(#567: 15 March 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: Discothèque/Do You Feel Loved/Mofo/If God Will Send His Angels/Staring At The Sun/Last Night On Earth/Gone/Miami/The Playboy Mansion/If You Wear That Velvet Dress/Please/Wake Up Dead Man
"Pop never had the chance to be properly finished. It is really the most expensive demo session in the history of music," Bono said, some years after the release of what was possibly the bleakest U2 album since October, and may also have been the most difficult album for the band to make. No last-minute rush job has taken so long to complete.
The recording of Pop began in 1995 and stuttered along almost until the last minute. Three of its songs dated from the Zooropa sessions and one ("Wake Up Dead Man") had originated as an uptempo song in the Achtung Baby period. I don't think they had the slightest clue about how to make this album. Over the best part of the two years they spent attempting to record it, they deployed a battery of producers - mainly stalwarts Flood and Mark "Spike" Stent but also Howie B, Steve Osborne and (comparatively briefly, before he decided he had more interesting things to do) Nellee Hooper. "I think it suffered from too many cooks," Paul McGuinness observed.
To add to their self-imposed woes, the band asked McGuinness to arrange dates for their 1997 PopMart tour before the album had been satisfactorily completed. The necessity of doing the latter ate into rehearsal time for the tour, which resulted in substandard performances. Pop had originally been scheduled for a Christmas 1996 release but the Spice Girls would easily have laughed that competition off.
Furthermore, in part necessitated by the time that Larry Mullen needed to recoup from major back surgery, much of the band's playing, including Bono's vox, was sampled and looped (mainly by Howie B), in a doomed attempt to mimic modernity. This leads to the general aural feeling of an A.I. version of U2 having made the record - and perhaps justifies the lamentably ludicrous Wikipedia entry on the album, much of which looks to have been penned by a bot ("'Staring At The Sun' features acoustic guitars and a distorted guitar riff from Edge [sic], and a simple rhythm section from Mullen [sic].").
We listened to the album for the purposes of this blog on YouTube because we literally couldn't be arsed to get up and find our CD copy. The intermittent interruptions of the album by commercials actually enhanced its hopeful status of disposable product - maybe they should have done what Sigue Sigue Sputnik did on Flaunt It! and booked advertising space between tracks. They announced the PopMart tour at a press conference held in the lingerie department of a New York branch of K-Mart - had they been watching the Father Ted Christmas Special too avidly? Or did it take U2 too long to realise that the postmodern disposable schtick had gone on for one album and one tour for too many?
I felt pre-emptively glum when preparing to sit down and listen to and evaluate Pop. As regular readers of this blog will know, our principal aim with it is to do our best to see the good side of number one albums - after all, if they become that popular, they can't be rubbish...or can they? Even when approaching something I know isn't likely to be of much good, such as a Boyzone or Robson & Jerome album, I remain intrigued by what has been put into such records and try to work out their appeal as objectively as possible. But I saw Pop as another weary job to be done, from its ghastly sleeve - a really cheap and cheerless affair, akin to a 16 Most Requested Songs zero-budget compilation (yet in keeping with the deliberately cheap pedals and other effects used in the album's making) - inwards. Listening to it again did not dispel that weariness.
6: POP!
2: POP?
6: Protect Other People!
2: People's Own Protection!
(Patrick
McGoohan and Leo McKern from their continuous dialogue in the "Once
Upon A Time" episode of The Prisoner, McGoohan demonstrating that he
certainly did know his Goethe)
Or pop as in the bursting of the bubble, or the exploding of the world; the original, unused end credit sequence of The Prisoner
had the symbolic penny farthing morph into planet Earth, revolving in
endless stellar darkness, out of which emerged the caption POP.
Pop
was the album, and it couldn't have sounded less like that other sort
of pop. "Discothèque" - note that acute accent on the E - begins the
record with channel-swapping sabres which do not resemble those said to
dwell in paradise before thudding, congealing beats stride in like a
wrecking ball as a bipolar, bitonal Bono (in voices both high and low,
female and male, and of course the wreckage of Sly Stone in corrugated
mind) mumbles and howls, as lost in this carnival of yellowing youthful
light as Joe Strummer's white man was at the Hammersmith Palais cabaret
("You get confused but you know it"), or the dancing queen having aged a
generation, still lost but now hopelessly so ("Looking for the one/But
you know you're somewhere else instead").
