It’s the Same Old Theme: How the Cranberries’ “Zombie” Transcends Any Single Conflict Irish alternative rock band The Cranberries rose to prominence in the 1990s thanks in large part to the unique vocals and lyrical mastery of lead singer Dolores O’Riordan. Their early songs featured lighter lyrics and instrumentals seen in songs such as Linger and Dreams. However, it was the release of their single “Zombie” in 1994 that solidified them as “one of the biggest rock bands in the world” according to Irish New York Times writer Una Mullally (par. 3). Written in response to a terrorist bombing that killed two boys (ages 3 and 12) by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Warrington, England as part of a thirty-year-long independence conflict between Irish nationalists and English unionists known as the Troubles, “Zombie” captures O’Riordan’s rage, indignancy, and desperation for the violence to end. The song remains one of the most relevant protest songs written in the past few decades due to its masterful blending of emotion and reason seen through the lyrics, instrumentals, and startlingly powerful music video.
Released to the public in 1994, “Zombie” was internationally received with near unanimous praise. The music video was shown on MTV so much that Mullally remarks, “it was impossible to ignore “Zombie” by the Cranberries” (par. 1). The world was her audience, though the song spoke directly to the people of the United Kingdom and Ireland. O’Riordan composed the song by herself at night in a hotel room in the wake of the fatal bombing attack in Warrington while on tour in England (Mullally par. 3). The powerful words she wrote that night and the voice with which she sang them is a large part of what makes “Zombie” still relevant today.
Dolores O’Riordan never hid her Irish accent. This embracing of her native tongue gave O’Riordan a level of credibility with her audience, especially the Northern Irish people who lived amidst much of the conflict in the Troubles. “Zombie” is no different. Had the song been
composed by a band or singer unrelated to the intensely complicated issues of Irish independence, it would not have been nearly as effective at capturing the hearts and minds on all sides of the conflict. As a proud Irishwoman condemning the actions of a terrorist independence faction from Ireland, she had a great deal of ethos built up from the moment she opened her mouth. But it was not just her accent that made and maintains this song’s relevancy.
The lyrics themselves spoke just enough to the Troubles themselves to connect deeply with the people of the United Kingdom but were also general enough to speak to the world. The first verse highlights the horrors of violence against children such as the Warrington victims: “Another head hangs lowly / Child is slowly taken.” She sings these words softly, accompanied by a simple backing instrumental section. This is an appeal to both pathos and logos, as she blends the outcome of the terrorist bombing with the emotions it caused in herself and the people in the UK and Ireland. Many died in the attacks between the IRA and the English army, but when a child is killed it is felt more deeply due to their innocence. Children rely on adults. Adults should be protecting them, not murdering them. O’Riordan focuses on this throughout.
She goes a step further, speaking directly to the listener harshly and clearly in the form of a repeated rhetorical question: “And the violence, caused such silence / Who are we mistaken?” The listener cannot escape how personal the message is; violence is violence, no matter the end goal. While performing at Woodstock in 1994, O’Riordan told the crowd, “This song is our cry against man’s inhumanity to man, inhumanity to child” (DiBlasi par. 3). Her harsh, staccato vocal choice for these lyrics demonstrates her own outrage, and the outrage she wants her listeners to feel.
O’Riordan also uses the repeated image of the ongoing conflict as “in your head” versus reality throughout. She sings in the first chorus, “But you see, it’s not me / It’s not my family / In
your head, in your head, they are fighting.” This is repeated elsewhere with slight variation three more times using crying, fighting, and dying. The first two lines can be interpreted in several ways now that we are several years removed and not directly related to the Troubles. On the one hand, O’Riordan’s original intent for these lines to declare her own disgust at her IRA countrymen was recorded in an interview slightly before her death: “So I suppose that’s why I was saying, ‘It’s not me’ – that even though I’m Irish it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it” (Slater par. 4). However, these lines could also signify people who are comfortable to ignore violence. Thus the lines in this first bridge appeal to logos and pathos together. O’Riordan in her grief has the audience grapple with two realities: the needless terrorism in Northern Ireland where most people do not want to see it happening, as well as the distanced stance that many people on the outside of conflicts take to avoid uncomfortable truths. This still happens every day.
A line in the first verse after the central instrumental section further evokes emotional imagery tied to reality. With “Another mother’s breaking / Heart is taking over,” sung in a style parallel to the first lines of the song, O’Riordan returns to appealing to the humanity of the innocents involved in conflict (19-20). The strength of a mother’s love is a repeated phrase and metaphor in western society. O’Riordan capitalizes on that relatable sentiment to create empathy in her audience. The soft sound of her voice adds to this. But her following lines are harsher than in the initial verse, no longer asking a question, but offering a condemnation: “When the violence causes silence / we must be mistaken” (21-22). It sets the tone well for the second half of the song, where the harshness that peeks through in the repeated, growled chorus of “zombie, zombie, zombie-e-e” had set the stage previously. The title of the song comes from these powerful lines. Zombies, a monster common in the horror genre for its mindless thirst for death, becomes the song’s title and chorus as it evokes
not only horror but anger at such mindless violence in the listener. All at once O’Riordan calls out to the IRA and British military, naming them “zombies” for following orders and the traditions of generations before despite the bloodshed against innocent children. But these words also carry forward to today, calling out anyone who stands aside or perpetuates needless cycles of violence.
