U2 does not take failure well. Each time they’ve even come close to failing, they’ve accepted nothing less than a complete career rehabilitation, a New Sound that they promptly ran into the ground at the end of that decade. There’s a reason I won’t be defending their other fiascos, Rattle and Hum (bloated, but with some great songs, including maybe the best one U2 has ever recorded) or No Line on the Horizon (an inconsistent mess, with some good stuff at the beginning and end) here. But Pop is a different story. U2 has made better albums than Pop. The likes of Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree have it beat as far as consistency goes (I don’t think anyone, even its defenders, likes every song on Pop), and Zooropa is the more adventurous of the two albums. And yet, I don’t think I’ve listened to any U2 album more times than Pop, despite its title as the black sheep of the U2 catalog. In fact, I find many of its songs to be among U2’s best, not just for that time period, but in their entire career. Why is it so hated? It all comes down to the first single.

“Discotheque”

If the failure of Pop can be boiled down to one suspect, it’s this song. To be honest, I actually quite like the song, for reasons I’ll get into a little later. But this was an incredibly misguided choice for a lead single. By this point, people were beginning to grow tired of the irony schtick U2 had been pulling for years (although their albums were largely unironic, the ZooTV tour had convinced people otherwise). A dumb dance-rock song with a video where the band dresses up like the Village People? No fucking thank you, said much of the population, and that stigma carried over to the album’s release. To date, Pop is one of the lowest-selling albums in U2’s career, going platinum only once (ah, the 90s, when that was considered a failure). While obviously this will remain a “what-if” scenario, I believe that it would have at least sold another million copies if, say, “Do You Feel Loved” was released as the first single. The “unwisely-chosen single” scenario would repeat itself over a decade later, when U2 somehow decided that “Get on Your Boots” was an ideal first single.

Production

Pop was a rush job. U2 was basically working on the album nonstop from the last half of 1996 to the first few months of 1997, and they still acknowledged that the album was essentially unfinished, the most widely-sold collection of glorified demos ever released. Even after a release date delay, the band scrambled to finish the album and find time to rehearse for the already-booked PopMart Tour. Many of the songs would be reworked either live, for the singles, or on future compilations. And yet, I don’t think Pop is all that lacking in the production department. A few songs were definitely improved with the remixes (“Please”, possibly the best song on the album, was muddled in the album mix but clear as day on the single, the same with “Gone” to a lesser degree), but a few others were lateral moves (“If God Will Send His Angels” had some slightly better choices on the single, but the single ditched part of the first verse for no reason, the remix of “Discotheque” just sounds different from, not better than, the original), and at least one of the songs was better the first time (the remix of “Staring at the Sun” just lazily adds in a drum section). Honestly, if you just listened to the album without knowing what the band members had to go through, you probably wouldn’t think that it was a compromised album.

Songs and Lyrics

In one of his few useful bouts of public speaking, Bono compared this album to entering at a party, but leaving at a funeral. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory listen of Pop to reveal that it isn’t the rah-rah fun dance album that “Discotheque” made it seem like. Hell, if you listen carefully to “Discotheque”, you could figure that out yourself. Much of the lyrics are focused on an unnamed person reaching some ideal, which seems permanently out of their grasp. Below is the bridge of the song;

but you take what you can get
’cause it’s all that you can find
oh you know there’s something more
but tonight, tonight, tonight

Well, I’m not sure I can dance to that. You definitely can’t dance to the next song on the album, “Do You Feel Loved”. As it turns out, the titular question is rhetorical, and it’s clear from the lyrics that you and Bono clearly do not feel loved. There’s a futility to the song’s lyrics, where the only way to feel loved is to lie to oneself (with my fingers as you want them / with my nails under your hide / with my teeth at your back / and my tongue to tell you the sweetest lies). By the bridge, Bono begins singing “stick together / a man and a woman” as if saying it will convince him that it’s true. His third attempt at saying it collapses.