The beats - more militant
early Def Jam than anything to do with Ecstasy, marshalled with
mirthful pitilessness by mixmaster Howie B - pile up like serrated
corpses as the singer searches for an essence which he hopes might not
be him ("You want to be the song/The song that you hear in your head"),
fully realises that he is wasting his time and life ("But you take what
you can get/'Cause it's all that you can find"). In the chorus he
shrieks for release - "let's go...and/or let go?...discothèque!(?)" as
that
Joshua Tree guitar tries to climb back in through the song's porous
gaps. But the percussive activity continues to escalate until a climax
of whoops and furious hand drumming - A Certain Ratio, the Pop Group,
1979
passim, hard to forget wasn't it? - blocks off all possible exits.
In the video the group dressed as a joyless Village People in a halo of
bloodied red which made them look as though the Manson family had just
paid a visit.
It was evident with
Pop that U2 had long since realised that the last millilitre of juice had
been squeezed out of the pomo Lemon - but still they persevere with it as
the record becomes progressively darker and more distant, if not more interesting. "Do You Feel Loved" (and feel loved?) plods on in the belief that EMF and
Jesus Jones are still trendy. "Mofo" groans like 1980 Simple Minds (Adam Clayton's bass rotogravure trying its best to be Derek Forbes) inexpertedly crossed with 1997 Primal Scream (
Vanishing Point achieves what so much of
Pop strives to attain, mainly because, as with
Screamadelica, Gillespie was smart enough to leave most of the work to Weatherall). Bono once again laments the passing of his mother, but did it so much more powerfully on "Tomorrow" and far more subtly and profoundly on "Lemon."
As with Achtung, so much of Pop's production is determinedly muddy, but in a more insidious sense, as if the band had been imprisoned in a kandy-kolored mesh and were struggling to escape from it. You can hear the old U2 - the one most people love - attempting to wriggle out to the listener on "If God Will Send His Angels." But "Staring At The Sun," the album's would-be big ballad "anthem," lopes along like a fuzzy Radiohead imitation, with Bono's voice very Yorke-like in places (oh, the IRONY) and where have I heard that little central melodic refrain in the verses before? Oh yes, on "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz, released eight years after Pop...
The album thereafter crawls along, largely uninterestingly. "Last Night On Earth" sounds like the film theme that it became. The Edge's "siren" effects in "Gone" compare very unfavourably with those on
R.E.M.'s "Leave." "Miami" is a gloopy mess redeemed only by the strange, distant signals which materialise towards its end (Wikipedia says that the track "has a trip rock style." What the penny farthing fuck is "
trip rock"?). "The Playboy Mansion," the basic leitmotif of which is more or less based on "You Showed Me" by the Turtles, is a wry look at decadent celebrity lifestyles and you end up just wanting to SLAP Bono and get him back to singing about tenements and shitty housing estates in Dublin and about going to church. You know, just something in which he might actually
believe.
"If You Wear That Velvet Dress" is probably
Pop's most intriguing song, as low as the bar may be, mainly I suspect due to Nellee Hooper's palpable involvement, and sounds like genuine musical adventure as opposed to plastered-on dayglo signifiers. "Please" calls for the Northern Ireland peace process to get going, but the General Election hadn't yet taken place and John Major was (just about) still Prime Minister so maybe Bono had a fraction of a point there ("Sunday Hopeful Sunday," as the possibly-looped drumbeat may
indicate).
The record terminates with, or is terminated by, "Wake Up Dead Man," an exhaustingly debilitating song and performance which perhaps indicates the journey that Pop has taken - according to Bono, it "begins at a disco and ends at a funeral" - in which a muffled replica of the real Bono, the one you might remember from "The Ocean" when we were all younger and more hopeful, pleads for Jesus to help him and this "fucked-up world" (Wikipedia: "It is also one of only a few U2 songs to include profanity.").
I derived no joy or real insight from
Pop, and it remains clear that U2 had hit a ceiling with their postmodern japes. The album is as dull a dead end as
Rattle And Hum had proved to be, albeit for opposite reasons. People were tired of being told that anything meant nothing or that consumerism was evil but by God did we
love it. The PopMart tour proved a generally flaccid and underpowered affair, the album initially charted strongly - possibly on the basis of numbers of copies shipped - but its sales rapidly fell off, and the band realised In No Uncertain Terms that it was time to stop pretending to be fashionable and to return to what they knew best and felt deepest. The consequent about-turn - see entry #636 - saw them pull away the gaudy curtains, reopen the windows and let
genuine light back into their sharply-defined world. As we have already seen, 1997 really was a case of sink or swim, adapt or die for most artists, and it was no longer sufficient to exist as a name in itself, or to treat one's band as a business, an industry. The art needed to exceed the brand.
