Pop album - what went wrong..?

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I never understood their idea that Staring has some potential to be grand. I mean the sound of the electric guitar and the arpeggiated refrain was excellent, but the rest is quite mediocre. And they killed this good part on the tour by doing an acoustic version, which was a snooze festival, U2 sounding like Oasis or Travis. Terrible moment...

Anyway in the end I liked the album more than the desperate attempt to remix it for Best of. I remember version of Gone that is sooo butchered by trying to be more rock n rolly and using vocals from 97 and 01, that was really baaad mish mash... The same counts for Staring...attempt to push it closer to live version. Not good at all. At least new mix of Discotheque was okay, I especially liked the new intro more.
 
I'm a sucker for SATS as well (including the acoustic version. It's not in my top 5 on the album, but I still love it.

My top 5 on the album are:

1. Mofo
2. Gone
3. Discotheque
4. Please
5. Do You Feel Loved

The only songs I'm not crazy about are Miami (though I love the live version) and Playboy Mansion, but I still never skip them. Also, If You Wear That Velvet Dress is an absolute gem.

The POP era pretty much rounds out a fanstastic decade. I just love this era more than any other era in any other band's career.
 
Playboy Mansion would be a total failure lyrically if it weren't dated 15 years on. It's juxtaposing earthly, ephemeral things that we consider important with heavenly things that will last but are ultimately neglected.

Place that message over a track that sounds more like a porno than a U2 song and you have a recipe for a brilliant song that nobody gets.
 
Here are my thoughts on Pop. First off, I really love it. The songwriting and arrangements are great for the most part, and Edge was actually on fire then. I'm surprised he didn't burn down ever studio they recorded in.

Pop has the best performances they ever recorded, and the variety of sounds on it is amazing. I think that Flood is the real MVP of the U2 production team.

Bono's voice is weak on it though. It began its decline, but it was OK since everything else - and there was a lot of it - was so interesting, including the lyrics.

I think it's their most compromised record, though. Last Night On Earth and If God... are generic compared to the rest of the record and don't really fit. Like Boots, Walk On, and every song on Bomb, they're tailor made singles. I think they put those on there to temper the more electronic elements, and that was a mistake. They should have gone further out. But since Zooropa was such a commercial failure, they wanted to rebound. They really wanted Pop to be massive...and it would have been, in 1996. Which brings me to my next point.

Many of the sounds on there were already dated when the album came out. They didn't run out of time, they spent too long working on it, polishing some edges off here and there and allowing the sounds that were current and trendy to become passe.

It's a bit too long - 10 songs would have been good, or maybe 12 if they replaced God and Last Night with I'm Not Your Baby instrumental and the mellow mix of Holy Joe. Those songs would provide some relief to the sonic assault of the rest of the album.

Still, there's no way the album can be said to be a failure. It's amazing, a solid 4 star album that could have been a classic. If only Edge would try this hard again.
 
Yeah, Flood knocks it out of the park. I don't know how anyone could say Pop is badly produced. It's the assault on the senses that is made necessary by the lyrics. The contrast between Mofo's searing beat and its extremely personal lyrical content is disarming and makes the song much better.

It's all subjective, of course, but listening to Pop on headphones is one of life's simple pleasures.
 
zooropa was a commercial failure? I kinda didn't see it way . I just think its funny when the term commercial failure is just thrown around. Pop has always been called this too. I mean disappointment by their standards sure but failure? I mean how many bands that ever made it had a album 17 years into their career that anybody cared about on any level? I mean did you ever think about how small the chances are that a band/act can achieve what u2 and say like a Madonna have accomplished? its proly like .0000001 %. Thousands of bands have gotten lucky enough to even attempt a career by releasing a album on a major label. Most of them flop and you never even get a chance to hear them, Then you have some one hit wonders. Mabey a one album wonder. And then that's it. careers over. Just cause. Most people have small attention spans and once they hear a song by a artist they don't bother them afterwards. Cause its whatever. They don't care to hear anymore. Ill always be grateful for the career that u2 has had. Cause what u2 has accomplished is more then what 99.99999999999 % of bands will accomplish . I keep the big picture in mind. I can see the aspect of disappointment of critical and commercial underperformances. Fine. Once in a while I need to remind myself u2 is in such incredible
place in the rock world that using the word failure is just sometimes silly.
 
