Originally posted by RattleandHum1988:[..]
Unless for some reason someone just doesn't like the "sound" of this record, or the lyrics, or for some reason finds it uninteresting, I just think those people don't really understand this record. I hate how that makes me sound, elitist, snobby, but that's not really how I mean to sound. Pop is like Achtung Baby, in that understanding its context in the U2 canon makes it that much more interesting, but Pop is definitely less accessible. You can give Achtung Baby to someone who doesn't know U2 at all and they'd probably find more than a few things they like on it. Pop, maybe not so much. It's way more niche sounding, and the lyrics are definitely more personal and darker. But when you're familiar with U2 and you know really what Pop means and did to the band, it makes it that much more interesting as an album. As a fan, I've definitely come around a LOT on this album since I became a fan. A LOT.
I think the album is up there with U2's best, and I really would consider it up there with Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby if it had that last tiny bit of polish on it. If the entire album had the polish that say, Gone (Pop album version) vs Gone (new mix from best of album version) had, it would be one of U2's greats. I'm not sure people would've had a different reaction, but still. I'm speaking from an objective perspective though. Subjectively, I think it might be U2's most interesting record in terms of both the album itself, the band U2 were when they recorded it, and what it did to U2 afterwards.
For anyone who hasn't read this article, it's fucking great and basically encapsulates what we all know about this album and its context in a really well-written and thought-out article by a huge U2 fan: https://www.stereogum.com/1927982/pop-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/.
It's crazy on how on-point this writer is, and really makes you realize that yes, U2 is literally still on the same reactionary path they set out on post-Pop. Like their output since then or not, it's clear they've never really "recovered". NLOTH has some hints of it (as I've been gushing about in that NLOTH thread the past few days), but they've never gone back to that same headspace, totally.
Originally posted by RattleandHum1988:[..]
For anyone who hasn't read this article, it's fucking great and basically encapsulates what we all know about this album and its context in a really well-written and thought-out article by a huge U2 fan: https://www.stereogum.com/1927982/pop-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/.
Originally posted by POPmart07:Pop imo is a top 3 U2 album lyrically, musically, and thematically. The band takes you on a quite incredible journey with discotheque - wake up dead man. As bono once said “it starts at a party and ends at a funeral” which is a great summary. So the question really is why do so many people hate on pop? Honestly I think it’s for 2 main reasons. #1 is the delays. Once an album has so many delays It sends red flags immediately you already start thinking “oh this is gonna be a disaster” and once that thoughts in your head it’s hard to get out your gonna be unsatisfied at that point no matter what. #2 is the name I honestly feel like just the name “pop” turned people off in 1997 and probably still do today. I laugh when I see pop at the bottom of U2 rankings by critics because it’s a “dance and techno album” excuse me have you listened to the album? Discotheque and Mofo are rock songs that are wrapped up in a bit of a dancier feel which isn’t much different than the critically acclaimed even better than the real thing. Do you feel loved has that techno intro but besides that isn’t really a dance song. And I don’t see how people could consider if god will send his angels, staring at the sun, last night on earth, gone, the playboy mansion, if you wear that velvet dress, please, and wake up dead man pop songs. Really the only real pop song is Miami which talk as much crap as you want about it but it’s fun. It honestly just confuses me how pop is dismissed as a “dance album” when it’s not but then songs like EBTTRT and Mysterious ways are considered classics.
Okay rant over
Originally posted by RattleandHum1988:Damn. I love this thread and everyone in it.
You guys are makin' a whole lot of sense
Matt, I agree with everything you said. Everything.
Originally posted by CMIPalaeo:Ok, so... Pop.
Pop is one of my absolute favourite albums, only after Songs of Innocence and of Experience for me - I can still remember the first time I listened to it, probably about seven or eight years ago, on my first big venture through (most of) U2's discography. It had some ups and downs for me then but I still remember finding the whole of the thing quite enrapturing.
And... that's a weird thing to say about something which is in such a precarious relationship with its creators. And just where U2 stand on Pop seems unclear - we all know they got burned with it, and they make that clear over and over... 'it just needed more time.'... But they often talk highly of it too, praising the adventurousness of it and lamenting that it was misunderstood. Even with STATS this summer, Bono's "psychedelic period" talk of Pop is both sort of acknowledging its creativity and its place in U2's discography while also being sort of dismissive of it. I liked the arguments that 'everything U2 has done since 1998 has been in reaction to Pop' - but we all kind of knew that already. I've never bought the argument some people seem to live by - that U2 'want' to make another Pop album or Zooropa album, but they're just too scared too because Pop 'flopped' (which the Stereogum article points out quite rightly that it didn't, but everyone likes to remember it that way - perhaps easier to swallow by saying it wasn't successful?). Sure, U2 are hesitant to be too experimental, but I've never once thought that any of the albums since - and ESPECIALLY not the last two - are anything other than the music U2 have had in the hearts and heads to make. Have they hedged experimentalism out of wariness over a retread of the mythologized failure of Pop? Sure - look at No Line. Have they resigned themselves to making albums they don't really believe in artistically in order to try and stay afloat in the sea of relevance (which is, loathe as I am to admit it, a losing battle for them)? Not a chance.
