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Released 10 years ago on March 3, 1997, Pop was U2's ninth studio album. It marked only the second time since 1984's The Unforgettable Fire that the band had a record produced by someone other than Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (the other exception being 1989's Rattle and Hum, which was produced by Jimmy Iovine). It was the first studio album from U2 in nearly four years, and expectations were understandably high. However, scheduling hiccoughs meant that the recording sessions and tour planning process were severely rushed, and neither the album nor the live show were truly "ready" on time.

The result was a stylistically adventurous record that was well-received by many fans and critics but panned by others. And as time wore on, it seems the band and the popular music press, unfairly perhaps, would rather that everyone forget about this period of the band's history. For evidence, see the lack of representation on U218, and any review of the last two albums which will mention Pop disparagingly.

So, is Pop a misunderstood masterpiece, or is it the first of "two crap albums" that the band is allowing itself before it's "out"?¹ The answers to this profound question probably won't be found below, but this will attempt to be a retrospective look at U2's last 1990s effort.

It's a wonder to stop and consider sometimes that an entire decade has passed since Pop was released. Think on this for a moment: there was no Google in 1997. Cell phones, ubiquitous today, were large and heavy novelties owned by few and "needed" by fewer, and they hadn't yet supplanted the Zippo lighter at concerts. All of the members of U2 were still in their thirties, and I wasn't yet legally eligible to vote. It had also been a decade since The Joshua Tree was released, a record which took them from being a hot and relevant act to being certifiable rock music deities.

The ten-year period from 1987 to 1997 was a tumultuous one for U2. The band impressed the world but also burned itself out on the Joshua Tree and Lovetown tours. This fatigue, coupled with the unexpected backlash from the Rattle and Hum venture, led Bono to famously declare that U2 was going to go away for a while to "dream it all up again." And of course, dream it all up again they did. Throwing caution to the wind, U2 released Achtung Baby and Zooropa, two albums that were unlike anything it had ever done before, all the while supported by the massive Zoo TV tour. By Zooropa, U2 had become unrecognisable. That record was a far cry from the anthemic stadium rock of the mid and late 1980s or the stripped-down, New Wave/punk(ish) sound of the first three studio albums².

During this period, U2 was still quite arguably on top of the world. The band won a Grammy for "Best Alternative Album" in 1993, a surprising feat considering the popularity of guitar-based "grunge/alternative" rock at the time. The band was unquestionably gaining many new fans, and retaining a lot of its long-time fanbase. But anecdotal evidence suggests, at least, that a growing undercurrent of fans was unhappy with the band's musical direction. They were the ones who appreciated the brilliance of Achtung Baby, the cocky wit and irony of the Zoo TV shows, and were generally appreciative of the experimental nature of Zooropa. They were, however, worried that this was the future of the band, and wanted the "old U2" back. They wanted Bono to come down from the ether (where he'd proudly stated he was in a Pop-era interview), and for the Edge to stop playing more keyboard than guitar in the studio. The Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1 project was also unsettling to some, as it continued in the ambient, experimental spirit, with nary a traditional pop song to be found.

So, it was in this atmosphere that U2 released Pop; some of the band's traditional fanbase may have been wary of an album which was hyped to be the result of the band playing with electronica and dance music. And the music press, given U2's lofty position at the top of the popular music world, was expecting the album to be a huge success. Its ambitions high, the band had planned a massive world tour that would outdo Zoo TV, even while the album itself was being recorded. Recording deadlines slipped, as they often seem to do with U2 records, and rather than being released by the end of 1996, the album wouldn't be ready until March 1997. Even this delayed date was barely met. Reminiscent of Bono's lyrics improvised out of necessity for the October album and the band locking itself in the studio to record "40" during the War sessions when time had run up, the chorus lyrics to "Last Night on Earth" were written and the vocals recorded at 7 a.m. the morning of the recording deadline.

The mad frenzy paid off, at least at the beginning. Pop debuted at #1 on Billboard, and reached this lofty position in charts in over two dozen countries. "Discothèque" and then "Staring at the Sun" did well as singles, and both songs received substantial video airplay. But then things started to go wrong, or at least some high-profile enough things went wrong, and it suddenly became fashionable to sensationalise the "failure" of Pop and the PopMart tour.

After starting out strong in the U.S., sales of Pop slowed down more quickly than anticipated. Releasing the album in March and immediately embarking on a world tour with the full PopMart setup less than eight weeks later meant that the band had very little rehearsal time. Consequently, the opening night show in Las Vegas was reportedly underwhelming, and it would be some time until the kinks were ironed out in the live show. Add to this a couple of technical problems with the giant video screen and a few poorly attended and even cancelled shows (mostly in the midwestern U.S.), and there was plenty enough fodder for news stories about "U2's decline."

