Final Results: Rate the Song Series, 2011-2012

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I don't particularly think it was rushed or unfinished or that it matters much.
I think it took a blow commercially and critically for a number of reasons, and then U2 and Boner went into panic mode and suddenly they had a ready-built excuse*. Just as long as you don't think it was an attempt at a "bandwagon hop" you'll escape my ire. :wink:

*part of a much longer thought, but I am trying to be concise for once.
 
U2DMfan said:
I don't particularly think it was rushed or unfinished or that it matters much.
I think it took a blow commercially and critically for a number of reasons, and then U2 and Boner went into panic mode and suddenly they had a ready-built excuse*.

I agree with this, if Pop had been a success they would have used terms like "raw", "sparse production" and "spontaneous" when describing it but because it failed in their eyes they call it rushed and under-produced...
 
Well, if the story regarding Playboy Mansion is true, then Pop was rushed. Adding vocals during the mastering of the album sounds incredibly chaotic. That's kind of a big no no.

Didn't they announce the tour and open ticket sales 3 weeks before the album was released?
 
Well, if the story regarding Playboy Mansion is true, then Pop was rushed. Adding vocals during the mastering of the album sounds incredibly chaotic. That's kind of a big no no.

Didn't they announce the tour and open ticket sales 3 weeks before the album was released?

That was my thinking there. Or the story of LNOE having it's chorus being written and recorded just hours before mastering begun.

As for Bono saying one thing or another based on whether or not an album sells, there's a lot of other bands out there that do the exact same thing. For example, a member of a rock band might say "Hey, we wouldn't mind working with that hip-hop producer again!" around the time his band's album comes out, then all of sudden they're talking about a "back to roots" direction for the next album if it sells less than expected.

It's certainly not unheard of, and if the stories of Pop being rushed are in fact true, you really can't blame Bono for thinking "What if?" a little bit whether or not it did sell. I like Pop myself the way it is, but would I have minded them taking a bit more time with it? Maybe... or maybe not.
 
What about those of us who think Pop doesn't sound rushed or unfinished? What are we, chopped liver?!

Without looking at quotes from 97 and/ or 2005 one can look at the clues and tell Pop was rushed and that the band felt like that at the time.

What other U2 release has that many editing mistakes?

What other U2 release has that many of it's singles that were drastically changed by the time they were released?
 
That was my thinking there. Or the story of LNOE having it's chorus being written and recorded just hours before mastering begun.

That's insane. If that's true, it's borderline incompetence. That means they had hours to mix it before going to mastering.

You don't touch the tracks or the mix during mastering.
 
i really don't have much more to add other than that i consider U2's 90's material as not only my favorite music by any band, but it really set the foundation for my overall taste in music.

call it hive or whatever, but i could care less about sales or even the band's intentions, all i know is that i love the collective piece of art (AB, Zooropa, Passengers, and Pop).
 
Without looking at quotes from 97 and/ or 2005 one can look at the clues and tell Pop was rushed and that the band felt like that at the time.

What other U2 release has that many editing mistakes?

What other U2 release has that many of it's singles that were drastically changed by the time they were released?


The only editing mistake I notice is the one right before one of the choruses on Last Night On Earth, where it jumps a bit.

As to your second point, the band was already in panic mode by the time the third single came out, and was trying to make it more listener friendly. The first two singles didn't have new versions, aside from the radio edit on Discotheque due to length.
 
What about those of us who think Pop doesn't sound rushed or unfinished? What are we, chopped liver?!
Yes.

Obviously it's not going to sound actually rushed, they're not going to be out of breath singing the songs. But Last Night on Earth is probably the best example, as that chorus was literally the last thing they recorded on the day they were supposed to send in the album. Discotheque also sort of wanders during the middle (how many times have they restructured that song?), Mofo seems a little unfinished, Staring at the Sun kind of has a weird change of rhythm at the beginning, Gone seems like they hadn't quite gotten the whole way done, Miami is a mess, Bono admitted he should have rewritten the Playboy Mansion's lyrics to not be so time-specific, and Please clearly had not found its ending yet.

Wake Up Dead Man may have been the only one they actually finished, and they'd been working on that since the Zooropa days.

No album (only Achtung Baby comes close) was this altered once the band went on tour. Oddly enough, Achtung Baby was their second most rushed album, which sort of explains it: the less time they have, the less finished the songs are, and the more adjusting they have to do in the live setting to get the songs to the place they want them to be.
 
Pop was definitely a problematic album to make, especially in its finishing stages. Whether it is "unfinished", like the band says, is just a matter of semantics. I do believe the Last Night on Earth and Playboy Mansion claims, that they were still being written while the album was in the mastering stages - I already stated before that one of the reasons why I love the album is the fact that it sounds so raw and unpolished.

I agree with this, if Pop had been a success they would have used terms like "raw", "sparse production" and "spontaneous" when describing it but because it failed in their eyes they call it rushed and under-produced...

Couldn't agree with this more. If Pop had been an overwhelming success, Bono would very likely talk about it differently nowadays, being far less apologetic about it.