The only part of the lyrics which frame the song as being about a specific conflict come in the form of a pair of lines that begin the second bridge. “It’s the same old theme / since 1916” expresses O’Riordan’s indignancy that the same violence in the Easter Uprising, “the quashed rebellion that gave birth to the Irish Republic,” is still happening on the streets of Ireland and the UK nearly seventy years later (Mullally par. 1). However, due to the rhyming nature and relative obscurity of the true reason behind these lines, it does not detract from the relevancy for today’s audience. The official music video for “Zombie”, uploaded in 2009, has over 1.1 billion views as of January 2022.
Instead of relying on the specifics of the inciting event, O’Riordan makes dramatic appeals to emotion by echoing an Irish practice known as keening where women would mourn the dead at the end of a wake (Mullally par. 6). It is done in small bursts throughout the song in the chorus with each “zombie-ie-ie.” However, it is most evident at the end. As she closes out all the discernable words of the lyrics, O’Riordan spends nearly 15 seconds straight utilizing her unique ability to go from low to high rapidly and cry out “oh” or “eh” not as words, but as musical sounds to express her pain. She mourns the dead children of Warrington and beyond with her audience by leading them in pained wailing.
Another way her lyrical decisions appeal to her message is during the times that O’Riordan decides not to use words. Both in the first minute of the song and for the last minute,
O’Riordan allows the harsh instrumentals to create the almost uncomfortable “silence” she sings of during the vocal parts. “Zombie” is written in a grunge style of alternative rock, unique among their other songs. In the moments where O’Riordan sings about the victims, the children and their mothers, the focus is on her words as steady, heart-beat-like drums play. O’Riordan utilizes this motif to remind the audience of humanity. It changes, though, when speaking about the mindless “zombies” that are doing the killing. It is raw and unfiltered throughout the chorus, the drums sounding nearly like the bombs and bullets O’Riordan is singing about.
The use of harsh sounds and passionate vocals is enhanced by the music video’s startling images. The video cuts back and forth between three major sections: recordings of the band, actual footage of streets in Northern Ireland shot in black and white, and scenes of the woman in gold against a cross surrounded by silver children. The contrast between the black and white, nearly news footage presentation of the streets of Northern Ireland and the beautiful but haunting portrayal of the woman in gold appeals to the audience’s heart and mind in equal measure. By presenting the footage of the streets of Ireland in black and white, the band is highlighting the very real and immediate threat of the violence in the song. The woman in gold, potentially a mother figure, and the children in silver are precious, to be protected from violence.
The documentary-like footage of the Troubles features several focal points. One is the emphasis on the British soldiers holding guns as they patrol the streets of Northern Ireland. This is first seen at 0:15, where the soldier’s gun is central to the clip and the man’s face is cropped out of the shot. What follows is a series of clips alternating between young boys playing with toy swords in the form of wooden planks and soldiers patrolling crumbling infrastructure. The Cranberries allow these visuals to stand on their own without words, only the guitar and drum instrumental to accompany it.
While the soldiers are typically portrayed either in shots that obscure their faces due to shadow, or with their faces out of frame, the snippets of the young boys focus on their humanity, thus evoking a potent response in viewers who see that they are real people, and they are hurting, a necessary part of any protest song. This humanity is apparent immediately, as seen in the first image of the face of a young boy. This initial clip up until 0:08 alternates between two boys, and in a center clip, one of the boys stands out of focus while the words “DIE” graffitied on a crumbling wall echo the two victims of the Warrington bombing. These images appeal to the audience both by showing the harsh reality of life for civilians and the victims of both sides of the conflict, the children.
The arrival of the first scenes with O’Riordan and the children painted silver stands in stark contrast to the realism of the streets (0:40). Mixing imagery of mythology, such as the cupid-like appearances of the silver children and the goddess or Cleopatra-like headdress and gown of O’Riordan with that of the sacrificial cross of Christianity, the Cranberries set out to use pathos to draw in the audience. These silver children are innocents, thus are dressed like the cherubs seen in traditional western painting styles and given a color closely associated with purity. These images are unexpected, but it is in their unexpectedness that they make an impact. The audience becomes captivated by these strange cherub-boys, but because of the close-ups on the boys and the pain in the woman in gold’s face, it does not interfere with the audience’s understanding that they parallel the boys in the documentary footage. They are at once both human and ethereal, precious like silver and gold but also precious because they are the future.
