It was a turning point in U2’s career. They had made an experimental
album with a visionary producer, something that showed maturation, that
suggested whole new avenues their music could explore that few might’ve
imagined prior. They had brought a moment-in-history performance to the
stage, underlining their expanding reach, the kind that would touch who
knows how many people over the decades. Four Irish kids had seen the
world, and their ambitions and talents expanded alongside their
perception. Now was a time to capitalize — to show what they could do
next.
Those were the circumstances that birthed
The Joshua Tree, released in March 1987. Partnering with Brian Eno for 1984’s
The Unforgettable Fire
yielded both their most adventurous album up to that point and the hit
single “Pride (In The Name Of Love).” Bono’s infamous venture into the
crowd during Live Aid in 1985 had elevated them to rockstar notoriety on
an international scale. They had seen countries far outside of the
North/South boundaries of Dublin that had once constrained them, and
Bono made his life-altering first trip to Africa.
The Joshua Tree
was the sound of a young band bottling all that up, then letting it
flow out into an album that was all-encompassing, universal, classic —
the one that began the business of solidifying their place in history.
On March 3rd, 1997 — almost 10 years to the day — the band released
Pop.
It had been a strange trip through those 10 years. Partnering with
Eno again, and then Flood, U2 had pushed themselves well beyond the
original strictures of their personality and aesthetic — first with
1991’s
Achtung Baby, even more so with 1993’s
Zooropa,
and especially on their 1995 one-off collaboration album with Eno under
the moniker Passengers. They had staged one of the most ambitious and
ludicrous but beloved tours in history with Zoo TV, a live spectacle
that dwarfed the moment of forced intimacy at Live Aid. Four Irish kids
had grown up, had children, gotten divorced, dated super models, taken
drugs in Tokyo, become world-wide celebrities. Once fashioning
themselves as punks — an argument half-continued in their attempts to
hijack and critique the mainstream while still seeking hits on
Achtung Baby and
Zooropa — they were now, solidly, pop culture.
Pop was the sound of a band who had been around nearly 20
years but were still just in their mid-30s, bottling all those
experiences up into a complicated, flawed, misunderstood album that
stands as a divisive oddity in their career while also casting a shadow
over everything that followed. Semi-parallels and 10 year arc aside,
The Joshua Tree and
Pop
are linked by their positions in U2’s story. They are brackets around
perhaps the most dynamic and debated era of the band’s career, the Big
Statement followed by artistic adventurousness that, perhaps, took them
too far out to sea, setting the stage for the reset button of 2000’s
All That You Can’t Leave Behind and the version of U2 we now know: the classic rock establishment.
The Joshua Tree started their ascension in earnest, made them superstars.
Pop was the beginning of the fall.
***
In many ways,
Pop was the first big disappointment of U2’s career. Their first several albums were the steady build of an up and coming band.
The Joshua Tree was massive. Sure, 1988’s
Rattle And Hum
was a stumble as far as over-indulgent followups to an artist’s
breakthrough go, but it also wasn’t a full-fledged album. The real
successor to
The Joshua Tree was
Achtung Baby —
meaning that between their two best, most immortal albums, U2 achieved
one of the most effective and total sea changes in rock history. Riding
on the popularity of
Achtung Baby, U2 were able to pull their fans along through the rest of their experimental ’90s.
Then there was
Pop, the album that’s still remembered as U2
pushing further into dance music and incorporating techno influences
into their songwriting. The album that felt both overcooked and
unfinished, thanks to the band running right up against their deadline
for a March ’97 release (already delayed from late ’96) preceding the
kickoff of their PopMart Tour. It’s the album accompanied by the tour
that the band announced in an appearance at a
Manhattan Kmart,
next to the lingerie section and under a fake department sign reading
“Pop Group” (priced at $U2.97), a tour involving the biggest LED screen
ever (at the time), a giant golden arch that coincidentally looked just
like half a McDonald’s logo, and that began, naturally, in Las Vegas.
(At the Kmart appearance, the band played one song — a b-side called
“Holy Joe” that, despite the horrific echo in the
live video, is one of their
best non-album tracks.)
Pop
was the album where the thesis shifted from the late 20th century
dislocation and media over-saturation of Zoo TV to a more brazen, warped
embrace of all the trashiness of pop culture and the commodity of a
department store chain like Kmart.