Finally, nobody serious would claim that U2 intended for Pop to be "obscure" and "inaccessible". I don't think anybody wants to say that. They didn't try to do a Metal Machine Music or a No Code (fantastic album BTW) or even a Kid A. What they did want to do is to challenge their audience with new sounds and new approaches without necessarily having an instantaneous commercial appeal. I don't think U2 at that point thought about how they could appeal to the audience without compromising their own artistic approach to the material - which is something that I believe has happened after the relatively lukewarm reception to the album on the following records, No Line on the Horizon being the prime example of that.
 
A song is only completed when you decide leave it alone.
So saying that a song is "unfinished" is a lot more nebulous than some of you may think.
If they are doing shit in the mastering phase, that is a sheer sign of panic.

The question is - why are they panicking? Because it is so undercooked?
Or because it was so overcooked that they couldn't decide what to do with it?

McGuiness says this in U2 by U2 (pg 270):
POP is always described as the album that didn't get enough time to get finished. It got an awful lot of time actually. I think it suffered from too many cooks.

He elaborates more but I am not going to type all that shit out.

Sales numbers aren't going to be affected by what Paul says about it 10 years later.
So he has no intrinsic reason to spin the truth, like the people who actually created POP.
The Truth? - POP was overcooked.
The Spin? - POP was undercooked.
Does it really matter? Maybe it does...there are so many discussions taking place on these last several pages, it's hard to tell what it truly the point of contention.

Either way, IMO, we should simply examine it for what it is. I bought it the first day it was out. And as far as I'm concerned, before I ever heard the band's excuse making, I'd already decided how much I liked it or didn't like it.
 
Even if Pop had been a huge hit, this article describing the difficulty of it's birth would have existed.

Right but let's all distinguish between modes of panic.

There is panic during the making of the album (overcooked/undercooked).

And then there is the panic after it was released.

The relationship between the two is an interesting discussion.
 
Either way, IMO, we should simply examine it for what it is. I bought it the first day it was out. And as far as I'm concerned, before I ever heard the band's excuse making, I'd already decided how much I liked it or didn't like it.

One way I look at it is that I like the chorus to LNOE as it is, whether they came up with it the last night of recording or not. Would I have liked the one they came up with if they had another two months in the studio better? Maybe... or maybe not.
 
Did I kill the thread?
I'll try to kick start something.

One way I look at it is that I like the chorus to LNOE as it is, whether they came up with it the last night of recording or not. Would I have liked the one they came up with if they had another two months in the studio better? Maybe... or maybe not.

But I would have to say...that the idea that it was even possible for U2 to have 'written' that chorus on the last day of recording has to be explained.

There's a difference between changing a song structurally (i.e. what they did with Sometimes You Can't Make it On Your Own) and simply writing a different line to sing/harmonize. So when Boner says "we wrote it on the last day" it might not be the same thing some people may be imagining. I doubt very seriously that anything musical was changed at all. I'd bet the melody was the exact same as well. U2, the band that currently needs six months to finish three songs, was changing compositions on the last day? I doubt it.

Fast Cars was different. It was basically a goof. It wasn't on the album and they completely re-did the whole thing as a fairly sparse performance. LNOE would have been an album track they actually needed as a potential single. And I can't see them re-recording the whole band performance on the last day. Maybe they did, but I can't imagine it.

In the end, I believe the last minute changes to LNOE were just a 'different thing to sing' to the melody over an established musical backing. We can see evidence of this method (for U2) all over the place. There is that article where Bono is singing 'Stir My Soul' and it becomes Beautiful Day. Most of the music was pretty much sealed in the can. This is what I think most of the 'POP-rush' was about. They were still very much in that kind of phase where they were actually working on 'the hooks' not in the music, but in the lyrics/phraseology. And then they had to turn the album over to the label before they could iron it out. But of course listening to The Politician and his historical revisions, you'd think their hair was totally on fire at that time. And I am sure it was a rush, but it's exaggerated.

It's all very indicative (to me) of the beginning of everything that has become wrong with U2. Too much time in the studio listening to the Jimmy Iovine's of the world. Not that they have ever ignored their label people. But that clearly on - let's just say Zooropa - they didn't listen to them as much as when they scrapped an album in 2003 and started over, or delayed the album in 2008 when it didn't have enough "hits". Jimmy Iovine doesn't have a fucking creative bone in his body, and yet Boner is listening to this guy talk about what kind of songs would end up on NLOTH? No wonder it ended up like it did, with that strange sandwich of three songs in the middle and Daniel Lanois (in my opinion) being left miffed at the band. That goes to the 'too many cooks' argument.

Hopefully the next album won't have too many cooks and too much time in the studio, although don't bet any money against it, they may be there already.
 
I'd consider editing 3 version of Mofo into 1, in the mastering session, major structural changes and complete chaos. Nelle Hooper was a producer for the first 5 months of the recording. Yet he doesn't get a production credit? That tells me they used very little of what he did. The band had no idea what they were doing. I think they get to summer 1996, and realize they don't have a record and try to get conventional. Things start to come together but they've screwed themselves cause they work so slow/strange. The really wacky stuff gets the axe, the traditional U2 songs come to the forefront.