Big fan of Pop, production isn't really the problem, Flood was and is a brilliant producer, they need to bring him back!

Not a major problem but it's a shame that they stack all their up beat ever so slightly dance/techno(for want of a better word) songs at the beginning, throwing another one in as track 8 for example would maybe have made the record more cohesive. Maybe.

One major problem though was their "trip hop guru" Howie B, he didn't seem to offer much focus/direction which is what they badly needed, if they wanted the music to go in that direction they should have just stuck with Nellie Hooper and left him in charge of the whole thing, either letting Flood engineer or let him sit this one out and bring him back next time.

The album does lack something that stops it being one of their top 3 but it still has some of my favourite U2 songs of all time, my top 5 are:

1. Mofo
2 Wake Up Dead Man
3 Gone
4 Discotheque
5 IYWTVD
 
Hollow Island said:
Here are my thoughts on Pop. First off, I really love it. The songwriting and arrangements are great for the most part, and Edge was actually on fire then. I'm surprised he didn't burn down ever studio they recorded in.

Pop has the best performances they ever recorded, and the variety of sounds on it is amazing. I think that Flood is the real MVP of the U2 production team.

Bono's voice is weak on it though. It began its decline, but it was OK since everything else - and there was a lot of it - was so interesting, including the lyrics.

I think it's their most compromised record, though. Last Night On Earth and If God... are generic compared to the rest of the record and don't really fit. Like Boots, Walk On, and every song on Bomb, they're tailor made singles. I think they put those on there to temper the more electronic elements, and that was a mistake. They should have gone further out. But since Zooropa was such a commercial failure, they wanted to rebound. They really wanted Pop to be massive...and it would have been, in 1996. Which brings me to my next point.

Many of the sounds on there were already dated when the album came out. They didn't run out of time, they spent too long working on it, polishing some edges off here and there and allowing the sounds that were current and trendy to become passe.

It's a bit too long - 10 songs would have been good, or maybe 12 if they replaced God and Last Night with I'm Not Your Baby instrumental and the mellow mix of Holy Joe. Those songs would provide some relief to the sonic assault of the rest of the album.

Still, there's no way the album can be said to be a failure. It's amazing, a solid 4 star album that could have been a classic. If only Edge would try this hard again.
Click to expand...

Totally agree, especially your thoughts on LNOE and Angels.
 
Hollow Island said:
...and Edge was actually on fire then. I'm surprised he didn't burn down ever studio they recorded in.
Click to expand...
I dunno, I don't feel that way at all. I personally think Achtung Baby is by far Edge's most accomplished moment as both stylist and songwriter, and I think Pop is one of his 'lesser' successes. It's hard to compare the more straight-ahead 'rock' style of the 1991 recordings with the highly processed, much-produced 1996 stuff, but I hear a lot of middling guitar work on Pop that, again, sounds to me unfocused, like the band lacked a direction. Edge may have been trying his best to point them in a certain direction, but I don't think he ultimately succeeded.
Hollow Island said:
I think that Flood is the real MVP of the U2 production team.
Click to expand...
Flood is certainly a great producer, based on what I know of him. I do think the album would have been a lot better if they'd just had him in charge, instead of slicing the cake three ways.
Hollow Island said:
...since Zooropa was such a commercial failure, they wanted to rebound.
Click to expand...
Uhh, what? Zooropa was anything but a commercial failure. No way their expectations for it were anything like their expectations for, say, The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby -- it was a tour-EP that grew into a tight, little album. If anything, the fact that it was broadly successful probably actually inspired them to keep going down the direction they were on with it. I wonder if you were around back in '93? The feeling was certainly not that Zooropa was any kind of failure. However, 4 years later, the feeling certainly was that something had failed with Pop.
 
The songs where they really experimented are excellent: MOFO, Please, WUDM even Miami I think is really well executed.
Disco, Velvet Dress, Do you feel ... are just about there.

Gone, Staring ..., Last Night ... just don't work for me. The songwriting and the production don't go together IMO.

Playboy Mansion and If God .... are just plain bad.

It's a shame, because lyrically the album is probably U2's best.
They were nowhere near to a consensus what the album was supposed to be though, let alone that they came near executing it.
 