The first words of the song come from a closeup of O’Riordan’s face, a common theme throughout the music video. Staring directly into the camera, she uses eye contact to speak directly to the audience just as her lyrics do (:50-1:00). This closeup on the faces, and
specifically the mouths, of those in the music video is consistent throughout. Most striking is at the end, once O’Riordan has allowed the lyrics to end and the instrumentals to continue. Over the course of the last minute, multiple close ups of the screaming faces of the children in silver are shown interspersed between the documentary-esque footage of Northern Ireland. In the black and white footage, the boys begin to carry the same guns the soldiers were seen with. O’Riordan uses the documentary footage to warn the audience of the perpetuating cycle, causing fear or dread. Thus, she has used yet another combination of appeals to reason and to emotion to turn “Zombie” into a successful war protest song.
The final shot as the music fades out features a cut between a child in silver at the foot of the wooden cross and a close up of the child in the black and white footage lying on the ground. These images all evoke parallels both to the overall message of the unjust suffering of children in war and the two specific boys in Warrington, England killed in the bombings in 1993. The two children even look similar. Cherubs, the image used for the children in silver, are angels. The audience now sees the real boy from the streets of Northern Ireland as an angel, killed by the violence that continues with every generation. O’Riordan thus blends both emotion and knowledge of reality to evoke horror, outrage, and sadness at the loss of these innocents.
Today, “Zombie” by The Cranberries is nearly as relevant as it was in the 1990s. On YouTube there are dozens of “reaction” videos featuring younger generations watching the video for the first time and experiencing the same horrors that O’Riordan evoked upon its release. A young Irish YouTube song reactor lists it as “one of [his] all time favorite songs” due to the historical context he is so aware of two decades post peace treaty (Emotional Irish Reaction). A YouTube account that works on exposing tribal people in Pakistan to global music showed them “Zombie” in January of this year, with one of the men expressing sympathy and understanding,
saying that wars everywhere are useless and must be stopped “or else we will keep losing more innocent lives” (Tribal). In Ireland, “Zombie” has been used repeatedly in relation to national sports or athletes with choruses of fans singing with near total participation (UFC Dublin). It does not matter how familiar one is with the Troubles or the Warrington bombing, the universal understanding and painful emotions evoked by the truth that children are killed in war comes through in “Zombie.”
There are numerous covers and tributes of “Zombie” on YouTube. But one in particular stands above the rest in showing the relevancy and lasting impression of the original, a cover by the metal band Bad Wolves. Recorded and shot in 2018, Dolores O’Riordan was set to reprise her vocals when she died tragically in her hotel room that morning. Bad Wolves went on to release it in her memory, donating proceeds to her children. What resulted was another anthem that differed only in two structural ways; they added “drones” to the list of weapons of war, and changed the year within the lyrics. The lyric amendment by Bad Wolves from “it’s the same old theme / since 1916” to “it’s the same old theme / in 2018” brought Dolores O’Riordan’s masterful and heartbreaking appeals to reason and to emotion full circle to show yet another audience the horror of warfare on the innocence of children.
Works Cited
“Bad Wolves - Zombie (Official Video).” YouTube, uploaded by Better Noise Music, 22 Feb. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaS93WMRQQ.
DiBlasi, Loren. “Watch Dolores O'Riordan Address the Powerful Meaning behind ‘Zombie’ in 1994.” Paste Magazine, Paste Magazine, 16 Jan. 2018, www.pastemagazine.com/music/dolores-o-riordan/watch-dolores-oriordan-address-thepowerful-meanin/.
“Emotional Irish Reaction To: Bad Wolves – Zombie | RIP Dolores O’Riordan.” YouTube, uploaded by Drew Fortune, 24 Feb. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch? v=7bn9B3f47Z8&t=344s
Mullally, Una. “The Memories in Dolores O’Riordan’s Fierce, Fragile Voice.” The New York Times, 16 Jan. 2018, https://tinyurl.com/2p8m5s3x.
Slater, Aaron. “How I Wrote 'Zombie' by the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan.” Songwriting Magazine, 19 Sept. 2021, https://www.songwritingmagazine.co.uk/how-i-wrote/zombiethe-cranberries.
“The Cranberries - Zombie (Official Music Video).” YouTube, uploaded by TheCranberriesTV, 16 June 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts.
“Tribal People React to THE CRANBERRIES – ZOMBIE.” YouTube, uploaded by TRYBALS, 22 Jan. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv89p0VgFAA&t=653s.
“UFC Dublin - Aisling Daly walk out song - The Cranberries – Zombie.” YouTube, uploaded by Hayley Bosworth, 25 Oct. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgK5g3rE2H4.
Artifact Quick Guide
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
Lyrics:
Another head hangs lowly Child is slowly taken
And the violence, caused such silence Who are we mistaken?
But you see, it’s not me It’s not my family
In your head, in your head, they are fighting With their tanks, and their bombs And their bombs, and their guns In your head, in your head they are crying
In your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie What’s in your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh
Du, du, du, du Du, du, du, du Du, du, du, du Du, du, du, du
Another mother’s breaking Heart is taking over When the violence causes silence We must be mistaken
It’s the same old theme Since nineteen-sixteen
In your head, in your head, they’re still fighting With their tanks, and their bombs And their bombs, and their guns In your head, in your head, they are dying
In your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie What’s in your head, in your head Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie