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March 26, 1997

Various would-be song titles for Pop

Here were the possibly rumored song titles for the album POP:

- Discotheque
- Wake Up, Dead Man
- Holy Joe
- If You Wore That Velvet Dress
- Hymn to the Universe
- In Cold Blood
- Super City Mania
- Playboy Mansion
- Miami
- When God Sends His Angels/If God Should Send His Angels
- Gone
- MMFR

All of these possible titles of new songs were mentioned in the "Faraway, So Close" book by B.P. Fallon, and the "U2 At The End Of The World" book by Bill Flanagan. Every single one of these songs were recorded at the same time as Zooropa, and except for 'Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me', all of them are unreleased as of yet.

1) In Cold Blood
2) Wake Up, Dead Man
3) If God Should(/Would) Send His Angels
4) If I Should Ever Lose Control
5) Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
6) Sparky's Left The Planet
7) Last Night On Earth
8) Nosejob
9) Untidy Life
10) Velvet Dress
11) Jesus Drove Me
12) Cry Baby
13) Indian Jam
14) Sponge
15) Landscape

Also, These two song titles appeared in the XPress interview as songs probably appearing on the August 'soundtrack' album:

16) Blue Room
17) Miss Sarajevo

Possible lyrics to "Wake Up, Dead Man": "Jesus, Jesus help me, I'm alone in this world and a fucked up world it is too...Jesus, I'm waiting here boss. I know you're looking out for us but maybe your hands aren't free. Your father who made us the world in seven, he's in charge of heaven, could you put a good word in for me..."

Posted by Jonathan at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)

One Tree Hill

The following article is an exclusive and original story I received from Simon Daniel's (snd11@student.canterbury.ac.nz) friend in New Zealand. The full email/article is unedited and unchanged. Any inquiries can be forwarded to Simon Daniel at: petethechop@mail.com

One Tree Hill

It still looks pretty much the same as it did back in 1987, except for the thick wire cables that now stretch in all directions from the top of the tree in an attempt to prolong its life. All this as a result of a senseless act of vandalism. More on that later...

One Tree Hill is so named after a lonely pine tree that grows on the summit of one of the volcanic cones that are dotted all over the city of Auckland. These cones were natural sites for pas, or fortified Maori settlements. Fierce inter-tribal conflict in the 1820s led to there being little organized Maori resistance to European settlement, and by 1840 the British had either beaten or bought out (generally for a few trinkets) the Maoris.

The summit of One Tree Hill is the burial site of one of Auckland's 'founding' fathers, Sir John Campbell, who played an important part in the city's early development.

One Tree Hill has become an Auckland landmark. The distinctive, lone pine and adjacent monument can be seen from many parts of the city, and the summit is very popular as a tourist lookout.

The U2 connection...

In 1985, U2 met a New Zealand Maori by the name of Greg Carroll. He worked as a roadie for the band on the New Zealand gigs and made quite an impression. Paul McGuinness was one of the many who were impressed, and he suggested that they invite Greg to Australia for the next part of the tour. It just went on from there. He ended up working for the band in Dublin and became very close to them (particularly to Bono) during that time.

On a wet Dublin day in 1986, Greg was running an errand on Bono's Harley. He collided with a car and was killed instantly. This, of course, devastated the entire U2 camp. The sense of loss for Bono was immense. Both he and Larry attended the Maori funeral (Tangi) for Greg in Wanganui, New Zealand.

Greg had spoken keenly to Bono about One Tree Hill the first time they met. I'm not sure at what point after Greg's death that the song was written, but I've been told that some of it - possibly the coda (Oh, great ocean...) - was sung at his Tangi. I could be wrong, so don't quote me on it.

During the U2 press conference which took place at Auckland airport in 1989, when U2 were here in New Zealand for the Love Town tour, Bono talked somewhat uneasily about the background to the song:

Press: "Can you tell us about One Tree Hill? What was the motivation [for] where that song came from; what it's about?"

With a look of anxiety on his face, Bono attempts an answer. "Again, ya know, it's hard to have sex in public - it's also hard to talk about things, arr..." He suddenly thinks about what he's said and realizes the faux pas. "Actually it's...", the press gallery now joins in on the joke as Bono thinks about how to get out of it. He adds, "depending on your point of view!" to much laughter from the media.

He gets serious again and continues, "One Tree Hill - we were there last night, actually, [the] four of us just got up there but, ah... - It was the first night we came into New Zealand [in 1984]. We went, ah - I actually couldn't sleep and I met some people who also couldn't sleep who were hangin' in the hotel, and they took me up to One Tree Hill. So I associate it with the first night. And also, it was the first conversation I had with Greg Carroll - was about One Tree Hill and what it was, a symbol for the Maori people, and the like."

It is obvious that Bono does not want to dwell on the painful past, and he seems to be searching for a quick way out. He finds it by simply adding, "And it's now... a song."

As for the vandalism... On the 28th October 1994, the tree was attacked by a Maori activist known as Mike Smith. The following article was front-page news in Wellington's Evening Post later that day:

New Zealand's most famous tree, on top of One Tree Hill in Auckland, was attacked, perhaps fatally, with a chainsaw early today. Made famous internationally by rock band U2's 1988 hit One Tree Hill, the 115-year-old pinus radiata was wrapped in wet sheets today as it struggled to survive. Police rushed to the top of One Tree Hill about 1:50am today after nearby residents saw a man attacking the tree with a chainsaw. Sergeant Don fisher said the offender had cut through a metal fence, erected to protect the tree from vandals, to get at the trunk. Two cuts, each about 30cm deep and extending two-thirds of the way around the trunk, had been made. A 43-year-old Northland man [Mike Smith] was arrested and was due to appear in the Auckland District Court today charged with willful damage. Council area manager Clive Manley said contingency plans had been in place "for a number of years" in case the tree died or was chopped down. He said three replacement trees - another pine, a totara and a pohutukawa - are being grown in a secret location. The council would consult interested groups over the next few weeks as to which tree should be used if the existing tree dies. The tree was the subject of a U2 song dedicated to the band's roadie, New Zealander Greg Carroll, who died in a motorbike accident in 1986. Carroll, aged 26 when he died, had been one of lead singer Bono's personal assistants. Following Carroll's Tangi in hometown Wanganui, Bono visited One Tree Hill to have a look at the place Carroll had enthused about. The brief visit inspired the song, which was released on The Joshua Tree album in 1987 and as a single, in New Zealand only, in March 1988. Bono was reported at the time to have felt Carroll's death keenly. The band's management company, Principal Management, said from Dublin Bono was on holiday and could not be reached for comment.

Posted by Jonathan at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

Edge on Macphisto and Batman

As for Brian Eno, he's currently producing the next U2 album, due out this summer -- while the band itself, according to the Los Angeles Times, beats the bushes for financing for a tour it wants to mount in the spring of 1997, which it figures will cost nearly $100 million. U2 management would only say that no tour plans have been confirmed. The group is also nominated for two Grammy Awards this year for its contribution to the "Batman Forever" soundtrack, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." Here's U2 guitarist The Edge on why the band got involved in the soundtrack project in the first place.

THE EDGE, U2: One of the things that interested us about the project was Batman, the icon. And we wrote the song about the super heroes and the fact that they're the ultimate stars. So we wrote the song kind of about stardom. And when we were thinking about doing the video, it occurred to us that it was kind of interesting and legitimate to include some of the super hero characters that we've created along the way: Mephisto and the Fly. And we felt that the best way of doing that was animation.

Posted by Jonathan at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

Sunday Morning Fever

Mojo magazine, March 1997

Sunday Morning Fever

by Mat Snow

U2's first album in MOJO's lifetime; produced by Flood, Howie B and Nellee Hooper. Among perhaps the discreetest samples ever committed to record are Don Cherry, The Byrds and Les Voix Bulgores.

U2 have a fine sense of event and how to tweak it. Preceded by advance publicity suggesting more than enough stylistic innovation to maintain the band's reputation for playing unsafe, a calling card single called Discotheque and, worse still for die-hard fans who prefer their U2 on the monumental side, bearing the worryingly lightweight title Pop, the new U2 is 1997's first must-hear album. Ten years after their commercial zenith, The Joshua Tree, and 17 since their first LP, it's still a case of No U2, No Comment.

As it turns out, Pop presents nothing like the leap into the relative unknown that The Unforgettable Fire and Achtung Baby were in their time. If you liked the latter you will like Pop which, following the patchily excellent Zooropa, marks the third U2 album to whip up a little musical dissonance to conjure up that pre- millennial tension we're all supposed to be feeling. Even if you believe the '90s to be almost relaxed after the '80s, you can't but be impressed by U2's faith in the power of rock'n'roll to reflect, interrogate and challenge the times. And whether or not you give a monkey's nutsack where we're all heading spiritually as the year 2000 approaches, this is still a cracking record.

Following the casually par-boiled Zooropa, U2 stage-manage, light, direct and edit the elements of Pop with a cinematic flair that trumpets, Major Statement. Kicking off with three bursts of unsettling adrenalin - Discotheque, Do You Feel Loved, Mofo - you must either turn off or tune in. Your attention thus grabbed, the strobe-lit energy level relents to let us find our bearings in a far more subtly shaded, slow-burning musical world.

In the interview that follows, The Edge wonders how an album that set out to be a celebration of everything fast, modern and cosmopolitan could end up so wracked with spiritual longing. Why the mystery? Surely it's obvious by now that U2 could make an album of jazz-tinged dub-metal, duelling banjos, oompah hip hop or ambient reggae noseflute, and the whole shebang would still hosanna to the highest. Born of a non- denominational religious teenage gang in Dublin, Godliness is hard-wired into their system; angst'n'faith'n'rock'n'roll is what comes naturally. That it can work at all is a measure of pop's deepest paradox: that the endorphin-charged, chemically-zapped rush you get in the eye of the big beat's reckless abandon is the closest most of us will get to the transcendent moments of epiphany spoken of by those touched by the divine. In short, God is in the guitar solo, and always has been. U2 instinctively know it, and take the opportunity to broach the big ones while everyone's in the mood.

God aside - not that He can be extricated from anything U2 sing about-the big ones here are the brave new world of information overload and just-add-money fun (U2 have taken us here before), sex, and mother (both, I think, new). These are the themes raised respectively in the first three tracks, but are developed at a more leisurely pace in later and better songs on the album. Bono's mother died when he was 14, and two songs here touch upon that loss. Mofo is angry and yearning, lyrics spinning into free-association as if to express his complex of feelings; this technique is refined on the far more elliptically crafted but emotionally involving Miami, where his need for a mother's love surfaces within a rumination on the Florida resort simply through the accident of assonance - "Miami, my mammy."

Miami is among Bono's least histrionic, most convincing vocal performances. On Pop his voice explores a little more of the continent-wide turf that lies between his two familiar poles of heroic declamation and the numbed drowsiness of someone for whom it's all too much. For all the evident sincerity of his singing, Bono seldom quite seems to inhabit the song as does, say. Lennon in the gut-wrenching primal scream period of Mother (not an unfair comparison in this context); at worst, Bono acts it out with the self-consciousness of someone throwing shapes in his bedroom mirror. This credibility gap yawns unbridgeably for some, but it's a measure of the band's talent for the epic that the sheer momentum of their music sweeps us to our connection.

As Adam Clayton suggests, the role of Howie B and Nellee Hooper was less to provide happening new sounds for U2 to bolt onto their guitar-rock chassis, but to acquaint them with fresh ways of listening to and so making music. Another of Pop's highlights, If You Wear That Velvet Dress, will be characterised as U2- go-trip hop, stroking an intensely romantic eroticism out of little more than an ambient ripple of guitar and a mentholated soft-shoe shuffle from the rhythm boys. File it alongside the Stones' Moonlight Mile and R.E.M.'s Nightswimming as the kind of intimate gem to be found way off the band's usual path. Indeed, like Automatic For The People, Pop is inspired to an exhilarating pitch of energetic invention despite the mood of troubled, unresolved quest that runs throughout. Or perhaps because of it. Maybe for U2 it's still not the finding but the looking for.

BONO, ADAM, EDGE AND LARRY TALK POP WITH FLORIAN BRUGGER

Q. Through what musical stages and directions did you move while recording ?

Bono: We wanted to make a record that sounded like our record collections, all the music we've been listening to. And we listen to such different things, all of us. On one night in my house we were playing records from the Sex Pistols to Chic, to Tricky, to Donna Summer, '70s disco, to some speed metal band. I think nowadays music is less tribal and the notion of being only one thing seems quite old-fashioned. On Pop we've got this science fiction gospel song, psychedelic pop, some trance stuff and trip-hop feels on Playboy Mansion.

Adam Clayton: We had to learn a lot of new techniques in the studio. We had a new production team, Howie B and Nellee Hooper, helping us out. We were learning how to programme, how to use samples, and how they work with what we were doing. For every song we almost had to learn a different genre of music in order to make it come alive.

The Edge: A lot of the time we spent in the studio was trying to find new things to say with our guitars, and Bono with his singing, and Larry with his drumming, allowing no restriction on that exploration, just going as far out there as we could and then trying to be disciplined about making these ideas into songs. Obviously trance, techno and trip-hop has been something we were enjoying a lot and allowing into our music. You can hear that on the first three tracks particularly. Last Night On Earth is typical for a U2 song. The verse part was written on acoustic guitar in France before we even started recording, but the chorus was written on the last day of the recording. The whole thing was mixed in about four hours. Our methods are so unique. We have this kind of pathological fear of making decisions on songs too early. So if something isn't really blowing us away we won't finish it and we wait. And sometimes it takes to the very end of the project before something will click. So often the last two weeks of an album are so frantic because all these things are just coming together. Most of the mixes are hands-on old-style mixing, so a lot of them are really rough. It doesn't sound overworked as an album because it really came together quickly.

Why weren't you working with Brian Eno this time ?

Adam: He is more analogue than you would think. He thinks computers waste a lot of time, and he may be right. But we wanted that sound and he didn't really like that sound any more. Also he didn't want to get into a year-long project because he wanted to work on his own music.

What have you learned from Howie B ?

Adam: How to listen. When he's DJing in front of an audience, he knows what turns them on and what works. And for us as a live band it was very, very interesting to have someone in the studio who knows the club scene, very refreshing compared to the MTV approach to music that you can hear everywhere else. That is why we got into a lot of club music and got excited by Underworld, Leftfield and Prodigy, people like that.

Edge: Howie was spinning records as we were playing, and introducing really strong loops. The arrangement styles were definitely inspired by music that Howie was bringing in. He was really fantastic to have in the studio because he was full of surprises.

Bono: It seems like we need a little bit of chaos to work. It's hard to explain why it would take us eight months or whatever to make a record. But six months were just messing, playing around, songwriting in the studio. There was a lot of fun just playing with Howie B. And then we had some weeks where we just played, the three of us...

The three ?

Bono: The others don't count me as a musician. In fact the only way to get Edge to play the guitar is when I start playing it. Edge thinks that the guitar is a bit of a stupid instrument. Well, it's not the instrument that he thinks is stupid, he thinks most guitar players are, because they all sound the same or like someone else. He is almost embarrassed about being a guitar player because he wants to sound fresh, so he kind of avoids it. So I will pick up the guitar and start to play then he goes, "Maybe I'll just play it..." Hahaha. Just to defend myself for one second, Flood is a fan of my guitar playing; he thinks I'm the only punk in the band, because I don't want to know everything about the instrument that I'm playing. Nellee Hooper was there when we started the record, but Flood is the overall producer; he was the man. We bought him a spiky helmet for the studio because it got very mad in the last few months and he really needed to get strict. We love to start things but find it hard to finish them. We get bored, get excited about something else and want to move on. Flood was the grown-up who came in and said, "Look, I think this is a more interesting direction than that."

Why did you title the album Pop ?

Larry Mullen Jr: It looks great on T-shirts.

Edge: It's music that is dedicated to what's going on. It's not really about being designed for AM radio around the world. It's just music that celebrates the moment. We wanted to strip it down and be quite simple, we didn't want to be too abstract.

Why record in Miami ?

Adam: Because it's hot.

Bono: Daylight was the reason, just literally to see the light. We'd been in the studio in Dublin for quite a while and spent all our time in the rehearsing room. Miami has some interesting things going on. It feels a bit like the next century. It's like a cross-roads: South America, Cuba, Caribbean, North America. It was like being in Berlin in a weird way, but very different. Miami is also a kind of a capital of glamour and kitsch. The Latin Americans have the sexy end of Catholicism. They have carnival which we don't have in Northern Europe. We have all of the denial but none of the celebration - that never came to Dublin or even England. Miami does have a Hispanic influence and people are more at home with their faith. I also wanted to explore the big hair and the villains smoking cigars. We recorded the song Miami there and a couple of other things, but in the end the fun we had was as important as the work. We did want to make a record that had some joy and some sunlight. I want my work to be both trashy and precious at the same time.

Edge: Miami as a city gave us encouragement not to take it all too seriously. You can call it creative tourism. We went, we saw what's happening, we took what we could and then went back. It is not overly angst- ridden, it's kind of allowing ideas to come out without second-guessing yourself too much. As the songs were written we were not really thinking of themes. But ironically it's probably one of our most spiritual records. Even though it's dedicated to the moment, in a weird way it became a spiritual record. I don't quite know how that has happened. It wasn't really our intention. Maybe when you pare things down to their most essential, you are almost at a very religious spiritual level.

During the recording for Achtung Baby, Bono developed The Fly. Did you develop any alter ego this time ?

Bono: I tried not to, but l might have failed. I actually wanted to make quite a personal record. I tried to avoid any persona on the record. The song Mofo was first called The Return Of The Fly, like a B-movie, and then it became the heaviest song maybe we've ever written. I feel like my whole life is in that one tune.

After Zoo TV, will the next tour be another extravaganza ?

Bono: Our last tour cost $125,000 a day. We risked bankruptcy. This time we thought we've got to be careful. So we've got a better deal now, a worldwide promoter, and I think we've got a way of making the numbers out of the T-shirts and all that stuff. In white music, particularly white rock in America and even indie music in England, there is a real embarrassment about talking about cash. You have these guys who are very shy and they are like, "I don't really want to be in a band, I don't know how this happened to me; here I am, I'm successful, I'm signed to a major label, I got heavy management, but it's all a bit too much... You don't see that in hip hop. It's so much freer because those guys are saying, "The music is the music, but I'm also taking care of business." They are very honest about it, and they always come off like they are greedy, like it's all about money, but it's not. A mistake that we made in the '80s was trying to explain ourselves. Our way of dealing with this success was trying to be pure. There was a sort of righteousness and that can be very dangerous for an artist. So we dealt with it in saying, "We are not righteous." We found a great liberation actually in not just listening to black music but also in the philosophies. In white rock music there are some very bogus ideas of authenticity: "Here I am with my torn jeans, I just play the guitar, I don't wanna deal with any of this new technology, I'm a purist..." On the other hand there are the 16- year-old kids coming out of Harlem or places like that and creating the sound of the next century. They are not afraid of the new technology. And also as angry as some of the hip hop people get, their music always has hips. Punk's got no hips: it's very Northern European.

With each new tour, isn't it hard to surprise the audience with something new ?

Bono: It's a chance to do something extraordinary. That's the job; the job is not to be dull. I don't want to talk too much about the tour because we are still working it out. But I say one thing: the last time we took a TV station on the road - this time we are taking a supermarket.

Posted by Jonathan at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

Bono Explains It All For You

Los Angeles Times, 1997

Bono Explains It All For You

By Robert Hilburn

Bono understands the confusion that "Discotheque," the first single from U2's new "Pop" album, has created with its infusion of electronic dance-club elements into the rock band's sound. Speaking by phone from Dublin on the eve of the album's release Tuesday, he outlined the band's aims in "Pop," the dance- culture connection and the album's most striking song, "Wake Up Dead Man."

"We didn't set out to make a club culture record. We were just inspired by a lot of the music being made by hip-hop and dance artists and we wanted to explore some of those elements," Bono said. "But we still wanted to make a U2 record and I think people will recognize that as soon as they hear the rest of 'Pop.'

"Some people are going to hear the words 'dance' and 'club culture' used and put on our record and go, 'That's not a club culture record.' And they are right," he said. "Most of 'Pop' is not something that would sound right on the sound system of a big dance club, but it wasn't designed for that.

"The real club culture aspect of the music is still to come in the remixes, which will be released as singles . The plan is to put out one CD single with a couple of B-sides the way we normally do and then put out a second CD single with remixes for the clubs. We already have an astonishing single remix of 'Staring at the Sun' done by Butch Vig and Danny Saber."

As for "Wake Up Dead Man," Bono said, "To me, the song goes back to the idea of David being the first blues singer, and the first man on record to shout at God in this angry fashion. There are a lot of people who feel that if there is a God, then roll him out because they've got some questions to ask. It's a very angry song."

Posted by Jonathan at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

Pop & more

Dotmusic, 1997

by Mike Pattenden

Few releases can cause as much speculation, anticipation and activity as a new U2 album, but the scale of interest preceding the release of Pop, the band's 11th album, is unprecedented in recent years.

There have been leaks, broken embargoes and wild rumours surrounding the project since it began 14 months ago, and these have grown ever more frantic as it has approached completion. All par for the course for a band that can still consider itself the biggest in the world after more than a decade at the top.

The release of Discotheque, the first single from the LP, has only served to sharpen the appetite with its combination of powerhouse rhythm, muscular Edge riffs and insistent groove. A 300,000 ship-out, the biggest in Island's history, makes the record destined for the number one spot here but Discotheque has done little to stifle speculation as to the direction of the LP.

With long-time associate Flood joined in the studio by Soul II Soul/Massive Attack guru Nellee Hooper, trip hop artist Howie B and Steve Osborne, one half of Perfecto, many were led to expect a dance album from the band. This theory was further confused by conflicting comments from Bono that the band were "going to make a trip-hop record"/"a rock'n'roll record. Bright red. No whingeing."

In fact initial listens suggest that Pop is a rich hybrid, unmistakably U2: powerful, big-sounding, richly melodic but inflected with a distinct club feel in its atmospherics and styling. Songs like Mofo and Last Night On Earth sound like classic U2 while others, notably The Playboy Mansion and Miami, have a dancefloor feel. "It's very much a rock'n'roll record but at the same time it's steeped in dance culture," agrees manager Paul McGuinness. "Creatively, they always follow their noses, they intended to make a modern-sounding record at the outset and they've achieved that."

"The whole thing about calling the album Pop is to emphasise its diverseness," explains Flood. "Some of the singles are more obviously rock-orientated but that's not true of the album as a whole. The basic premise was that they wanted to move on, that they couldn't repeat themselves. They wanted to bring in elements from the dance world and integrate them, not necessarily with the aim of turning it into a danceable album, but to synthesise a new sound. That's why different people came in - they wanted to experiment with different influences."

Sessions for Pop began in November 1995 at the band's new studios at Hanover Quay, dubbed HQ, in Dublin's dockland area, with everyone generally working in 12-hour shifts most days, together or separately. The recording proceeded, with small breaks, through to Christmas of last year when it was finally completed with a batch of nearly 30 tracks whittled down to the 12 which appear on the LP. Occasional hiatuses occurred, notably early on when Larry Mullen sought medical help for a chronic back problem.

Virtually all the finished songs bear contributions from the various producers, often on the same track, with few bearing the stamp of one single member of the team. Such a modus operandi could have disintegrated into a war of egos but, says Flood, while there were obviously disagreements, things never got out of control.

One name did emerge as a very significant force in the making of the record, according to McGuinness. Howie B, (nee Bernstein) remains enthusiastic about his part in Pop. The DJ, producer and artist was associated with the Mo Wax crowd a few years back and his skills have become much in demand. He assisted with Everything But The Girl's fresh dancefloor direction on Walking Wounded and first collaborated with U2 on the Passengers project. This time he took his engineering skills, ideas and record collection into the studio with him. "I began just playing tunes, old school hip-hop, that sort of thing, and we talked," he says, explaining his part in the process. "Then we were jamming together in the studio. I was putting together beats and loops, digging out samples. For example, Discotheque started out as a little wee jam me and The Edge had that turned into this mad tune."

Frequently, he confesses, the recording took wild left-turns. "It went off at magic tangents and that was the best thing about it. Half the time I didn't have a clue what was going on. As long as you were able to react to what was happening and were honest, it was really exciting."

Island managing director Marc Marot explains how one of the tracks altered radically under this working régime. "I've got an early version of a track called Mofo which was originally a much more traditional-sounding U2 record then it turned into this monstrous Bomb The Bass meets U2 meets Nine Inch Nails type thing, which is 100 degrees hotter than the original."

The finished result, he says, ranks among their best work. "It is more than the album I hoped they'd produce. It more than surpasses my expectations. It's both extremely modern and traditional U2 at the same time. It has an experimental edge but the spine harks back to traditional U2 territory. Fans are going to be delighted with it."

McGuinness is equally bullish about the finished treatment and feels confident about its potential in the US, U2's biggest territory. "The record is very well-timed, particularly in the US where dance-based music has made very little impact until recently. With The Prodigy and Chemical Brothers beginning to make inroads, it comes at a good time and I think the sound behind Pop could even open up the market in America."

Reflecting the album's diversity Island America managing director Hooman Majd prefers to concentrate on Pop's strength in the modern rock area, where things have been stagnant in the US for some time. "I think it's incredibly impressive. Given the state of the American charts and suggestions that maybe the alternative market is a bit flat here I think this will turn everything upside down. It sounds very much of the time, everyone is hoping it will spark the market. Certainly the retailers who have heard it here feel strongly that it's an adventurous and exciting record."

Pop faces strong competition in the US from Live, whose new album Secret Samadhi is released two weeks earlier, and the continued success of No Doubt. Pop should have seen the light of day in November but was delayed when both sides felt that it wasn't quite ready. But this left Island without a major Christmas release, which Marot maintains they simply had to accept. "You can't take a three-month snapshot of a company and those sort of pressures certainly can't be allowed to intrude on an act. In the history of things people will remember Pop, not whether Island had a bad last quarter of '96," he says.

More serious were the various leaks which sprung around the single and resulted in the release-date being brought forward a week. An original problem which emanated from the band's fanbase on the internet was superseded by a security breach which ended with America's KROQ playing the single over Christmas. "We turned the original problem to our advantage, and generated a lot of press from it," says Marot. "We had stories in Time, Rolling Stone, Newsweek and the national newspapers but the second leak was more damaging. It was a question of our international media and retail plan being thrown into disarray. We chose a release window which we thought was best for the artist and were forced to change. We took a decision to bring Discotheque forward and we moved mountains to do it."

With a worldwide act the size of U2 a major release like Pop becomes a juggling act, maintains Marot. "You simply can't afford to be parochial about a record like this, you'll never see us going for a Chart Show exclusive if there's something needed somewhere else. We try to be even-handed and while the UK is U2's second biggest market they're still growing in the Far East and parts of Europe. There's potential here to take them beyond the 10m mark. However, that sort of volume of sales can't be achieved without touring as Majd is keen to point out. "Touring is crucial for big sales, a band like U2 put on a real show and it puts them in the shop window. People look at REM and say that the last record wasn't successful but one of the reasons it didn't do so well is that they didn't tour, same with Pearl Jam."

With this in mind U2 are set to announce a major world tour at a press conference in New York on February 12. Opening in the US this April it moves to Europe in July, runs through to October there before the band head back to America for a second leg.

Figures in the region of $100m are being bandied about, which would make it the biggest-grossing tour ever and a very attractive vehicle for outside sponsorship. McGuinness confirms they have had approaches but maintains nothing has been sealed. "There are always people who would like to be associated with the band, particularly in the information technology world. Since that's stuff we like to use it's not something we're rejecting out of hand but no deal has been inked so far." Heavyweight computer companies like Microsoft and Apple appear to be in the running. There is a distinct possibility that one of the acts on Mother Records - the label co-owned by the band, McGuinness and Malcolm Dunbar - is in the running for a support slot. Both the Longpigs and Audioweb have shown promise - the former performing well here - but a support slot on the tour could break them worldwide.

With U2 preparing for live action once again it would mean little let-up in the punishing schedule they have maintained throughout the Nineties. With two huge world tours, three major album releases plus a host of side projects, including the Eno collaboration Passengers, plus film soundtrack work on big budget movies like Batman and Mission:Impossible, U2 are rock music's biggest workaholics. "They are an example to younger bands who may have sold a million records on what it means to stay at the top. They work incredibly hard and I have nothing but admiration for them," says Marot.

It's difficult not to agree with him as U2 prepare to put the Pop into popular.

Posted by Jonathan at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 1997

Sunday Times Pop Review

Sunday Times, March 23, 1997

By Andrew Smith

The word was that this would be U2's intrepid and possibly self-destructive entry into the dark heart of modern dance music. It was going to be a techno album. It was going to be simmering trip-hop. The much discussed involvement of DJs Howie B and Nellee Hooper (the former Soul II Soul/Bjork/Massive Attack producer) implied that there was some truth in the rumors. The reality is much less unsettling and much more interesting than could have been hoped for. After 20 years the Irish quartet have made their first great album.

Released on March 3, POP is not a dance record. You would no more dance to it than you would recite poetry to a toaster. U2 have done what Blur might have done with their eponymous fifth album, unfavourably reviewed here three weeks ago. They have not tried to co-opt a sound wholesale: instead, they have taken the spirit of the new electronic music and used it to inspire a fabulous rock album. This, in other words, is the flip side of the Prodigy's Music for the Jilted Generation. U2 have not reinvented themselves so much as rediscovered themselves.

They have tried to recast themselves before, with varying degrees of success. First there was the liaison with Brian Eno, which began on The Unforgettable Fire in 1984. Unfortunately, the Fire turned out to be more easily forgotten the title foresaw, but it is worth remembering just how bizarre and imaginative this alliance seemed at the time. Picture Eddie Izzard lining up with Vinnie Jones at Wimbledon's midfield or Jeffrey Archer joining the editorial board of the New York Review of Books and you have it. People thought Eno was slumming it, creatively speaking, but the partnership proved as fruitful as could have been expected. Their second collaboration, The Joshua Tree, turned U2 into the monstrously popular stadium act they are today -- though, typically of all pre-POP U2 albums, it contained only one unarguably great song, the subtle, slow-burning "With or Without You."

There again, until now songs have never been the whole point with U2. They rose to prominence in the wake of punk and were part of a barely conscious project to define a new, non-blues-based brand of rock. Nearly all of the influential guitar groups of the 1980s were on this same mission from Simple Minds to the Smiths, New Order, the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses. U2's first serious champion was John Peel, and their songs still tend to have a linear quality that is at odds with traditional tunesmithery. When the group tried to engage with American blues and R&B, as they did on the misguided Rattle and Hum (their Blur), it was about as unconvincing as a phenomenon can get without Mulder and Scully turning up to investigate. It seems a strange thing to say about the most consistently popular band of the past 15 years, but if you liked U2, you liked the grand chiming noise they made rather than their songs. Nothing wrong with this necessarily, but it will be interesting to see how mega-selling works such as War and Achtung Baby (again, one great song, "One;" a few good ones) are judged by future generations.

No such worries about POP. POP sees the happy coincidence of two new developments. First is a wholly unexpected melodic and atmospheric subtlety -- a heightened sense of light and shade (rather than just loud and quiet, as so often before) seems to have infused the material. The simple truth is that the tunes sparkle like gems. Second, the dalliance with dance styles renders traditional songcraft even less important than it was before. U2 are playing to their strengths, a fact that is instantly made clear by the breathtaking force of the 15-minute opening sequence, which consists of the fine single "Discotheque," followed by "Do You Feel Loved," and "Mofo." All three pieces mesh pulsing, technofied synthesizers and/or synthetic beats with the reliably pneumatic bass and drums of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen. They rock, to be sure, but with a rare fluidity. Driven forward by the Edge's vivid, adventurous guitar playing, galvanized by Bono's finely judged vocal performances, U2 have never sounded better.

It seems obvious that, from here, things can only go downhill. They do not. The spell cast by that monumental opening never wears off. "Miami," co-produced by Howie B, is the first dark offering. There are breathy, industrial rhythms, robotic, walking bass lines, lots of drones and clangs. If U2 were going to slip up, it would be here, but the clever way these unfamiliar elements combine with shifting chord changes and ghostly, half-submerged melodies has an unexpectedly compelling effect. Elsewhere, "Last Night On Earth" establishes a pattern to be followed by several songs, starting off as a pretty piece of nothing much, before growing into an intense, moving gale of a piece. The best of these is "Please," so underwhelming to begin with, so devastating by the end. Again, Bono's delivery is passionate without once giving the impression that his hemorrhoids are on fire. And as with "Mofo" and another sweeping stand-out track, "Gone," the content is unusually raw, the standard stuff about faith and disillusionment rubbing shoulders with some exclusively personal demons. "Mofo" does appear to be an interesting meditation on the emotional legacy of his mother, who died when he was 14.

