10 Terrible Songs By Perfect Rock Bands

During the mid ‘90s, there was no one who could really touch U2 anymore. Even though grunge should have logically killed them, embracing the ironic side of the music business gave their entire career a second wind, cashing in by making songs that were a lot more jaded about what life as a rock star was supposed to be. It was a good time to be experimenting, but one of the first singles from Zooropa left us with no real hook.

While the idea of handing the mic off to someone else in the band may have been their way to spice it up, you can’t really call what the Edge does singing per se. For the better part of 4 minutes, most of Numb consists of Edge speaking like some mechanical robot, almost going for a sort of industrial tinged mood with some of the lyrics but not really having the same attitude behind it.

The idea may have been to make him sound artificial, but it doesn’t make it any fun to listen to, especially when Bono’s backing vocals come in out of nowhere. It gets even stranger when you see the music video, with the Edge just being shuffled through some of the weirdest scenarios imaginable before the song just abruptly ends during the fade out. Zooropa might not be a lot of people’s favorite U2 album, but when you have an opening single like this, the odds are already stacked against you.