I'd agree that Pop's lyrics are pretty good. Someone said here, earlier, that they're the most negative and despairing U2 have ever done, and I'd also agree. But I don't think the Pop lyrics are the best they've done. There are some real clunkers on the record. I think "Mofo" was interesting sonically, but lyrically, it's weak. "If God Will Send His Angels" is lovely, bittersweet song with a perfect chorus, but it has some really clunky lyrics:
When love took a train heading south (that's just a bad line)
It's the blind leading the blonde (might have been okay once, but when repeated several times, it just becomes bad)
It's the cops collecting for the cons (cliché)
Does love light up your Christmas tree? / The next minute you're blowing a fuse (just bad)

"Staring at the Sun" is another fine song -- one of my favorites -- but, 16 years later, no one yet knows what Bono is on about here. There are some remarkable turns of phrase, and some awkward lines ("Intransigence"?), in about equal measure. Nice song as it is, its popularity and lasting appeal were greatly limited by the fact that nobody knows what the hell it's about. There's of course something to be said for ambiguity, but not much to be said for confused vagueness.

("Miami's" lyrics actually aren't too bad... the song of course sucks, but that's another issue entirely.) :wink:

I've no problem with "The Playboy Mansion" (it's okay to be dated, actually) and "Please" is lyrically brilliant. But the records ends on "Wake Up, Dead Man", which has one of Bono's (Edge's?) worst-ever rhymes:
Jesus, I'm waiting here, boss
I know you're looking out for us
Uggh.. every time I hear that, it nearly spoils the song for me.

Anyway, Pop is a typically worthy U2 record, but I don't think it beats a handful of other albums in lyrics.

(For some reason that eludes me, Pop seems to invite twice as much discussion as any other U2 record on this forum, particularly in regard to its "failure". So, even if it was a failure, it was a highly interesting one.)
 
I still think it´s a messy record. It should be called Mess, not Pop. ATYCLB should be called Pop, that was their real pop record in a bad sense of meaning.
With Pop, they never really figured out the direction, neither the production.
Was it meant to be a raw rocknroll like they intended at the beginning? Like Gone, Last Night hinted?
Was it meant to be experimental record with dance influences? Like Mofo, Discotheque, Miami hinted?
Was it meant to be ironic minimalictic club record? Like Angels, Velvet Dress, Playboy Mansion hinted?

It ended up somewhere in between, half way through in the middle of nowhere :)
Interesting experiment, they have my respect for that. Some moments were even great. But the result as an album it didn´t work out, it was very incoherent, problematic record.
 
The Panther said:
Jesus, I'm waiting here, boss
I know you're looking out for us
Uggh.. every time I hear that, it nearly spoils the song for me.
Click to expand...

Once again the variation in taste among fans is a lot of fun to see. I love that line. As someone who was brought up religious and left it, I think those ironic lines encapsulate a ton of experience, religious culture and meaning in a tiny number of words. It may not be a superb rhyme but it's a pretty effective lyric.
 
the Jesus line in WUDM is a highlight of the album, so are Mofo's lyrics. Glad i'm not the only one that sees this.
 
The lines that address Jesus in WUDM are sung in a grimly mocking tone, which is why they make sense imo.
 
He could've just said "Jesus....Oooo Jeee-sus. I know you're looking out for us"

Would've rhymed.

Or maybe "Jesus...you're the driver of the bus"

"Jesus. I wouldn't give you an A plus"

Honestly, I never disliked the Boss line. It's kinda sarcastic and I like half rhymes sometimes more than perfect ones.
 
It's not a lazy rhyme, because the usage and placement of the words are ironic perfection. /WUDM rant.
 
Half rhymes are often less predictable than perfect ones. And some of Bono's finest lyrical moments don't even have a traditional rhyme scheme, like ASOH, Stay and RTSS. Anyway, I like the line.

Mofo is fucking awesome lyrically. Dig past the beat and there's some really dark, confrontational material under there. That's what makes it so special.
 
To further clarify, it's not half-rhymes that I dislike; it's the use of the word "boss" in the couplet.

I mean, who calls Jesus "boss"? Tony Danza?
 
I forgive a lot of the flaws of the album, but what really annoys me is the lazy bridge on LNOE. It's so half-assed and it doesn't lead anywhere except to very same chord as the verse. They tried to fix it in the later version and the live takes, but it is just so weak. And this is on a song that ended up as a single.

Every time I hear that, I get the feeling that someone just said, "Yeah that's fine. Just leave it."
 
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