"Zooropa" is set amongst neon signs of a brightly lit futuristic city. In the song's introduction, background voices ask, "What do you want?" In response to the question, the lyrics in the first three verses consist of various advertising slogans, including, "Better by design", "Be all that you can be", and "Vorsprung durch technik". Critic Parry Gettelman interpreted these lines as meaning to "signify the emptiness of modern, godless life". In the song's second half, the theme of moral confusion and uncertainty is introduced, particularly in the lines "I have no compass / And I have no map". "Babyface" is about a man practicing his obsessive love for a celebrity by manipulating her image on a TV recording. "Lemon", inspired by an old video of Bono's late mother in a lemon-coloured dress, describes man's attempts to preserve time through technology. This is reflected in lines such as, "A man makes a picture / A moving picture / Through the light projected he can see himself up close". The lyrics to "Numb" are a series of "don't" commands, amidst a noisy backdrop of sounds. The Edge notes that the song was inspired by one of the themes of Zoo TV, "that sense that you were getting bombarded with so much that you actually were finding yourself shutting down and unable to respond because there was so much imagery and information being thrown at you".