The Alternative Number Ones: The Cranberries’ “Zombie”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

"Inna yah hayyyyy-yad! Inna yah hayyyyy-ayuh-yad! Zahhhhm-bay! Zahhhhm-bay! Ay-ih! Ay-ih! Ay-ih!" Once somebody started screeching it, everyone else had to join in. That was the unwritten rule. For what felt like an endless stretch of time -- really probably just a few months in 1994 -- that chorus played on a constant loop inna everybody's hayyyyy-yads. We couldn't escape it. Maybe we didn't want to escape it. Nobody could sing that chorus properly, of course. It's an impossible song to sing, and we were all kids. But something about the sheer impossibility, the feverish-yodel thing that Dolores O'Riordan pulled off so memorably, invited every dumb fucking teenager on the face of the earth to attempt it anyway. Most of us couldn't relate to the sentiment of "Zombie." Most of us probably had no idea what it was even about. But a chorus like that has the power to stampede all over its context. In practice, the Cranberries' "Zombie" became a song about itself.

"Zombie" was supposed to be a protest song, and I'm sure plenty of people received it that way. The Cranberries didn't exactly keep this fact a secret. The "Zombie" lyrics are a bit vague and poetic, but they're specific enough that anyone even slightly familiar with the Troubles in the North of Ireland could recognize the references. The video made those references even plainer, permanently affixing its images of British soldiers in Belfast to the chorus that we wouldn't stop singing. But to suburban American kids who heard "Zombie" one zillion times, the Troubles were remote and theoretical -- sad, upsetting things happening an ocean away, presented to us as images of car-bomb debris on the nightly news. The "Zombie" chorus, on the other hand, was not remote or theoretical. It was all around us, all the time.

A few decades later, the "Zombie" chorus is still all around us, all the time. The Troubles have been over for many years; the different forces involved all came to a permanent ceasefire agreement in 1998. But "Zombie" remains ultra-present in ways that eclipse most of the other canonized alt-rock smashes from that time of canonical alt-rock smashes. My kids sing that chorus now, and they probably have even less of an idea what that song is about than I did at their age. "Zombie" is a soundtrack standby, a cover-band standard, and a stadium chant. Nobody can sing that chorus right, and that impossibility still invites everyone to attempt it. That kind of context creep happens with old songs all the time, but it happened with "Zombie" pretty much right away. As soon as the Cranberries released "Zombie," it essentially stopped being a protest song about a particular conflict, and it became a mass singalong instead. In a way, "Zombie" felt bigger than the thing it protested.

A few years ago, my son had a friend over, and he posed me a rhetorical question: "'Zombie' by the Cranberries: classic song, right?" I will confess that I had never really considered the possibility. In 1994, it wasn't all that cool to love "Zombie." It was a thing that you admitted to, not something that you proudly announced, even if you and all your friends really did love the damn song. The Cranberries were an ultra-successful band, but they weren't underground legends who made it to the mainstream. They were kids from Ireland who lucked into global success at the moment that alternative rock became a commercial force, and they came off like a sleeker version of some of the college-rock acts who were floating around before them. When they made "Zombie," their decision to suddenly crank the distortion seemed at least slightly cynical -- a dreamy coffeehouse group suddenly going full grunge. In its moment, "Zombie" was a serious song, but it was not one that I took seriously.

It would've been insane to explain any of this to my son's friend. This kid was in elementary school; he didn't need to hear about teenage me judging the Cranberries because I thought they were lightweight industry plants who might've been punching above their weight class with their loud protest song. He just wanted a yes or no answer. And when I took half a second to think about it, I realized that I still remembered every single second of "Zombie" -- every drum hit, every sparkly guitar note, every wild-eyed intense vocal inflection. Without me even realizing it was happening, "Zombie" had become a part of my lived experience. If that's not a classic song, I don't know what is. And it's not the only classic song that the Cranberries made, either.

The Cranberries have three classic songs -- two from their first album, one from their second. They might have more than that, I guess. They definitely have more great songs, but that's a different question. They have three songs that tower over all their other songs and that have become fully absorbed into our shared culture. All of three of those songs call up different images in my head, and they might not be the same ones in your head. "Dreams": Faye Wong swanning around her crush's apartment to her own Cantonese-language cover in Chunking Express. "Linger": Countryside spooling past the car window on some endless family road trip. "Zombie": The obnoxious full-car singalongs that the song practically demanded. Those are all core memories. Three times, the Cranberries swept into my life and shaped the currents of my thoughts, to the point where they're still in there now. My daughter, who is older now than I was when those songs were new, is having a Cranberries phase of her own right now -- a phase that's basically limited to those three songs. They'll probably soundtrack her core memories, too.

