I haven't really followed this thread entirely, but I wanna say that U2DMfan's post is outstanding, and very welcome. If only we'd all put similar intelligent thought into our posts, rather than typing our useless opinions and hitting 'Enter'.
Anyway...
anyone trying to tell you that U2 thought this was a sure-fire accessible album is only listening to Boner the Politician, spinning things after the fact.
Speaking for myself, I'm
not arguing that U2 thought it was a sure-fire accessible album (is there such a thing?). Indeed, I'm sure they realized that what they were doing (putting it out before it was ready, booking a stadium tour, etc.) was risky in the extreme. What I am arguing is that U2 always try to be big and popular. They didn't design
Pop with a smaller, less accessible album in mind. You don't do that if you're taking a long break between records, spending months and years on the album at enormous costs, and pre-booking 50,000-seater stadiums.
A fair argument could be made that
Achtung Baby was a bigger career risk than
Pop was.
Achtung Baby has much stronger songs, and ultimately won over more fans than it lost on its sheer quality, but it's only in retrospect that it seems a sure-fire classic album. At the time, it was risky, and they knew it -- indeed, I think U2 were surprised at how successful it was.
Zooropa was more of a minor album (actually not even conceived as an "album" initially) made in a "safe" period where its success or failure commercially wasn't particularly important, as the game of U2's reinvention had already been won by
Achtung and ZooTV (which was concurrent with
Zooropa's release).
Pop was made and released after a long rest-period and with US stadiums booked in advance. Its release was accompanied by an enormous (and spectacularly unsuccessful) press conference to international media, a high-budget video/single, a TV documentary, and a large press attack in general.
Did U2 know they were gambling a bit with it? Yes. But they also took a huge gamble with
Achtung Baby (and to a much lesser extent with
Zooropa). And both of those gambles paid off. With
Pop, their luck ran out, to some degree.
The only time, in my opinion, that U2 has intentionally released music that they didn't want a mass-audience to hear was when they decided it wasn't "U2" and called it Passengers.
So, yes, what we're all sort of arguing about is simply the nuance between the old chestnuts of (a) trying to be popular and (b) trying to be artistically valid. It is a conundrum that pre-punk, classic rock bands didn't really have to worry about, and U2 have navigated this dangerous water better than most of their 80s'/90s' peers, although it appears in recent years to have swung rather too far to (a) than (b). In any case, I personally think
Pop's relation to (a) is just as strong as its relation to (b).