Of 12 tracks, only two fail to satisfy (the pretty mundanely U2-esque "If God Will Send His Angels" and the whimsical "The Playboy Mansion," for the record). By anyone's standards, this is a favorable ratio, making it all the more surprising to learn that, reading between the lines of recent statements from the band there was a lot of tension and conflict in the studio. On the other hand, perhaps this was necessary. As Bono commenting on the current state of rock music, said recently: "There's a difference between liking something because it's great and liking something because it reminds you of something that was great." For the first time in 10 years, U2 have had something to react against, other than themselves and their runaway suceess.

It is time to give U2 their due, then. They have in the past been accused of pretentiousness, as with the Zoo TV tour (which they got away with) and 1995's 'experimental' Passengers album (which they did not). Yet the latter case is interesting. Even Mullen detests Passengers, though the Edge thinks his drummer will come round to it in a few years' time. Personally, I doubt this, but, in retrospect, you could look upon it as a kind of sketchbook, a preparation for POP.

The point is that there is no such thing as pretentious pop, because, having no rules, it can go anywhere. The 1970s group Yes were not pretentious, they merely mistook musicianship for musical worth, possibly as a consequence of over-restrictive legwear. The Who's Tommy was just a really, really bad story. No, the worst thing pop can be is boring, the second worst over-ambitious, meaning that the scope of its ideas fails to match the sales pitch they are given (the complaint against Zoo TV). But is creative ambition such a crime ? Sometimes the ideas catch up in the end. So it is with POP.

This is a terrific album.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:19 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 1997

U2's 'Pop' Pops Off to a Good Start

Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1997

U2's 'Pop' Pops Off to a Good Start

U2's much-anticipated "Pop" album on Island Records is off to an encouraging start, entering the national sales chart at No. 1 by selling nearly 350,000 copies last week, according to SoundScan.

That's the highest single-week total this year and the biggest opening-week figure since the 479,000 copies generated by Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Tha Doggfather" last November. The results surely led to a sigh of relief in the record industry, which had seen several of its rock superstars, including Pearl Jam and R.E.M., come in with relatively disappointing opening-week figures -- a trend in recent months that has greatly troubled the $12-billion-a-year industry, whose sales have been flat for two years.

"It's a very healthy first week," said Geoff Mayfield, charts editor of Billboard magazine. "It's a very respectable start."

U2's last two albums, 1991's "Achtung Baby" and 1993's "Zoo-ropa," sold an estimated 275,000 and 377,000 copies in their first weeks. The albums went on to sell 5 million and 2 million, respectively.

Meanwhile, however, ticket sales for the Irish rock group's lavish world tour, which begins April 25 in Las Vegas, have been mixed. While shows have sold out and dates have been added in some cities, including New York and Chicago, Amusement Business magazine reported that only about 20,000 tickets have been sold in San Diego and Tempe, Ariz.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:25 AM | Comments (0)

Salon Pop Review

Salon online magazine, March 13, 1997

By Charles Taylor

"I WANT TO BE THE SONG, be the song that you hear in your head," Bono sings on "Discotheque," the opening track of U2's new album, "Pop," and that's the band's furious ambition in a nutshell. It would be enough for most bands to want their new record to take over the charts. U2 wants "Pop" to take over the moment, to exist at the center of pop consciousness, the way "Thriller" or "Murmur" did. It's impossible to imagine a record like "Pop" being attempted by any musicians who didn't think of themselves as rock stars, who didn't have complete faith in their ability to realize their huge ambition. Its impact depends on our being able to hear a familiar group talking to us in an unfamiliar way.

U2 is still preoccupied with salvation and redemption, though now the lyrics make room for irony and ambiguity, humor and doubt. The pretension is gone from Bono's voice. But the meaning of "Pop" is inseparable from its sound. U2 hasn't abandoned guitar rock, as the buzz on the album would have you believe. But Bono wasn't kidding when he told "Spin" that U2 is "trying to make a kind of music that doesn't exist yet." Putting themselves in the hands of producer Flood and the British ambient D.J. Howie B., they've made an album that suggests how the new electronic dance music might break with a mass audience. I think that in a few years their embrace of electronic music may feel something like Neil Young's embrace of punk, and to some older fans it may be just as alienating.

How could U2 not be attracted to dance music? Dance is the most messianic of all pop music, aiming at transcendence through the relentlessness of the beat, abandonment of the self in ecstatic communion. If "Achtung Baby" and "Zooropa" were frontal assaults, a band toying with a new style, "Pop" is a total immersion, encrusted with rhythm tracks and electronica, razor-blade guitars and pure fuzz-toned noise, like the doodads that cover every available space of Latino religious art.

U2 has joined its infatuation with the new dance music to end-of-the-millennium hopes and fears that bring out its naturally apocalyptic sense of drama. What they've heard in house and ambient and techno is the ticky, nervous rush of urban life and the exciting uncertainties of a world making connections via technology. Roving over a large landscape encompassing Europe and America, "Pop" is U2's attempt to keep a step ahead, an album that aims to sound like the day after tomorrow. If skepticism creeps in about the state of things, so does a conviction about the necessity (and the thrill) of living in the moment. "She feels the ground is giving way," Bono sings about the young woman who's the subject of "Last Night on Earth," "but she thinks we're better off that way." He even manages to take a detail another singer would use against her -- her love of tabloids -- and turn it into an image that quotes one of the Beatles' loveliest songs: "She's at the bus stop with the 'News of the World' and the 'Sun,' sun, here it comes." As befits an album named "Pop," U2 is both acknowledging the discontents of a disposable culture and rushing headfirst into its pleasures.

They don't pretend adults are immune to those pleasures. "Miami" moves like the sleek, elliptical marriage of an action movie and a tourist brochure. Elsewhere, Bono asks, "Have I got the gifts to get me through the gates of that mansion?" Which is exactly the sort of question you'd expect him to ask, except that it comes in a song called "The Playboy Mansion." The song happily draws a mustache on the longing for salvation of numbers like "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." In that number, Bono was Jesus in the desert. Here, he's Jesus in the Ritz.

Opening with the Edge playing a sort of corrupted blues riff (the blues reduced to a series of electronic blips), "The Playboy Mansion" proceeds through a list of temptations -- Big Macs, Cokes, lotto tickets, talk shows that function like confessionals -- to break a modern pilgrim's will. There's a dry wit to the number but nothing is clear-cut, and the beautiful gospel chorus that brings it to a close confuses things even further. If capitalism can sound so good, who could ask for anything more?