Pop was the album with “Discothèque” on it.
Many would have you believe
Pop is the nadir of U2’s work,
even against their clearly less-inspired 21st century albums. Initially,
the album actually arrived to mostly strong reviews and sales, though
the latter would taper off and stagnate relative to U2’s usual financial
success, and the reputation of the album would tank within years. The
established critical narrative for the band often counts it almost
alongside those misjudged bids for continued cultural relevance by
classic rock artists, U2’s version of the bungling perpetrated by ’60s
greats in the ’80s. There was fan backlash to the garishness of it all,
like
Pop and PopMart finally took Ironic U2 too far. In both
camps, it’s amazing how much the album gets reduced to “Discothèque” as a
signifier of how the band had lost their way — the self-mockery of
their Village People impression in the theoretically disposable dance —
rock song’s video the jump-the-shark moment of U2’s performative ’90s
shallowness. Its reputation wasn’t rehabilitated by the band at all,
either. Even in the immediate aftermath of the record, they talked of
the frustrations during recording, the frustrations with having to (by
their estimation) rush the album out. They’ve talked about wanting to go
back and re-do some of those songs. Live, they hardly ever touch the
album, if at all.
On some level, the criticisms are understandable: at sixty minutes,
Pop
is a lot to take in. A crowded album full of different themes and
sounds melting together. Even if you aren’t one of the people who could
never get with U2’s about-face in the ’90s, there’s no denying the
songwriting on
Achtung Baby is more bulletproof than it is here; one thing the band is right about is that some of the tracks on
Pop
could’ve used a bit more refining. As it’s often been noted, Bono’s
voice — long a signature quality of U2’s music, especially the rich boom
it had matured into for
The Joshua Tree and the moody croon he found for
Achtung Baby and
Zooropa
— showed its first glimmers of weakening and cracking. Having pushed it
too far on massive tours, he sounds frayed around the edges, reedier.
If you look at
Pop as a haphazard album, the work of musicians
straining against themselves and circumstance, it isn’t hard to hear
Bono’s graininess as giving voice to the whole struggling enterprise of
the album.
Pushing further into the electronic influences that had already characterized their ’90s work,
Pop did indeed find U2 trying to incorporate club music into their sound — not
that
outlandish considering dance music’s legacy in Europe and electronica’s
brief pop moment in America during the late ’90s. Plenty of
alternative-rock bands of various sounds and generations got curious,
incorporating samples and loops into their music and eschewing big
guitar riffs. U2 were seeking to change up their songwriting process, so
they too dove headlong into loops, sequencing, and a whole array of
effects and studio tricks. (Larry Mullen, Jr. was also unable to
contribute drums earlier on in the recording due to a recent back
surgery.) The paradox of
Pop, however, is it doesn’t exactly go
far enough. Some dismiss it for U2 dabbling in the wrong trends for
their sound, but there’s just as much of an argument to be made that
they didn’t lose themselves as much as they should have in order to make
Pop as singular a left-turn as they might’ve wanted at one
point. There might be the skittering pulsations of “Mofo,” but there’s
also the fairly straightforward U2 pop of “If God Will Send His Angels”
and “Staring At The Sun” right after.
All of that being said, here are the other things
Pop is.
Pop is the freakout and comedown at the end of their ’90s road, where they lost the battles of
Zooropa
and fully embraced rockstar trappings, the dirty glamor, the glitz and
crassness. The album signaling U2’s last brush with unfettered and
fearless experimentation. The album where the mingling of sex and
religion from
Acthung Baby continues, but is pushed into Pop
Art overdrive while deepening the conversation: sin and materialism and
indulgence are entangled with shaken faith. The album where they bred
European textures with boom-times Americana, getting at something more
real and immediate and sinister and shiny than those late ’80s ventures
where they supposedly got closest to American themes. Almost written out
of their narrative but pivotal to it,
Pop is the album that remains most perplexing and fascinating and layered in a career of thoroughly analyzed classics.