They weren't the Cranberries at first. They were the Cranberry Saw Us, a band of teenage kids, and thank god they changed the name. The Cranberry Saw Us came from Limerick, which is not just a dirty-joke format but also a rural city deep in the southern part of Ireland. The Hogan brothers, guitarist Mike and bassist Noel, started the band with their drummer friend Fergal Lawler. (They had two Hogans and a Lawler in the group, but I can't figure out how to turn that into a wrestling joke, simply because the Cranberries were never a wrestling-joke type of band.) They had a friend named Niall Quinn who played drums for the Hitchers, a Limerick band that's still intermittently active today. The Cranberry Saw Us kids convinced Quinn to sing for their band, and they released a demo tape called Anything in 1990. But Quinn decided to go back to the Hitchers, and the other three guys stayed together. They didn't have a singer, so they kept practicing and figuring out instrumental ideas. When they decided that they were good enough, they decided to go find themselves a new leader.

Dolores O'Riordan was the youngest daughter in a big, chaotic working-class family in Limerick. She started out singing traditional Irish music, sometimes in pubs, as a little kid. When she got a little older, she learned to play piano, guitar, and accordion, and she started writing songs. At 18, she left home to move in with a boyfriend, and she was dead broke for while. O'Riordan was connected to Niall Quinn, the guy who left the Cranberry Saw Us, through some arcane chain of acquaintances. (Per a 1995 Rolling Stone profile, O'Riordan was "a friend of [Quinn's] girlfriend’s older sister," which looks like a lot of degrees of separation to me.) But O'Riordan heard that there was a band who needed a singer, so Quinn brought her to a practice, and she auditioned. O'Riordan was only 18 at the time, but the guys in the band were about the same age, and none of them had ever been in a band before that one.

O'Riordan came to the audition with her portable keyboard, and she sang a few songs, including Sinéad O'Connor's "Troy," which would've been pretty new at the time. Noel Hogan gave her a tape of instrumental songs that he'd written, and she started writing to that tape. A week later, she came back with "Linger," the song that would become the band's biggest mainstream chart hit. (In 1993, "Linger" peaked at #4 on the Modern Rock chart and #8 on the Hot 100. It's a 10.) Naturally, the guys were dumbstruck. They couldn't believe how lucky they were. She got the job. The new lineup of the Cranberry Saw Us recorded a demo tape at a local studio, and the studio owner knew they were special. He put the tape out on his label, and he signed on as their manager and produced more demos for them. Those demos found their way to a bunch of different UK labels. A&R reps flew out to see the band play a college show in Limerick, and a bidding war broke out. Eventually, the Cranberry Saw Us signed with Island, and they changed their name to the Cranberries.

The Cranberries headed out on a series of small UK tours. They fired their manager, found a new one, and tried recording a few times before scrapping the stuff that came from those sessions. In 1992, they went to work with Stephen Street, a London-born producer who is still probably most famous as the guy who helped make every Smiths record. Street has already been in this column for producing the Psychedelic Furs' "All That Money Wants" and "Until She Comes," and he was just starting out what would become a long working relationship with Blur. He was exactly the right person for the Cranberries to meet at that moment. With Street's assistance, the band recorded their debut album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, which came out early in 1993.

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? wasn't an instant sensation, but when MTV picked up on lead single "Dreams," things started moving quickly. "Dreams" is a total stunner of a song that pulls together a bunch of the sounds and ideas that were floating through indie music in the early '90s. As a singer, Dolores O'Riordan obviously owed a ton to Sinéad O'Connor, the person who figured out how to translate a piercing and mesmerizing traditional Irish yodel-wail into arresting, immediate guitar-rock. "Dreams" also has plenty of the Smiths' impressionistic jangle -- not surprising, considering who produced it -- as well as the starry-eyed sweep of the Cocteau Twins, the lovestruck warmth of the Sundays, and maybe even the mysterious pure-moods tingle of Enya. But "Dreams" also sounds more like straight-up pop than anything those guys made. The mix puts O'Riordan's voice front and center, never burying it in murk, while the arrangement goes for grandeur rather than atmosphere. It sounds like someone took every great swirl-blur dream-pop record of the early '90s and turned the knob just slightly, bringing things into such sharp focus that you can't believe how fuzzy everything used to look.