"Pop" is U2's attempt to "take this tangle of a conversation" (as Bono sings on "Do You Feel Loved") and get at the beauty of the way the threads twist around each other. It's not so experimental that it loses sight of its desire to be a huge global hit, but it wouldn't be so thrilling if it did. U2 is trying to sum up what rock 'n' roll feels like at this moment, when the grumblings that electronica isn't rock 'n' roll are starting to echo the same things that were said about disco, punk, rap. On "Pop," U2 moves like kings of the dance floor throwing down flashy moves and a challenge: Open your ears or get left in the dust.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 12, 1997

Wall of Sound Pop Review

Wall of Sound, March 12, 1997

U2
Pop
Label: Island
Genre: Alternative
File Under: Masters of reinvention
Rating: 85

by Gary Graff

U2 is a band that likes to move in what it believes are mysterious ways. Following the sonic expansion of its first two albums of the nineties, Achtung Baby and Zooropa, U2 was rumored to be working on a record that would roaringly return it to the guitar-soaked rock of its early days. Then came word that the disc was instead a full-on embrace of electronica, as telegraphed by the ambient Passengers side project and the industrialized Mission: Impossible theme worked up by bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. This enigmatic posturing suits both U2 and its fans. After all, how many artists these days — R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Pat Boone, maybe — get us excited enough to engage in such breathless speculation?

What finally emerges on Pop, however, is nothing as dramatic as these early suppositions. There is plenty of guitar work on the album, but it is not an early-U2 redux. Nor is it a full-on electronic album, though production whizzes Flood and Howie B. do bring the noise of tape loops, samples, ambient textures, and other sonic bric-a-brac to such songs as "Discotheque," "Do You Feel Loved," "Mofo," and, in a more subtle way, "Last Night on Earth." This is merely U2's next album — no small assessment, considering the high standard the group has consistently set since bringing its anthemic clarion call out of Dublin at the start of the eighties.

For U2, electronica is a tool, like any other instrument. Had Pop adopted the disjointed, better-living-through-technology sensibility posited by many techno, industrial, and ambient artists, it would have seemed downright unnatural. U2 has always been about passion, not ironic detachment. So, while U2 would have us believe that Pop is about "bubble-poppin', sugar-droppin' rock and roll," it's as earnest, sober-minded, and spiritual as any of its predecessors. Even "The Playboy Mansion" contemplates the House That Hef Built as a crucial cultural artifact, with a bluesy groove and hymn-like chorus generating a smooth, solemn vibe.

Mind you, all of this makes for another fine, captivating album which reveals new depth with each listen. The techno elements meld well with U2's spacious rock aesthetic, and a song such as "Do You Feel Loved" churns stadium-sized energy with an underbelly of subversive, extra sounds to keep the ears locked in. Where "Mofo" is frenetic and industrial, "Please" is sly and jazzy. "Miami" rides along the phat-funk groove of a low-rider, while "Staring at the Sun" revisits the band's familiar terrain of rock-and-roll hymnals. Throughout Pop, Bono keeps looking for God — and wondering if he's left the building. "If God Will Send His Angels," for instance, asks if omnipotence really equals power. But, hedging his bets, Bono beseeches Jesus to put in a good word for him in heaven, on the gripping album-closer "Wake Up Dead Man."

Ultimately, Pop sounds like an album full of songs that will translate wonderfully to the concert stage when U2 hits the road in late April. As with Achtung Baby, the band has sophisticated its music without sacrificing its core integrity, opting for refinement rather than a re-invention, which is fine, since the latter is an empty buzz word these days anyway. And as much as it likes to play with image and style, U2 has always been committed to the kind of content and substance that make this much more than just a throwaway Pop album.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 1997

Bono on the Pop album and tour

Time Magazine, March 10, 1997

RAPPIN' WITH BONO U2'S LEADER SOUNDS OFF ABOUT THE BAND'S NEW ALBUM AND TOUR AND ABOUT THE SAD STATE OF ROCK

by Christopher John Farley

Electro music, which supplements or replaces the guitar-driven riffs of regular rock with synthesized sounds, isn't new -- R&B dance remixers have drawn on it for years. However, the form is bustling with activity these days. Electro visionaries such as Tricky, Goldie and Carl Craig are pushing its boundaries; youthful trip-hop bands such as the Sneaker Pimps and Morcheeba and the promising avant-dance group the Prodigy are giving what has largely been instrumental musci a voice, fresh faces and heart; and rock vets like Eric Clapton (hith his new band T.D.F.) and David Bowie are tapping into it for inspiration. Now, this week, U2 releases its electro-tinged CD Pop, which features drum-and-bass-driven songs like Mofo and dance-rock numbers like Discotheque. Pop is passionate, futuristic and completely engaging. Lead singer Bono, on the phone from Dublin, talked about his band's bold new direction.

TIME: Your new album isn't going to please everyone -- some people are going to say you guys are just strip-mining underground music forms.

Bono: What I'd say is, "F[uck] right off. We were dooing dance remixes when you were still in short pants, you little a[sse]s." When this bogus term alternative rock was being thrown at every '70s retro rehash folk group, we were challenging people to new sonic ideas. If some little snotty anarchist with an Apple Mac and an attitude thinks he invented dance music and the big rock group is coming into his territory, that's ridiculous.

TIME: Will electronic music be big?

Bono: Well, as soon as people start writing that, it kind of stops it in a way, because then you expect too much. It's been a long time since there's been a dance movement, particularly in the U.S. To have hard-core dance on white radio would be crazy. It would be good.

TIME: Pop is a danceable album. Why do you think that alternative rockers typically have been drawn to mosh pits but afraid of dance floors?

Bono: It's a WASP thing. It really is. It's Anglo-Saxon. It's Teutonic. Crashing into each other is just not as evolved as real dancing. I mean as angry as people in hip-hop get, even in gangsta rap, they still have hips. Rock has fallen behind.

TIME: Is rock dead or just resting?

Bono: A lot of what's called rock these days does seem like folk music. It does seem absurd that there are punk rockers in the late '90s rebelling against their parents' music. I can't quite get my head around that. It's "Dad, you suck -- can I borrow your Sex Pistols album?" White-bread rock has, for me, lost its sense of adventure and seems very tired in comparison to hip-hop.

TIME: As usual with U2, there's religious imagery on Pop. Are you a churchgoer?

