i find "stuck together with God's glue" fascinating. he also deserves a medal for how he sings "stickier."
"Waves that leave me out of reach / breaking on your back like a beach" -- much more complicated than one might initially think.
Pop is a great album lyrically. granted, "blind/blonde" deserves a slap, and they should have known that Playboy Mansion was going to age horribly (but since it's a horrible song maybe they didn't care).
that said, Pop has so many of Bono's best individual lines:
stuck together with God's glue
white dopes on punk staring into the flash / looking for baby Jesus under the trash
the face i had before the world was made
this whole bit here:
Take the colours of my imagination
Take the scent hanging in the air
Take this tangle of a conversation
Turn it into your own prayer
With my fingers as you want them
With my nails under your hide
With my teeth at your back
And my tongue to tell the sweetest lies
Jesus' sister's eyes are a blister / the High Street never looked so low
this, too:
I bought two new suits - Miami
Pink and blue - Miami
I took a picture of you - my mammy
Getting hot in a photo booth - Miami
I said you looked like a Madonna
You said maybe
Said I want to have your baby, baby, baby
We could make something beautiful
Something that wouldn't be a problem
We could make something beautiful
Something that wouldn't be a problem
At least not in Miami
lots going on in here -- the temptation to run away and lose one's self in hedonism with a Madonna-like motherly figure (the "miami / my mammy" is probably a reference to a Freudian slip, which works really well given the blurring of sex/salvation and mother/lover, all with the hope of escape and creating a reality that wouldn't be a problem.
and that's just what i can throw together in 5 minutes.
in a nutshell, the core idea of the album is the "baby Jesus under the trash" album, where the first half or so puts the protagonist in a hedonistic world filled with temptation, but that temptation might actually be the divine calling out for him -- reminded by the nightly speech during PopMart about finding "peace in the neon" and the lines in the Flannagan book about how things that appear to be opposite (sex/salvation, plastic/soul) might be mutually implicated in the same paradox, opposite sides of the same coin.
what's also interesting is that this is flipped on it's head, especially in Please, when those who put forth so-called noble/pious/religious/nationalistic ideas are revealed to be peddling little more than trash (stick-on tattoos / sermon on the mount from the boot of your car). that where you might find salvation in the discotheque, you might also find the worst of humanity praying in church on Sunday. reminds me of when Bono was in Tokyo and points to a big neon sign written in Japanese -- "all this beautiful script, and it probably says 'pussy'." that's the flip side of "peace in the neon."
while i have issues with Pop and find it wildly overrated here, the lyrics and the big ideas it wrestles with are fascinating -- and are very much in line with what the band was talking about in 1993/4. i'm more than willing to forgive Bono's clunkers because they show that he's striving for creativity, originality, and to try to be more than smart, more than celever, and more than the rather superficial "poetry" of the UF/JT era.