If Howie B is cutting tape in the mastering suite, that means Mofo is a conglomeration of 3 different mixes on the final cut. I'm a crappy musician and that scares the crap out of me. I can't imagine how little confidence U2 had in either of those 3 mixes to decide to chop'em up and tape'em together. It's madness.

Then again, it's U2. Edge thinks they could've done better on The Joshua Tree.
 
I don't really understand the dig at Iovine. For a guy without a creative bone in his body he's been heavily involved in some amazing records.

He mixed Springsteen's "Born To Run" and Big Country's "The Crossing." He produced "Making Movies" by Dire Straits and Tom Petty's "Damn The Torpedoes."

Hell, he recorded Harry Nilsson/John Lennon on that wacky "Pussy Cats" album where Harry blew his voice out and kept recording.

Some legendary stuff.

Jimmy Iovine | AllMusic
 
Speaking of Jimmy Iovine, he now seems to be a regular on American Idol, mentoring these kids on what kind of artist they should be and what kind of songs they should be singing.

Like Von Schloopen said, this is a man who has worked with the likes of Lennon, Springsteen and Bono, surely he knows how incredibly remote the chances of these shows ever producing talent of a similar ilk actually are. As we all know, a great voice does not make a great artist. Why is he even there? Not for the money, surely.

On the other hand, listening to a lot of what he has to say, I'm kind of baffled as to why he's been quite so successful. He's more insightful than Steven Tyler, but only just.

All this talk of justifying the percieved flaws of Pop makes me wonder how they'll try and square the lukewarm response to NLOTH when the time comes.

I get the feeling they're still a little non-plussed as to why it didn't make a massive impact.

Can you really put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Boots? A poor first single can certainly dent a records chances but providing you've got a couple of other solid-gold offerings just waiting to be dispatched you can regain lost ground and salvage the campaign, at least to a certain extent.

Current flavour of the month Adele is a brilliant example of this, both of her albums were released without any hullabaloo whatsoever and did practically nothing for months on end. It wasn't until they heard her take on Make You Feel My Love that people sat up and started to take notice, totally reversing the fortunes of both records and sending her profile through the roof.

That's the power of a genuinely great song. Crazy Tonight didn't stand a chance, being one of the most banal U2 singles of all time IMO.

Magnificent was better, but too similar to other stuff they'd released this decade to really make a mark, and ultimately, just not special enough.

As opposed to Pop, maybe they'll say NLOTH was overcooked, which would be true IMO, but will it encourage them to take a different approach next time? Bono briefly suggested the album was perhaps too challenging for the populace to get their heads around, but that wouldn't really be true would it? In many ways, Pop was a far thornier proposition.

Sometimes it's far harder to face and accept the reality of the situation, that maybe the milestone work they thought they were crafting was actually never anything of the sort. The question is though, do U2 realise this?
 
I think a poor first single can sink an album. Especially on those "event" type albums that U2 do. I think Discotheque killed Pop, and Boots killed No Line. If Staring at The Sun and Magnificent were lead singles the both records would have sold better at the shops.

With Pop there were other factors at work as well, namely Zooropa. Numb & Lemon didn't exactly set the majority of U2 fans on fire in 1993. I had large numbers of friends who loved Achtung Baby, saw multiple Zoo TV shows, and thought Zooropa was a dud. That's a record with sales numbers that reflect more about the appeal of Achtung Baby than of Zooropa itself. Throw in a 4 year wait with Discotheque as a lead single and ya get what ya get. I think a lot of fans though "yep. not my cup of tea anymore. Not even gonna buy the thing." I remember playing Gone, Last Nite On Earth, & Staring At The Sun for friends who'd written the record off after Discotheque. They were stunned.
 
The funny thing is that Discotheque was the Number 1 single in the UK (and quite a few other countries) and even cracked the Billboard top 20. There's quite a bit of revisionism as to how "Discotheque sunk Pop" imo.
 
Iovine's favourite on NLOTH was/is reportedly Every breaking Wave. Didn't make the album.
That's how much U2 fawns over record execs' opinion.

It's obvious they were in trouble when they booked the tour too early. Finishing vocals on the day the label gets the album is...bad by most standards. Disastrous for a band of perfectionists like U2. They even changed 3 singles.

Though yes, Bomb, Pop and now NLOTH prove U2 should stick with one producer at a time. Be it Lillywhite solo, Eno and Lanois alone, or (from what we heard) Danger Mouse alone. It would also help if the guitar player got inspired again...

I still think Boots tanked NLOTH. Magnificent was the only choice for a lead single. And while something like The Fly was once a lead single, they were also wise enough to recover with the double pack of One/MW. And ATYCLB/Bomb were always supposed to be song collections/the hunt for 11 singles.
 
I'd be careful using charts to gauge how a song's been embraced. Discotheque was indeed #10 on the US pop charts.

Beautiful Day hit #21.

Vertigo hit #31.

I don't think anyone would suggest Discotheque was a bigger hit than either of those tunes.
 
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