuzz bass riff? What is this? It sounds like a Bono side project. But it's U2.

The lyrics here are interesting and unsettling. My girlfriend at the time (college) speculated that "Daddy" is a child molester and I found this an edgy and compelling theory, though I wouldn't stand by it now and I suspect she wouldn't either. At the time, though, I submitted it to some U2 fan site that accepted reader interpretations of songs, and got chewed out by the site admin in their email response for reading something so perverse into a song by U2, who to be fair do sing more quasi-wholesome songs about God than any rock band at their level. But they were barely doing that on Zooropa, aside from the song that they had Johnny Cash sing. Had I wanted to argue, I could have pointed out that "Babyface" is clearly about watching pornography, but I hadn't been on the internet long enough for being chastised to make me combative.

These days I think of the "Daddy" in this song as more like the "Mom" in Laurie Anderson's O Superman and his paying for your crashed car as the equivalent of Anderson's "Mom"'s holding you in her petrochemical arms. This is of course informed by my own personal loathing of cars, which I won't go into here except to say that it's a reading that fits the lyrics pretty nicely. Anyway, this song probably qualifies as a deep cut but it's one of my favorite and weirdest U2 tracks of all time.