U2 - Pop

This year, U2 are celebrating the 30^th anniversary of one of their greatest successes (the Joshua Tree), but it is also the 20^th anniversary of the much maligned Pop album.  I would argue that this was U2’s last great album – their last brave album.

The 90s was, without doubt, U2’s most interesting decade.  They famously decamped to Berlin to seek the muse and they found her with the release of their greatest album Achtung Baby.  Starting off as a way to kill time on tour, the planned follow up EP grew into the excellent Zooropa album.  They filled a bit of time by writing songs that featured on soundtracks to films and the truly unique Passengers project.   It’s safe to say that U2 were on a creative roll. 

Obviously enamored with 90s dance culture the first sounds you hear from Pop certainly scared the horses.  Calling your first single Discotheque was one thing.  But dressing up in Village People gear for the video was another.  No wonder Middle America decided to head for the exits.  But that was their loss.  Looking under the façade of the disco suits shows that U2 were still the serious young things that they always were.  Discotheque is a riddle wrapped in a mystery trying to decipher the enigma that is love.  “You can reach, But you can't grab it, You can hold it, control it …”

Following this is MOFO – a song about the loss of Bono’s mother.  All of this is presented in the shiny wrapping of dance music with U2 pulling the classic bait and switch trick of pretending to be superficial but delivering some of the most meaningful songs in their catalogue. 

 

The rest of the album, for better or worse, is a grab bag of songs showing the band wasn’t out of ideas.  There are straight ahead rockers (Last Night on Earth, Gone) trip hop numbers (Miami), torch songs (If you wear that velvet dress), a song about politics (Please), love songs in the vein of One (If God Will send his angels).  The surfeit of ideas was probably the undoing of the album in the end.  It’s unfocussed – the band created new versions of about half the album after its release (and I’m not talking remixes – complete new versions).  But what it lacks in focus, it shows a band having fun, not caring what anyone thinks of them and pretty much pulling it all off.  

 

There’s certainly an argument to me made that they should have cut some songs from the album and made it shorter, but the length and breadth of the music makes for a much more interesting album than the (more successful) follow up All That You Can’t Leave Behind (which features Beautiful Day -  a return to the top of the charts).

 

It feels that everything that U2 has done this century has been a reaction to the response to the Pop album (it wasn’t received to their usual fawning expectations).  The band felt that Pop wasn’t finished before they went out on tour, so albums seem to take forever to finish these days.  The strange and interesting songs have been replaced by safe choices.   They always seem to be searching for “relevance”. 

 

What Pop is crying out for is a reissue – there must be hours of the band early jams and alternative mixes showing the process about how the band came up with this album.  A reissue would also show that the band was ahead of its time.  They were fusing rock and dance right on the cusp of when that became “a thing”.    Certainly for a band searching for “relevance”, this would be no bad thing.