Pop indulged and exposed a side of U2 never really seen
before or after it. It is a decadent album, not only because it’s a
clearly expensive, labored-over album by a superstar band, but also
because it’s a loopy, druggy thing overall. U2 sounded like many places
and times over the years, but there’s never really a time where U2
sounded so much like designer drugs on speedboats or in clubs,
hallucinogenics on the beach. (The corroded song “Miami,” after all,
came out of a debaucherous interlude in its Floridian namesake during
the lead-up to
Pop.) This characteristic persists through much
of the album: the seedy sheen of “Mofo” and “Last Night On Earth,” the
sun-drenched guitar cries in the chorus of “Staring At The Sun,” the
swooning Technicolor hymn of “The Playboy Mansion,” the bleary-eyed
day-after meditations in “Please” and “Wake Up Dead Man.” Bono once
characterized the album as beginning at a party and ending at a funeral,
moving from its uptempo club tracks to the broken-down gravity of its
conclusion. But throughout,
Pop moves through day and night
repeatedly, weaving the rise and the comedown, the sublime and the
profane, into a hybrid where the polarities become indistinguishable.
This complicates the name and theoretical manifesto of the album. They titled it
Pop
because of a play on mass culture, on disposability, but it’s also the
moment where they become that stuff entirely: they’re rockstars here,
and they’ve had the attendant life experiences. But try as U2 might —
and this might be part of why people still have issues with their ’90s
material — they could never fully go in that direction. They always had
their earnestness, and these songs have more weight and bigger ideas
than the intentional schlock of “Discothèque” or PopMart’s lemon
spaceship would suggest, or than they’ve been credit for.
That might be a failing in the eyes of some, but it’s also the exact
thing that makes ’90s U2 so fascinating, and so rewarding to delve into.
For all the riches and complexities of their ’80s development, the
younger U2 still always turned to wonder in the end. The ’90s is where
they grew up, and wrote a decade of songs that fought much harder to
find that wonder.
Pop has as much crisis of faith yearning as
its immediate predecessors, but its darker moments approach U2’s
absolute darkest. Everything is in hyperdrive here, and it accentuates
the vulnerability of the humans within it –whether we’re talking about
just slightly off-kilter, otherworldly balladry of “If God Will Send His
Angels” or the rabbithole of “Mofo.”
There’s no better summary of all this tension than in that latter example. Like
Zooropa’s
“Lemon” before it, “Mofo” employs the supposed superficiality of dance
music as a vessel for Bono airing out one of his most persistent demons,
the early death of his mother. Where “Lemon” used shimmery, plastic
future-disco to talk about preserving memory via technology, “Mofo” is
the amphetamine rush through blurring, fading snapshots of the past.
Bono mutters, then wails “Mother” throughout, issuing desperate pleas
into the growing maelstrom of twisted synths and rhythms around him. 20
years later, it sounds very much like a late ’90s song sonically. And
that belies what’s going on here, and thus what’s going on all over
Pop.
“Mofo” is nothing short of exorcism, and many of the record’s other
highlights similarly grapple with heavy themes within the
bait-and-switch of glistening surfaces that cede rather easily to reveal
the simmering, festering frameworks within them.
Like
Zooropa, this is the power of
Pop: the idea of
human emotions and voices lost in the post-industrial noise enveloping
them. The difference here is that those crisis of faith moments litter
the album — maybe the band felt listless, and were writing listlessly,
but that’s part of the album’s impact. At one point in history, U2 spent
their time on the tour bus reading the Bible, which must have been the
most fun tour ever. By
Pop, those older guys who had lived a
bit of life were singing about broken religion and beliefs all around:
the struggle of relationships and human connection in “Do You Feel
Loved” or the alternate-universe lounge music of “If You Wear That
Velvet Dress,” the pop singer midlife-crisis of “Gone,” the search for
answers that crop up differently in “If God Will Send His Angels,”
“Staring At The Sun,” “Please,” and most particularly “Wake Up Dead
Man.”
