U2 – Pop Review

At least the title is honest. By this point in their careers, U2 had dominated stadium rock and would continue to sell those sizeable structures off the back of Zooropa. An intense album, an interesting piece of work which sounds like a safe draw, but offered a series of incredible risks for the band. It questioned what they stood for, what they were going to stand for in the years to follow, and it allowed Bono and the talented musicians behind him on stage to show they were still a band with a burning passion. Pop reverts all that. Five years between this and Zooropa comes undone with a title as egregious as We’re Only in It for the Money. At least The Mothers of Invention laced their album with psychedelic irony. U2 found a spot in the contemporary Cool Britannia period, waited for it to pass, and blew the sagging competition out of the water with an album inevitably set to top the charts.  

U2’s name is on it; the chances are it’ll appear somewhere, be it on an iPod out of the blue or on a landfill with the rest of the unsold Pop record prints. If you want to know where Bono and chums were knocking about at the time Pop was made, take a listen to Discotheque. U2 at their worst. A band not leading the charge of a changing culture but trying to reflect the burning wreckage, seeing the smoke from imploded engines as a plume to signal an of-interest moment. U2 were too big to fail when Pop released, and that is a disaster. Creativity is best when pressured, when put to the test. There is no test when the stadium tour has lined the band’s pockets for five years off the back of three of their best albums. Once your foot slips off the gas you get these dated but somewhat provocative and entertaining pieces. Messy noise like Do You Feel Love does little, and even less is formed on Mofo.  

Bloated yet thin on the ground. An ugly spot to find themselves. U2 reduces the edge they had on previous releases, quite literally. The Edge sounds distant on Pop, rarely, if ever, given a chance to shine. When he is, it’s clear he wants to be the rhythm, the force and groove of the song. You can hear a relatively solid go of that outline on Staring at the Sun, which is at least a minor step up in quality. White noise to follow, and then The Playboy House, a groovy little rarity from Pop which suggests the band were capable of laying down a groove of interest. Not often enough for it to work, but certainly on display often enough. Bono muses on the death of youth and the continuation of life as a creative in what he perceives as the middle period, but even that strong source of influence goes nowhere.  

What few standout moments there are for Pop, the penultimate song and single, Please, is more because of the shortcomings around it than anything it does well. Another catchy and moody high point for the album, which is a dull thud of a song compared to their higher points. On its own, Pop fails to capture the mood of the times. It prods at the popular touches of culture, what surrounded U2 is not, at this point, what the world was experiencing with music. Wake Up Dead Man, no relation to the Daniel Craig film, is a solid album closer. If the band had decided on that moodier tone earlier, instead of chasing the ghost of a pop past, then they would have been better set for Pop. It’s an album which both predicts the demise of those cheery guitar rock pop days and yet sounds fed up with what followed.