For a decade in which U2 had embraced irony, their last nineties album being entitled Pop was probably the biggest one. Because it was with this album – and the advertising surrounding it – that the sarcastic bubble that they had surrounded themselves in finally burst. Announcing the PopMart Tour at a K-Mart (because consumerism) and releasing the dance song “Discotheque” as a first single accompanied with a video of them dressed as the Village People caused many to grow tired of the band’s seeming shtick after the release of Infinite Jest the previous year had ushered in the post-ironic age (*citation needed*). The album sold only(!) one times platinum (the days when that was a failure!) and the PopMart Tour sold around half the tickets of ZooTV. If anything was a bigger symbol of the band’s problems it was when during one of these events, at the moment where they were set to come out of a giant Lemon/Discoball, the contraption failed to open and the band were trapped inside. For the second time in the band’s history, the Spinal Tap comparisons would be too much to take the band seriously.
But unlike Rattle and Hum, problems were not down to any kind of band hubris. The record was a famously rushed job, making up for the time in which Larry Mullen had suffered a back injury and working on everything down to the last day, and along with a slight hint of “too many cooks” syndrome the record was never done to the band’s complete satisfaction. Any singles that were released after the album, on their own or in Best Of collections, were in some way remixed or re-recorded, and if Pop is anything like Rattle and Hum, it is that like that album the bands next ten years would be a reaction to the record’s reputation.
So after that context, after all those troubles, after all that self-flagellation, imagine my surprise when I listened to this record knowing all these things and came out liking it. Yes, this will be a mostly good review of Pop, making The Solute the only domain which contains two positive retrospective reviews released in the past year. I don’t know how much more I can say that The Narrator doesn’t already say, but I’ll still do my best.
I’ll start by saying how 1997 would be a great year for electronic dance music. The UK big-beat scene would have two of its most famous releases – The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land and the Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole – and French House would see the self titled debut of a nascent Daft Punk. Pop was no doubt inspired by the previous two’s work, but unlike the intensity of the Prodigy and psychedelic experimentations of the Chemical Brothers, here in Pop and its lyrics we see a quality that isn’t really in the previous two: death and mourning. At first thoughts somewhat counterintuitive for something sold as a dance album, but as Bono remarked this album is akin to “entering a party but leaving a funeral,” and is more than in keeping with the themes of the previous two U2 releases: a high sensory exterior that reveals within in it something ultimately intimate and sad.
This can be found in the midst of the first song and (misguided) single. “Discotheque” has lyrics that sound like thee band describing the song itself as piece of bubblegum, a piece of “lovie dovie stuff” that like bubblegum could otherwise be disposable. But under that surface – albeit a cool one that ranges from bubbly guitars to something that sounds like a tuned buzzsaw – is images pertaining to taking and reaching something unobtainable, with one line in particular (“take this tangle of a conversation/and turn it into your own prayer”) giving hints on to the kind of themes that will be in most of the record. I like this song as an opener to an album more than a single, but it still has a couple of problems, in as much as the transitions between different sounds do not bridge together effectively all the time (important for a “dance” song). But yeah, the parts themselves are great.
“Do You Feel Loved” starts off sounding one of the more obviously guitar led on Pop, before the electronic elements and Clayton’s processed bass take over and the two elements play off one another. In many ways that contrasts the same way as the subjects of the lyrics; with a narrator who does feel loved, talking to someone for whom the title question likely seems “No” (the contrasts are also made apparent with images of the combining sun and rain. It also links back to lyrics from the first track, with both the first line (“take these lines, they’re good for nothing”) and ones about taking the colours of imagination.
“Mofo is the first to really commit to a completely electronic sound and with the high pitched samples the closest track to sounding like a song from The Prodigy. And it is in this much darker sounding track that the album really tips its energetic exterior/sad interior vibe, with the title “Mofo” actually referring to Bono’s mother, a recurring subject of trauma for him having lost her at a young age. By the time the spacier synth leads come in and Bono sings “Mother, am I still your son, you know I’ve waited so long for you to say so” and follows that with snarls and falsettos, we get the honest sense of hurt prevailing throughout Pop. It’s one of my standouts from the album, and I agree with commenter Silverwheel who said that this should have been the album’s lead single; leading with this single Pop could have had the same kind of culture shock that “The Fly” was for Achtung Baby.
“If God Will Send His Angels” is really interesting in the context of Pop, in that the phasered guitars in the verse are something from the nineties period, but the choruses sound exactly like something that would be on Achtung Baby. There’s a couple of groaner lines here – rarely do Christmas references not stick out for me, and “the high street never looked so low” is pretty corny – but otherwise the stuff about Bono’s seeming battles with faith (particularly in the final verse) is quite gripping.
“Staring at the Sun” follows U2 sounding like a “band” with Edge bringing in an acoustic guitar and Larry Mullen’s percussion being much more apparent (though with some electronic elements). Musically, this is also the kind of song that could have been released by Oasis (who were going through their own backlash period with Be Here Now). The lyrics meanwhile are nothing like that, as seem to suggest some kind of depression, particular with the metaphor of the insects in your ear that you cannot scratch at, and “waves that leave me out of reach.”