On “If God Will Send His Angels,” Bono sings “God’s got his phone off
the hook, babe/ Would he even pick up if he could?” and “Jesus never
let me down/ You know Jesus used to show me the score/ Then they put
Jesus in show business/ Now it’s hard to get in the door.” By the time
“Wake Up Dead Man” closes the album, Bono’s gotten some time on the
books, or at least started calling the direct line. “Jesus/ Jesus help
me/ I’m alone in this world/ And a fucked up world it is too/ Jesus/
Jesus tell me the story/ The one about eternity/ And the way it’s going
to be” he sings before the first restrained reading of the chorus —
“Wake up, dead man.” The tone is hard to pin down. Is it a legitimate
prayer for salvation, a sardonic-leaning address to Jesus about the
Second Coming? Is it a disenchanted transmission to a concept Bono
doesn’t know if he believes in quite the same way anymore, the sound of a
man trying to hold onto the defining structures in his life? The way
Edge’s arid guitar parts in the chorus unravel then tighten again over
Mullen’s drum fills feels like bonds tightening, then breaking apart,
then tightening again. Is it the sound of Bono talking to himself as
much as anything, calling out to a lost soul and demanding “Wake up,
wake up?”
After the push-pull of
Pop’s split identity between clearly
adventurous songs and more standard U2 material given a digitized
facelift, this is where it ends: a strung out paean that after small
eruptions, clatters to an end. It’s one of the greats in a handful of
U2’s strong closing numbers, and the logical conclusion of
Pop
whether you buy these songs’ latent concerns or not. After all the
album’s excesses, it ends on a song that shambles through the early
morning hours, possessed by resignation as much as the desire for new
resolutions.
Maybe people were right to look back on
Pop as an unfocused
album by people who didn’t know where they were. But whether the band
recognized or intended that in the moment, that’s why
Pop
remains one of their strangest and most engrossing works. It works in
little vignettes: the mind-altering party music shield of its first
three tracks, the yearning middle section, giving way to the bizarre
celebrity and fashion addled lust triptych of “Miami,” “The Playboy
Mansion,” and “If You Wear That Velvet Dress,” and finally the crash
landing reckoning of “Please” and “Wake Up Dead Man.” They collect to
tell the story of one of the most famous bands ever, still at the end of
the height of their powers, trying to locate the meaning in something.
It sounds like people who have lost themselves, lost what they were
looking for, lost their anchors — and answered it with an attempt to go
deeper, weirder. Sometimes they fumbled, but the freak-outs fold into
the DNA of
Pop as a great album, in all its haggard, Day-Glo, trainwreck glory.
***
In an
interview from 1997, Bono characterized
Pop as the “logical extension” of what began with
The Joshua Tree.
It’s hard to know what the band themselves would mean by that exactly.
Were they referencing the forward momentum of experimentation they threw
themselves into after their breakthrough and its middle-of-the-road
epilogue? Were they referencing those aged, conflicted conversations
that dominate
Pop vs.
The Joshua Tree offering the
sound of four dudes in their mid-20s first throwing their arms around
the world? No matter how you interpret that 10 year arc, they could
never go back after releasing
The Joshua Tree, and they could never go back after
Pop — though in a very different way.
U2 has always had a complicated relationship with the word “pop.” At
various times in their career, they’ve presented themselves as
alternative in some capacity, whether as young post-punks from Dublin or
avant-garde “artistes” hanging in Berlin just as the Wall collapsed.
And even their most major works often feel slightly out of time.
The Joshua Tree or
All That You Can’t Leave Behind define their eras more so than they sound birthed from them; U2’s ’80s work is
of the decade but doesn’t sound
like the decade. In the mid-’90s, Bono balked at
Zooropa
— likely still their weirdest full-fledged album — garnering a Grammy
from an Alternative category. This is a band who grew fascinated with
celebrity and the largest scope possible within pop culture, who grew
fixated on their continued relevance and hit-making potential, but also
never abandoned their inherent stubbornness. For a long time, the
mainstream came to them, so it worked.
A combative relationship with the term and idea of “pop” is what was at the core of
Pop
— a hit-making band now part of the younger pantheon of the classic
rock lineage, embracing the grosser directions of pop culture. The songs
themselves are way poppier and more hook-driven than several of their
other albums, but they’re couched in what was then forward-thinking
electronic music that would have definitely seemed avant-garde to your
average casual U2 fan who went to the show to hear
The Joshua Tree
singles and “Pride” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” In an un-cynical way,
it is a midlife-crisis album. Especially considering what it wound up
doing to them: the greatest irony of the end of U2’s irony days is that
the album named
Pop, the one hung up on all things mainstream
and what it all meant, registers as one of their most significant
stumbles. It is something they’ve been reacting to ever since.
he line Bono favored when describing
Pop’s followup
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
in 2000 was that U2 was “reapplying for the job” of the biggest band in
the world. This is the kind of talk that, over the course of the last
seventeen years, would contribute to a younger generation looking at
Bono and the rest of the band with a general eyeroll. But it’s also
telling, how much
Pop left a scar on U2. From there, they’ve
talked through every album cycle, or the yawning four or five year gaps
between releases, about the drive, the need, to remain relevant.