The album has already taken a dark turn, and we haven’t even gotten to the third song yet. And it’s a doozy of a third song. “Mofo” is the most obvious sonic departure from typical U2 on the album, full of frantic, pulsating synths and electronic beats, but while the sound suggests the party, the lyrics feel like the memorial service. This is a song about Bono’s late mother, who also inspired the sonically wacky, lyrically sad “Lemon” four years earlier. You’d be forgiven for not figuring out the song’s darkness early on (although the line “looking for baby Jesus under the trash” may suggest otherwise), but by the time Bono sings the following

mother am i still your son, you know i’ve waited for so long to hear you say so
mother you left and made me someone
now i’m still a child but no one tells me no

the true inspiration is hard to ignore.

By contrast, the fourth and fifth songs, “If God Will Send His Angels” and “Staring at the Sun”, sound most like your daddy’s U2, with “Angels” even showing off that chiming Edge guitar. And then the lyrics. “Sun” feels like more typical U2 balladry than anything else on the album (of course, as evidenced by the rest of this piece, I’m a fan of typical U2), but “Angels” walks and sounds like a ballad but talks like a deeply hopeless song. Early on, we get the line “God’s got his phone off the hook babe / would he even pick up if he could“, which seemingly renders the titular proposition all but useless. And then in the final verse, Bono drops this on us;

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

Bono must have been working through a shitton of demons when he was making this album.

The next pair of songs, “Last Night on Earth” and “Gone”, continue the trend of depression. “Last Night on Earth” has a rawer, more rock feel than many of the songs on the album, but it too has some uniquely depressing lyrics. Many songs have been written about women who are living on the edge, but I don’t think many of them have contained lines like this;

She’s living living next week now
You know she’s going to pay it back somehow
She hasn’t been to bed in a week
She’ll be dead soon
Then she’ll sleep

Similarly, “Gone”, like many other songs, takes a look at how it actually kinda sucks to be a rock star. This is one of Bono’s favorite U2 songs, and lyrically, it may be the best one on the album. If I wanted to quote certain lyrics, I’d probably just end up posting all of the song, so I’ll just link to it instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKrjvRogu18

After “Gone” is where the problems begin. The two songs immediately following it may very well be the worst-received U2 songs of all time. Personally, I like the first song, “Miami”, which serves as a nice, weird little breather after all the turmoil of the album’s first half. Many people hate it, but by the time Bono starts scream-singing “MIAMI / my mammy” in a manner that’s both cathartic and terrified, I find that I can’t get mad at it. Plus, it killed on the PopMart Tour, when it segued directly into “Bullet the Blue Sky”. However, I can find plenty of room to get mad at “The Playboy Mansion”, which wasn’t good in 1997 and has dated about as well as a grilled cheese left in the sun since then. With its painfully on-the-nose lyrics about various American institutions, it grinds the album to a halt with its tired irony when the album should really be gaining momentum. Thankfully, we get back on track with “If You Wear That Velvet Dress” and especially “Please”. A scathing song about, in simple terms, what a bunch of fuckheads the Irish were being during The Troubles, it’s among their very best lyrically, and it leads nicely into the last and most hopeless song on the album. By “Wake Up Dead Man” starts playing, you’ve forgotten that this was once a dance album, and not the most depressing album U2 has ever released. The titular dead man is Jesus, and the titular request is given by Bono with the desperation of a man who knows that it’s not going to do any good. The production, full of such electronic bravado early on, becomes much rawer here, like the microphone just happened to be on when Bono was having a serious spiritual crisis. This concludes the album, unless you have the Japanese version, in which case it leads into “Holy Joe (Guilty Mix)”, a remix of a b-side that was best left as a b-side.

Legacy

Pop has seen something of a revival since its release, with many people coming out of the woodwork to say, hey, that was actually a pretty good album. It’s better than anything U2 has released since, with only Songs of Innocence and maybe All That You Can’t Leave Behind (although that one falls apart in the second half big time) coming close to equaling it. Maybe whenever they run their new phase into the ground, we’ll get Ptwop.