On that note, we always like to say NLOTH was U2 'chickening out' on a fringy album, having Pop flashbacks - but I think it's fair to say that U2 chickened out with the original Pop. As I am fascinated by Pop - the album itself, the imagery of it, the ideas of it, the absolutely unparalleled VIBE of Pop - I'm always rather thrilled when I come across the behind the scenes kind of things from its gestation, like those alternate album covers for it that were shared somewhere round here some months back. And looking into that... it's obvious U2 had an album ready in 1996. They did. They must've. They were making stuff for an album release that they seemed quite ready for, but then that they just kept moving back. We give them grief about Songs of Experience being delayed, NLOTH being delayed, the Rubin stuff evaporating into thin air, the bloody interminable game of album release tease-promise-silence-tease from 2010-2014, but Pop was the first time I'm aware of them really just pushing an album back and back... until they'd backed into the wall and they had to put it out. U2 harp on about how much Pop needed just another couple weeks in the studio, and I really really do want madly and desperately to hear the Pop that was released in May '97 instead of March '97... but not half as badly as I want to hear the Pop released in November or December '96 like they originally intended. Was the Pop that we got already U2 trying to play it safe, softening up or remodelling an album they weren't satisfied with? Maybe the Pop that we got was the best of all possible Pops. We'll probably never know, or at least not know for a good decade or two while U2 actual still exists (one of the things I am most dissatisfied with the band over is their aversion to releasing archive material... and the total avoidance of any reissue collection of Pop while we get The Same Bloody Tree Album Again... although at the risk of making this set of parenthesis Very Long Indeed, maybe their hesitance stems from the fear that confronting that material, those Alt-Pops, that it'll reopen old wounds - either through people still thinking badly of Pop even with the additional context to its ontogeny [or perhaps worse, not caring about it or giving it a fair fresh appraisal] or through people realizing they butchered it by overthinking and overworking it).
The Stereogum article does a nice job of placing Pop in context at the end of the trajectory of The Joshua Tree and in being the Spectre of Death driving U2's current modus operandi when it comes to overthinking, overcooking, overhyping, and finally overcriticising things, but I think it gets one thing very wrong. Pop wasn't the end of old U2. It was the beginning of new U2. Pop wasn't the last album where they didn't care. Pop was the first album where they cared too much. Pop was where U2's ambition and status finally got neck-and-neck with each other - where the fact that they'd well and truly made it big became a stumbling block. Rattle and Hum was a flirtation with that, the first brush with it, shaken off easily by a jaunt of being rude and arty and European - Pop was where it became inescapable, the consummation of U2's destiny and the only continuing definition of their very existence. Pop was where U2 had no escape. They had reached their peak, and despite my love for 21st century U2 - any of you who've regularly interacted with me on this site know I adore their 2004-2017 albums like they're family - were no longer at the height of their collective powers. U2 had backed into the point where they'd never be able to avoid criticism and dismissal. They were already walking on thin ice with their other 90s albums, but by the time of Pop, continuing on that trajectory would either be seen as indulgent and U2 losing the script of what made them great in the first place... but not continuing on that trajectory would be U2 chickening out and selling out and playing it safe (or the criticisms at every album since then, basically... which is the point). Pop was the start, and on every album since then, U2 have been very much in a damned if they do, damned if they don't sort of existence. It's probably the only fate for a band like them, the Last Great Rock Band. Without just rehashing the same thing over and over and quietly admitting that it was really all over (the Rolling Stones come to mind) - and say what you like about the 'safeness' of the 2000/10s albums, or 'boringness' or whatever term you prefer, you know the band at least think they're doing something different every time they go into the studio - U2 are forever caught between needing to do something completely different and needing to never attempt anything slightly chancy ever again for any reason whatsoever.
I'm rambling here.
Pop is the beginning of the end for U2. I mean that in a way which is not quite as doom and gloom as it sounds. I don't mean it condemned them to churn out ever-worsening and hollow albums - God knows I don't think that for a moment. I mean that it was when mortality took hold of them, in a real and an abstract way. Pop was U2 finally actually getting burnt, and reacting to it, in all fairness, probably a lot more poorly than they should've - they had a minor misfire, and jumped back like they were dodging an explosion. But Pop is the album where ambition was no longer something that could be seen as U2's saving grace if all else failed. Now, ambition is seen as one of U2's most irritating qualities - the ambition to be relevant, to be the soundtrack to people's summers and thoughts and lives... The U2 that made Pop is not the U2 of today... but I think they were more the U2 of today than the U2 of Achtung Baby, or even Zooropa. With ZooTV, U2 had been playing at being Rock Stars... with Pop, they were playing at playing being Rock Stars, if that makes any sense, and they still are, just less garishly. The self-awareness had been laid on thick and stayed there. It was already eating away at them - Pop was ready in the last quarter of 1996, U2 weren't. So they pushed it off. In pushing it off, they released an album that (in the popular memory) failed. So they had to recover from that with ATYCLB, which was a soaring success, but had been such a 'return to form' (even though, as the Stereogum writeup points out, it really doesn't sound very much like any of their other records) that they had to adjust course to something a bit different with Atomic Bomb... which was a success but had been quite straightforward, like its predecessor, which necessitated a change, which led to NLOTH which 'failed'... and so on...
I love U2. I love, or at the very least really, really like, all of their albums. But Pop is... where the bitterness sets in. It and its successors always remind me they're getting older, they're getting slower... this thing we have now won't last forever. It won't even last much longer, really. I don't feel that on Boy, obviously, but not on TJT, or even AB and Zooropa. But my God, it rings out on Pop, just as loud and clear as on Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Maybe that's why they're my favourites.
Sorry for the essay. It's very rambling and half-baked, and I know what I'm feeling and thinking but I don't know how to say it. Thanks for reading, if you manage it.