Pop
wasn’t that quite yet. Those were still young-ish men incorporating
cutting-edge sounds and techniques and broadening their identity. The U2
since has oscillated between being very conservative or dabbling in
trends too late. They are older men, no less or more obsessed with
contemporary relevance than they were in their 30s, but looking all the
more ridiculous for it as the years pass.
After
Pop,
All That You Can’t Leave Behind found U2
folding the electronic influences into their music more subtly,
stripping back the arrangements, and generally espousing a “back to
basics” approach. A return to what they do well: big, swelling pop songs
like “Beautiful Day” and “Walk On.” Nothing they had done before
sounded like that album, but it gets characterized as some kind of
“return to abstract form” anyway, the moment U2 righted their course and
embraced their core strengths. If
Pop was the first severe
dent in the band’s stature, this was the way of shoring up the defenses
for years to come, and U2 have yet to stop reacting to
that either: the turn from the failings of
Pop to the rejuvenation of
All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
Since then, they’ve released just three albums.
How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb arrived in 2004 and basically repeated what
All That You Can’t Leave Behind did, with more of a rock angle. It took five years for
No Line On The Horizon to materialize after that, and when it did the band talked it up like it’d be a left-turn on the level of
Achtung Baby.
But it wasn’t; they couldn’t commit on that level anymore, they still
had to overcrowd it with something for everyone and their misguided
attempts at a big single. (In the context of that album, it was the
woeful bid for another “Vertigo,” “Get On Your Boots.”) Then it took
another five years (and who knows how many songs or projects,
considering reports of U2 working with RedOne on a “club” album and
maybe Rick Rubin on another rock album and Danger Mouse on something,
etc., etc.) before
Songs Of Innocence arrived. And that’s it, the end destination of what the
Pop/
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
one-two begat: an album that felt focus grouped into existence, U2 too
possessed by the questions of what U2 are supposed to be and sound like
to simply write a great new U2 album. So they arrived at the classic
rock moment where they appear as shadows of themselves.
In the ’90s, U2 had the willingness to fall on their faces, even if
that willingness was calculated. Today, they seem oblivious — it takes a
lack of awareness to think that, hey, dropping
Songs Of Innocence
onto everyone’s iPhones might not result in a resounding chorus of
hallelujahs. But they are also cripplingly self-aware, always heavily
criticizing themselves a few breaths away from self-aggrandizing. This
is part of
Pop’s lasting damage, that it retroactively
diminishes the standing of ’90s U2 as a whole — if this is what it was
all leading to, surely the thinking that preceded it was also folly,
right?
“The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear,” Bono sings on
“I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” one of the hit single
attempts that marred
No Line On The Horizon. By 2009, that was a
cringe-inducing line from him: the version of the band we had now was
the hammy, classic rock kind of ridiculous. A safe ridiculous. But
throughout the years, U2 did have a sense of the absurdity of what they
were doing: as much as they were true believers in the transcendent
properties of pop music, they also poked fun at themselves for the
patent ridiculousness of getting up onstage and being a rock band.
This is the version of U2 that’s missed after
Pop. The guys
who admitted this whole thing was a bit of a farce, but actually acted
on it, too — the guys who were willing to take some chances. The
“ridiculous” line is laughable because all U2 wants to be now is “U2,”
and they make creative decisions — now
always long-gestating
and overcooked in an attempt to marry the idea of the band with their
idea of what could make the band as vital as they were twenty and thirty
years ago. None of that is coming back. For those of us still (somehow)
this invested in this band, it’s easy to keep wishing that U2 has one
more great adventure in them — that they’d really go for it. They hedge
their bets now. The turning point of
Pop was that U2 made an
album that would end their time as a band that innovated, and reimagined
themselves, surprising us over and over. Ever since, they’ve been U2 as
we expected them.