"Dreams" never got past #15 on the Modern Rock chart, but it was on that chart for months, and I remember hearing it all the time. The Cranberries followed that single with "Linger," and that was a straight-up smash. The Cranberries toured tirelessly through the US, and they were soon playing to huge audiences. It's famously difficult for British bands to break through in America, but the Cranberries weren't British. Maybe they didn't have the press baggage that sometimes comes with hyped-up British bands. In any case, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? was a commercial smash over here, and it easily eclipsed all the other dreamy and jangly stuff that came out in those years. The band entered the VH1/adult contemporary zone. They became the kind of thing that your friend's mom would put on during carpool drives. The album went platinum in 1993 and double platinum in 1994, and it kept selling. It's now quintuple platinum.

While they were on the road, the Cranberries kept writing. One day in 1993, when the band was on a UK tour, IRA members set off two bombs in trash cans in a shopping area in the English town of Warrington. They sent a warning to authorities ahead of time, but the warning wasn't specific enough, so the area was not evacuated. Dozens of people were injured, and two boys, one three and one 12, were killed. The Cranberries' bus wasn't far from the bombing. O'Riordan saw the news reports and got extremely upset. She didn't like that the bombings were being carried out in the name of Ireland. Down in Limerick, O'Riordan and her family didn't have much to do with the Troubles, and she thought the armed struggle was pointless. Later on, she told the BBC, "The IRA are not me. I'm not the IRA. The Cranberries are not the IRA. My family are not. When it says in the song, 'It's not me, it's not my family,' that's what I'm saying. It's not Ireland; it's some idiots living in the past."

O'Riordan was still thinking about the bombing when the Cranberries got home to Limerick. One night, she went out, got home late, and came up with the chorus that so many people would sing so badly over the decades. Often, O'Riordan would write the Cranberries' lyrics and vocal melodies, and her bandmate Noel Hogan would write the music. But O'Riordan wrote "Zombie" entirely by herself, and then she brought it to the band. On the song, O'Riordan tries not to blame the violence on either side, though she definitely pissed off some Irish republicans who pointed out that the British were responsible for a lot more historic brutality. It's hard to keep the moral high ground when you're indiscriminately blowing up little kids, as we can see so clearly today. I still think the British need to get the fuck out of Ireland, but I can't imagine begrudging O'Riordan her anger.

"Zombie" is a funny title. There are all sorts of possible meanings -- the people who just keep on fighting mindlessly because it's what they've always done, the way conflict can create inertia, the bodies piling up on both sides. O'Riordan sings about the fighting as an irrelevant, mindless act: "It's the same old theme, since 1916." The whole thing only matters inside someone's head, and that person needs to let it go, rather than threatening those who would criticize: "When the violence causes silence, we must be mistaken." She doesn't offer any solutions that could lead to the end of all that fighting, but that's not what songs are supposed to do. They're supposed to capture a feeling, and "Zombie" does that.

When O'Riordan brought "Zombie" to the Cranberries, they first tried to play it like one of their quiet, twinkly songs, but that's not how she wanted it. In their practice space, she plugged in and played loud, and she told her bandmates to do the same. "Zombie" was a big leap from a band who'd mostly made pretty makeout music. O'Riordan belts out the song with feral intensity. The melody is huge and pretty, but she makes sure that you can hear the growl at the back of her throat. The fuzzed-out guitars and the sinister bassline nod in the direction of grunge, but the band said that wasn't a conscious stylistic move. O'Riordan had written an angry song, and the music had to match it. That makes sense to me. "Zombie" made the Cranberries an even bigger radio band at a time when college-rock janglers were disappearing from alternative radio, but I don't hear it as a cynical move anymore. The Cranberries were just doing what made sense. Through touring hard, they'd gotten used to playing louder, and that came through in what they made. They did what a band like that is supposed to do. They learned something new and leveled up.