We start to move back into the electronica influence in “Last Night on Earth,” albeit an influence which still allows Edge’s guitars to Mullen’s percussion to take centre stage (if I have a continuous criticism of Pop, Clayton’s bass tends to be quite low for supposedly dance-rhythm sections). The more hard rock elements especially complements the apocalyptic/world ending lyrics, but here there are no “Leonard Bernsteins”, instead there are reminders that the time is slipping away and how as the sun rises (another track link) the female protagonist realises there is no one to save her.
Of all the remixes that were done to tracks from Pop, the one for “Gone” by Mike Hedges really helps to make it stand out as an album highlight (the album version is alright, but the guitar tones in the single are much better, the album version too committed to sounding spacy and siren-like). But what is lost in the album mixed is made up for by the lyrics, with more references to the sun – this album focuses on the sun in the same way Achtung Baby focused on the moon – as the narrator floats away to be without, implying some kind of death and leaving the people below behind. Boy, the more I type out these lyrics the more of a bummer this album sounds.
Speaking of bummers, we then get to two of the worst songs of the album and two of the worst U2 songs. Narrator defended “Gone” as being somewhat cathartic after the turmoil of the first act, which I can agree with conceptually. But the thing that gets me are not the lyrics (which are only not the worst on Pop because of the next track), but of the increasingly annoying instrumentation; it sounds less like a precursor to glitch and more like the producer was trying to swipe the sound files from the computer as they are being played (and the guitar tone is too ugly to be truly cathartic).
But the nadir of the album is “The Playboy Mansion,” a song I hated from its first “laidback” notes, even before the dated “Michael Jackson History” line, and the fact I had to listen to this song multiple times to review it annoys me to the very concept of these articles. Like “Elvis ate America” it is proof that Bono was right to leave his American obsessions behind and should stop trying to bring them back (except for Songs of Innocence, that was fine), especially if it leads to lines like “If OJ is more than a drink”. Yeah, it’s also something like this song: a murderer.
Fortunately, unlike “Elvis Ate America” in Original Soundtracks 1, the album does recover after this. It also moves backs to the common three-contemplative-track closer typical of U2 albums, as “If You Wore That Velvet Dress” starts having that spoken word Lou Reed feeling Bono was playing with in Zooropa before moving onto breaking into his vocals amid wavy synths, bright guitars and the most prominent sounds of Clayton’s bass on the whole album. The dark atmosphere reflects that of images of the moon, which fits in with the sun imagery of Pop by having the two compared: “Sunlight sunlight fills my room/ It’s sharp and it’s clear/ But nothing at all like the moon”.
“Please” is another standout on the album, and one which remixes didn’t actually change much in terms of quality (barring awesome guitar solo). Returning to the subject of The Troubles, which they hadn’t really talked about overtly in song for fourteen years, this song has that same kind of militaristic drumming by Mullen, and also a return to a full band sound, but here the vocal are less righteous fury and more a jaded sense of tiredness. The pleases aren’t a childish plea for peace; they are the last grasp of hope.
Which leads gracefully into the completely hopeless final track and truly funeral like “Wake Up Dead Man”. The Dead Man in question is Jesus Christ, but considering the rest of the album it seems like they have a conflicted, complex relationship. With the exception of Middle Eastern vocal lines – to give us a sense of time and place – there is nothing truly fancy on this climactic track; mostly clean chords, a ringing bass and light percussion and Bono singing on what appears to be a roughed up Microphone. From that base we have the band at the most vulnerable that they’ve ever been – even on the intentional vulnerable Boy – as they let their guard down and beg Jesus to come and save mankind (so much so that they use one of their very rare swear words). By the end of the song, and the albums, the screeches seem to reach the realisation that “Last Night on Earth” did: there’s no saviour coming, no way to turn back time, and no way to really sort all the disorder on the planet. What the hell is this? I came to listen to a dance album called Pop. I didn’t want to leave almost crying.
Pop has its problems, mainly down to production and a couple of dud tracks, but in terms of ambition no-one can deny that it isn’t there. In fact, I think that ultimately that beyond production issues is why the band decided to change their sound so much; they released something that was both ambitious and raw, and the public rejected it. Some are disappointed with the direction U2 went after this record, seeing it as a betrayal to this kind of experimentation, and whilst I agree somewhat (wait until How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb for that rant), I’m glad they decided to end this period of U2 music with this album. All my favourite songs on this album – and the ones most linked to the major themes of death – seemed to be written before the conception of the album itself, and in the marketing for Pop some of the “we’re being ironic but not really” stuff was starting to get tired. At least we left this era of U2 with a good cap to the trilogy, albeit one that may take a little more time to be accepted.
And besides, after something so dark, U2 could do with leaving things behind and making some brighter music…
What did you think, though?
U2 Album Rankings
- Achtung Baby
- Zooropa
- Joshua Tree
- The Unforgettable Fire
- Pop
- War
- Original Soundtracks 1
- Boy
- October
- Rattle and Hum