Pop is a damn good record but it has too many flaws to get close to being truly great music. It's a shame, but not really.
It entirely kills the CCM industry. It's without question U2's "most interesting" album, and the only one that stands up to intellectual analysis. The lyrics rhyme too much. People could write endless dissertations on Pop-- a large part of its meaning is from the fact that U2 released it. You cannot ignore that. It's not just U2 chopping down the Joshua Tree and adopting a new style and a new image. It's U2 attempting to chop themselves down. And only half succeeding (see Kid A for near-full success). But really getting some things across in the process, things only a band in the position of U2 could get across, and no other band in that position ever tried. Radiohead, huge as they could have grown at one time, were still never remotely in U2's position.
In a way, the fact that it sounds musically compromised or overproduced or underproduced or dodgy or just blah in places (in my opinion at least) helps get its artistic point, its religious point, its point about the vacuousness of mass pop culture, home even more. But I dont think that was intentional. The problem with Pop is its title was trying to be both ironic and dead serious at the same time. It was U2, actually, being the biggest corporate stadium rock band in the world, and it was U2 criticizing a world that creates stadium rock bands in the first place. You can't do that. Not because it's hypocritical, that would be a shallow and stupid reason to criticize it and it would apply to every vaguely anti-establishment major label band out there. But the unfortunate fact is, you will no longer be the biggest stadium rock band in the world if you allow yourself to write quite the type of music that is necessary to convey the emptiness of being the biggest stadium rock band in the world. Unless you fully embrace irony and make an album of intentionally shiny happy meaningless nonsense pop music so nonsensically shiny and happy it would convey that emptiness to the intellectuals, and be embraced mindlessly by the mindless without ever knowing it was mocking them on the side. And that would have been an intellectual exercise, and far too cruel and elitist to the mainstream audience for Bono. He wants everyone to get it. He wants to lead them there. And he has a point-- Pop makes too many valid criticisms and U2's audience was too broad, to lose that preaching (in a good way) opportunity. That's why he could never fully embrace irony, and even "Discotheque" has those lines at the end telling us what it's really all about.
But for me the best part of Pop is, they didn't get the time to perfect it. That's good because who knows what perfecting it would have meant-- either turning it into better stadium pop music, or turning it into more experimental music. I'm guessing the former, but either one would have taken it out of the middle ground, with those two instincts fighting it out, that makes it such a brilliant failure.
Yes, it mostly fails as instantly pleasing pop music. It needed quite a few listens for all the hooks to come through, and still they are maddeningly unmemorable compared to this band's best. And it also fails at being experimental anti-establishment music, for more obvious reasons. More than half this album was spun off as singles. U2 did not cease to be U2 with Pop, they became U2 even more. Only critics, and the people that had to pay for the PopMart tour, saw it as a failure.
The nagging flaws of Pop are what get you to investigate it more deeply. It doesn't sound like a brilliant sonically reinvented ironic U2 (just a couple songs), nor does it sound like perfectly constructed corporate pop music. It doesn't fully please anybody. What is sounds like, is halfhearted corporate pop music at points, and like lukewarm sonic reinvention at others. Like corporate pop music that hasn't been so much intentionally dismantled as left to decay a bit and show its cracks. Almost always, the music is weak enough for the lyrics to show through and make their point, and that's the important thing.
Is it an unintentional masterpiece? No, if I had been in a place like this for years I might think that, but I'm not enough of a U2 obsessive to believe it, and it's my intellectual response-- which U2 wouldn't want anyway. As a piece of performance art, it's perfect, but when you stick on the headphones and forget who this is, as music, it must be compared to other music, by U2 and by others, and it has to do that intangible metaphysical thing the greatest music does. It's not bad as music, but it's much more of a museum piece.
My ranking of the songs:
1. Discotheque
2. Staring at the Sun
3. Do You Feel Loved
4. Gone
5. If You Wear that Velvet Dress
6. Mofo
7. Please
8. Miami
9. Wake Up Dead Man
10. Last Night on Earth
11. If God Will Send His Angels (way too earnest for this album. musically dull. feels unnecessary because the rest of the songs and their back catalog say this same thing in better ways. doesnt work for me)
12. The Playboy Mansion (er, no)
He's had plenty of time to listen to it but instead he's been listening to other music. This is killing me! I've been listening to all of u2s albums except pop for the past month and being able to listen to it when i have it is really annoying me.