Honestly, I think the tension in "Zombie" between the song's ambitions and the Cranberries' natural inclinations is one of the reasons it hits so hard. It's not hard to imagine the band's original idea of "Zombie," before O'Riordan turned the volume up. Stephen Street's production definitely builds on the quiet-to-loud grunge blueprint, but the quiet parts are way prettier than what most grunge bands were capable of making. O'Riordan applies the same tremulous grace that she brought to the big Cranberries ballads, and her little yip-yodel high notes are just devastating. Up until the chorus, she sings "Zombie" like an Irish folk song. Then the guitars hit, and she just opens up. You can't start out at in yah hayyyyy-yad! You have to build up to it, and that's what "Zombie" does. The chorus is so vast and overwhelming that I can barely remember a time when it didn't exist. O'Riordan makes it all sound instinctive.

When "Zombie" came out and then immediately became inescapable, I was definitely suspicious -- not because of my Irish republican sympathies but because it really does hit the grunge formula pretty squarely on the nose. It's not as rapturously enveloping as the two big ballads from the first Cranberries record, and there's maybe a little too much trudge in its theatrics. But it's also just an undeniable banger -- the kind of thing that I told myself not to like even as I unconsciously committed the entire thing to memory. A song like "Zombie" is built to bulldoze past all your defenses, and that's exactly what it did.

Before the Cranberries recorded their second album, "Zombie" became a regular part of their live show, and crowds reacted to it in a big way. When the band played Woodstock '94, "Zombie" wasn't out yet, but they played it anyway. Mid-song, O'Riordan told the crowd, "This song is our cry against man's inhumanity to man, and man's inhumanity to child, and war, and babies dying, and Belfast, and Bosnia, and Rwanda." (It's weird to watch footage of the band playing that song at a huge festival and to see the crowd not singing along.)The Cranberries didn't wait long before hitting the studio. Their LP No Need To Argue hit stores in October 1994, just a year and a half after their debut came out. They knew they had something with "Zombie." Much of No Need To Argue is just as soft and pretty as the first LP, and "Zombie" stands out starkly. They still wanted it to be their first single. Island wasn't sure.

I have a hard time imagining an A&R person hearing "Zombie" and not immediately putting a down payment on a bigger house, but the Cranberries have always said that the label didn't want "Zombie" as a single. Maybe the label people thought that the Cranberries might alienate all the people who bought the first record. Maybe they were just scared of getting caught up in any kind of Irish sectarian violence. Honestly, it's kind of funny that Ireland has so happily adopted a song that's so critical of the IRA; maybe it's a sign that the Troubles were almost ready to end. In 2020, Noel Hogan told Stereogum, "The record label initially wasn’t keen for a song with that subject matter to be the first single. But we knew how it was going down live." Former Cranberries manager Allen Kovac once told Rolling Stone that Island offered O'Riordan a million-dollar check to push a different single and that she ripped it up in front of them. That sounds like bullshit to me, but it's the fun kind of bullshit.

Obviously, the Cranberries got their way. The band enlisted video director Samuel Bayer, who'd made videos for giant alt-rock songs like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Blind Melon's "No Rain." Most of Bayer's "Zombie" video is goofy as hell -- Dolores O'Riordan painted gold, rocking a chain-mail wig in front of a gold-painted cross, hanging out on a soundstage with a bunch of little kids who are also painted gold. It looks nice, but it's classic fake-deep '90s-MTV bullshit -- symbolic gestures that aren't necessarily supposed to symbolize anything in particular. But Bayer also went off to Belfast, told authorities that he was making a documentary, and filmed the soldiers and the kids in the street and the murals in different neighborhoods, and that stuff gives the video a completely different urgency.

I went to Belfast to visit my godmother once, a couple of years after "Zombie" but before the permanent ceasefire, and that trip was an eye-opener. My godmother took me around to the different neighborhoods, where the curbs of the streets were painted in the colors of whichever flag that neighborhood supported. She told me to be careful in the unionist ones. As an American, I'd probably be safe, but they definitely didn't like Catholics there. I asked how they'd know I was Catholic, and she said, "They say our eyes are further apart." The giant murals in the "Zombie" video were everywhere. In the republican neighborhoods, the murals were mostly images of the Irish and Catalan flags; solidarity with Catalonia was a big thing. In the unionist neighborhoods, the murals were posters of guys in ski masks with guns, and they said stuff like "the Protectors of Ulster." I left that town thinking the unionists were crazy. For the most part, Belfast was a fun city, surrounded by gorgeous countryside. You could get drunk in bars or go to the movies, just as you could anywhere else. (I think my friend and I went to see Grosse Point Blank there.) But the hostility in the air was a little more obvious than what I'm used to seeing in American cities, and American cities can get pretty fucking hostile.

The overt messaging of "Zombie" is why the song exists, and it's why Dolores O'Riordan sounds so raw and passionate on it. But the message wasn't what most people took from "Zombie." Even if you did know what the song was about, that probably wasn't what you took away from it. Most of us just heard a kickass rock song. "Zombie" came out at a moment when fuzzy, aggressive guitar music was at the peak of its cultural saturation, and the song went crazy. Alt-rock radio ran "Zombie" into the ground. It was all over MTV, and it also got burn on pop and mainstream rock radio. Island never released "Zombie" as a commercial single in the US, so it never reached the Hot 100. Elsewhere, though, the single did big pop-chart numbers -- #14 in the UK, #3 in Ireland, #1 in France and Germany and Australia and Denmark and a bunch of other countries.

Dolores O'Riordan got married to a former Duran Duran tour manager just before No Need To Argue came out, but she didn't give herself much of a break. The Cranberries worked "Zombie" hard. They played the song on Letterman and SNL and MTV Unplugged. The BBC banned the "Zombie" video because of all the war imagery, but Island cut together a version that the station agreed to show, which pissed the band off. I have no memory of this, but WHFS, my local alt-rock station, apparently booked the Cranberries to play a free Washington, DC show in 1995. Apparently, 10,000 people showed up, and lots of them acted rowdy. The police cut the performance off early, and the crowd rioted. A riot at a free Green Day concert makes sense. A riot at a free Cranberries show is absurd. But that's how things were then. You'd go to a radio station festival, and it would be mosh warfare during Jewel. (That's not a randomly chosen example. Jewel was a surprise guest at one HFStival, and she stormed offstage mid-song after she got hit by a frisbee. It was pretty funny.)

"Zombie" was the only real hit from the No Need To Argue album. The next single was "Ode To My Family," a lovely tribute to the O'Riordan clan, and its vibe couldn't have been further from what the band did with "Zombie." "Ode To My Family" got play on alt-rock radio, and so did the very fun "Ridiculous Thoughts," but neither song was huge. ("Ode To My Family peaked at #11, "Ridiculous Thoughts" at #14.) "Zombie" was still so huge that No Need To Argue sold like crazy. The album came out late in 1994, and it was platinum by the end of the year. Over the next two years, No Need To Argue sold seven million copies in the US alone. The Cranberries kept touring, and soon they were headlining amphitheaters and sometimes even arenas. Their pace was unsustainable. That was the peak moment for the Cranberries, but it wasn't the end. We'll see them in this column again.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: I have no shortage of options here. Stereogum once ran an article about all the different ways that "Zombie" resonated over the years. Tons of people have covered "Zombie": Miley Cyrus, alt-R&B star Dawn Richard, Chicago rapper Vic Mensa. Before Dolores O'Riordan's sudden passing in 2018, she was planning to sing on a "Zombie" cover from LA metal band Bad Wolves. They released their version without her, and it became a minor radio hit. Eminem sampled "Zombie." On The Office, Ed Helms' Andy Bernard sang "Zombie" and got on everyone's nerves. Sharon Horgan and Aisling Bea sing it in a really funny scene from the Irish show This Way Up. It soundtracks one of many dead-kid scenes on Yellowjackets. Jung Chan-sung, the Korean Zombie, used "Zombie" as his entrance music in UFC. So: Too many options.

I'm going with one that, at least to me, illustrates how context creep happened to "Zombie" almost immediately. In 1995, an Italian artist called A.D.A.M. had a big European hit with a very silly Euro-dance version of "Zombie." That version is pretty terrible, and it washes all traces of protest out of the song, but I am delighted that it exists. Here's the video:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: One more example of context creep: During the 2023 Rugby World Cup, the Irish national team adapted "Zombie" as their anthem. Here's a stadium full of Irish fuckers singing it:

THE 10S: Liz Phair's euphorically horny deadpan fuzz-blast "Supernova" peaked at #6 behind "Zombie." It fucks like a volcano, and it's everything to me. It's a 10.

Green Day's "Welcome To Paradise," the dizzily mind-blown fizz-pummel anthem of bummy punk-life discovery that they re-recorded with major-label polish, peaked at #7 behind "Zombie." For some strange reason now, it's feelin' like a 10.