In response, the band and manager Paul McGuinness were flabbergasted in interviews. McGuinness questioned how an album could be doing badly if it'd sold 6-7 million copies worldwide. (In fairness, that figure at the time was the number of records shipped as opposed to the number of records actually sold by stores.) Larry suggested that media outlets were looking for "U2 fails" as a good and juicy headline to print (in reference to the adage "bad news is good news"). An obviously frustrated Bono, in response to a suggestion that U2 was "in trouble," said they'd just played to 120,000 people in New York, and countered that "Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles didn't sell this amount of tickets or records...the music business has gotten very greedy, and they wanted us to be their flagship, and sell a billion records. But U2's made a very awkward, complex record. It's going to take until the end of the year before it sinks in...and we knew what we were doing when we put out 'Discothèque.' I mean, we're not stupid."

Musically, Pop was not the electronica/dance album that it was rumoured/hyped to be. In a 1997 interview, Bono clarified that those rumours weren't started by the band, and refuted the idea of Pop being that radical a departure for U2, saying that "Achtung Baby was more processed, if you think about it. We've been experimenting with sounds and samples going back to The Unforgettable Fire." Stylistically, Pop does incorporate sampling and looping in contexts influenced by the popular dance music of the 1990s, but the majority of the songs on the album are still, at their core, "U2 songs," for lack of a better term.

Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois weren't involved in the making of this album, but their influence by this time had been branded on the band (Bono once said that instead of going to art college, U2 "went to Brian"). "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" seems like a page taken straight from The Unforgettable Fire with a more artful Adam Clayton on bass and an older Bono singing. "Do You Feel Loved" would have been equally at home on Achtung Baby.

Thematically, Bono (and the Edge, who is also credited with lyric-writing on this album) explores much of the same area he had in the past: love, spirituality, and conflict. "Please" expresses frustration and desperation with the violence in Northern Ireland, whereas War's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" visits the subject in a much angrier way. "Mofo" continues a series of songs that are at least partially inspired by his late mother: "I Will Follow" from Boy, "Tomorrow" from October, and "Lemon" from Zooropa. These songs catalogue, in a way, his development as a writer. As a young man, the emotionally charged early songs drip with the emotion of loss in both his words and his voice. The haunting and impersonal atmosphere and presentation of "Lemon" belies the very personal connection Bono puts into the song, which was partially inspired by an old family film in which the late Iris Hewson wore a lemon-yellow dress. Finally, "Mofo" returns some of the earlier, raw energy, but tempered by the self-realisation of his becoming a parent himself, "looking for the father of [his] two little girls." Pop, for an album with such a "light" title, contains songs with some very heavy lyrics: the aforementioned "Please" and "Mofo," and "Wake Up Dead Man," where Bono is pleading desperately for divine intervention. The two previous albums, Achtung Baby and Zooropa, began the 1990s dealing with sensory overload and confusion, and Pop ends the decade with a defeated whimper of a man questioning love and faith, with a backdrop of noise and confusion.

Pop and the PopMart tour not only capped the 1990s for U2, they also ended an era of stylistic experimentation, ironic self-mockery, and dark lyrical subject matter. The band's days of stadium-only touring were over, although in fairness, the age of stadium-only touring for any band was over. Much as U2 felt it'd over-extended itself at the end of the 1980s, the band began the new decade with a new image, returning to a simpler approach to music and touring, shedding the layers of irony it'd hid itself behind for much of the 1990s. The subject matter of the songs had also changed. On the next record, Bono sang about finding beauty, hope, and grace within despair, and it's hard to find a song in the last two albums with lyrics as dark as those on any of the 1990s albums. U2 has matured and developed since then. Bono, Adam, Larry and the Edge are no longer the band they were when they recorded the War album, and we've gotten to the point where Zooropa and Pop can't be considered "new U2" anymore. But as a recent @U2 fan survey suggests, the 1990s are seen as U2's "best decade" by the majority of our online readership, and one can only assume that the stylistic experimentation, ironic self-mockery, and textual themes of the three 1990s albums and tours have a lot to do with this. For all of its flaws and weaknesses, real and perceived, Pop was U2's one, last great push in that decade.

Further reading:

The Trouble With U2 The Guardian, October 19, 1996

Having "practically collapsed" in the studio, the world's second-biggest band have postponed the release of their new album. The accountants are worried...

U2's 'Discotheque' Sets Records Allstar magazine, January 18, 1997

Pop

Rating: 4 stars (out of five) Rolling Stone, March 01, 1997

Rains, Apathy Cancel U2 in Raleigh The Raleigh News & Observer, May 28, 1997

Pop - More Songs of Innocence and Experience Propaganda, Issue 26, June 01, 1997

'I Can Still Hear the Edits' Propaganda, Issue 26, June 01, 1997

¹ "Two crap albums and you're out. That's our deal with our audience." This quote is attributed to Bono in 2004 after the release of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, but it has its roots in a suggestion that George Stromboulopoulos made in an interview on May 25, 2001, after one of the band's Toronto Elevation Tour shows.

² If anything, Zooropa is a stylistic cousin of The Unforgettable Fire, another album on which Brian Eno had a heavy guiding hand.



© @U2/Tran, 2007.

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• Mar 04, 2007 - Like A Song: Pop Goes My World

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