Bono: I am a believer. Biut I find it hard to be around religion. I was brought up in a mixed family -- Protestant, Catholic -- and I've seen what religion has done around here, and I'm just nervous of it. But there's one church that if I was living close by I'd definitely be in the congregation. It's in San Francisco -- Glide Memorial. Rev. Cecil Williams there looks after the homeless, gays, straights; he marched with Martin Luther King, he's funny as hell -- pardon the pun -- and you can get an HIV test during the service. Now that's my kind of church.

TIME: Will the Prodigy open for you on your tour? They've got quite a buzz.

Bono: They're literally still makeing their record -- maybe at the end of the tour we'll get back to them and see. Underworld I would like to have for some of the European dates -- they're really taking this DJ-culture thing to another plane.

TIME: Your tour is a big one; tickets cost between $38 and $53. Isn't that steep?

Bono: If you're going to play big places and you don't want people to be in the back of a muddy field, like they were in the '70s, you then have to try and do something special to make these events in the full sense of the word, and you've got to spend to do that. We want to make, as they say in Ireland, a show of ourselves. We're working round the clock to put it on, and we have 200 people on the road, or whatever it is. It's madness. And I'm not sure we could do it again.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 1997

St. Paul Pioneer Press Pop Review

St. Paul Pioneer Press, March 9, 1997

By Jim Walsh, St. Paul Pioneer Press Staff

Somewhere along the line, 'popular music' turned into 'pop music' and became an all-encompassing description for all things unclassifiable: rock, country, R&B, hip-hop, disco, punk, funk, and, now, electronica. At its most effective, pop is a dialogue between the past and future that defines, and is completely of, the moment. So what else could U2 have titled its latest stab at greatness?

Like all visionary-slash-chameleonic artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to Prince, U2 have remained creatively restless, and seek to reinvent themselves at every turn. This time, the group tapped into their techno-trance-ambient roots that have percolated since 'Zooropa' and 'Achtung Baby.' 'Pop' was recorded with Howie B, the guru of Britain's underground deejay culture.

Lyrically, Bono is at his provocative best, spraying out images of God, sex, and the gutter like a volley of keyboard beats, or kaleidoscope strobe lights bouncing off a disco ball. The standouts are the minimalistic 'Miami,' the anthemic 'Gone,' the rave first single 'Discotheque,' and the apocalyptic one-two of 'If God Will Send His Angels' and 'Wake Up Dead Man.'

For U2, they still haven't found what they're looking for, and the sound of that search is raw, fun, and altogether ephemeral: 'Pop' (aka 'Newer Adventures in Hi-fi') is that rare work of art that creates a hunger in its listeners every bit as voracious as in its makers.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:18 AM | Comments (0)

March 07, 1997

Rattle And Hymn

Entertainment Weekly, March 7, 1997

Rattle And Hymn

On their probing new album, 'Pop,' U2 search for a cutting-edge techno sound and divine salvation. In both cases, they still haven't found what they're looking for.

By David Browne

Try as they might, U2 do not take to postmodern irony easily. Take the band's Feb. 12 press conference to announce their upcoming PopMart world tour. In keeping with the shows' stage design -- a parody of crass, consumer-culture totems like supermarkets and McDonald's -- the band met the media at a Kmart in Manhattan. Get it? Sitting on a makeshift stage in the lingerie department, Bono and the boys did their best to downscale themselves. They joked with reporters and cannily dodged questions on CD censorship and money. Bono even plopped himself onto one writer's lap -- mine, as it turned out.

In the wake of their 1992-93 Zoo TV tour, this scenario wasn't altogether surprising. Long before their arena-rock peers, U2 smartly sensed that rock and pop culture were mutating into an amorphous, media-saturated blob. Despite the cheeky presentation at Kmart, however, the old, ardent U2 kept rearing its close-cropped head. By the end of the press conference, Bono was comparing techno bands like Prodigy to blues myth Robert Johnson and waxing on about conquering the world. Even when they expressed a passion for junk culture, it came across as a bit studied. "We believe in trash, we believe in kitsch," said guitarist the Edge, "and that's what we are up to at the moment." With his earnest delivery, he sounded less like a hedonistic rock star than a Jesuit confessing to a crush on Jenny McCarthy.

The PopMart tour is, of course, designed to support the new U2 album, POP (Island). The music-industry rumor mill has been abuzz with talk that the band was immersing itself in the new electronica scene. And with its bustling-traffic arrangement, the album's first single, "Discotheque," released in February, suggested that U2 were heading to a rave near you.

Judging by Pop, don't believe the hype. Despite its glittery launch, the album is neither trashy nor kitschy, nor is it junky-fun dance music. It incorporates bits of the new technology -- a high-pitched siren squeal here, a sound-collage splatter there -- but it is still very much a U2 album. The band's grab-at-the-clouds grandeur is heard in anthems like "Staring at the Sun," while its moody side shines in several sultry, atmospheric crawlers. ("If You Wear That Velvet Dress" simmers with a sexiness rarely heard in their music.) Only "MoFo," with its throbbing computer pulse, recalls the work of techno outfits like the Chemical Brothers. U2's clattering, whirring Zooropa (1993), the Blade Runner of mainstream rock, felt more 21st century than Pop.

That U2 haven't completely given themselves over to the new pop is disappointing but not unexpected. With its rigid rhythms and splice-and-dice pastiche, electronica is about machinery and distance, not charisma and upfront emotions. U2 could never be so detached; at the end of "Miami," for instance, the Edge can't resist cranking up the guitars, and Bono wails as if he's reaching for the upper decks of the stadiums the band will be playing on tour for the next year. U2 are still believers -- in rock, and salvation through it.

Do they, however, believe in that other source of salvation? In "MoFo," his voice contorted by studio murk, Bono tells us he's "lookin' for to fill that God-shaped hole." Not since the last DC Talk record has a pop band name-dropped the holy deity as much as U2 do on Pop. The songs are peppered with spiritual references -- to God, heaven, and "baby Jesus under the trash."

Longtime Christians, U2 have occasionally used their music to touch on redemption. But this time, the God-fearing element sucks some of the snap and crackle out of Pop. Electronica auteurs like Moby, himself a devout Christian, construct rapturous electronic symphonies that find God in the (artificial) details. U2 plug in and find nothing. Everywhere Bono looks, God's place has been taken by TV and shallow celebrities. He's right, of course, yet this is hardly an epiphany. Bono may be a moralist, but as a songwriter, he can do better than lyrics like, "Then they put Jesus in show business/Now it's hard to get in the door" (from the delicate "If God Will Send His Angels"). In "Wake Up Dead Man," Bono implores the son of God to return and save us all, while admitting that may no longer be possible: "I know you're looking out for us/But maybe your hands aren't free."

Spiritual crisis may be the album's central theme, but after a while it wears on the music. Rabble-rousers like "Last Night on Earth," about a free-living woman who's "not waiting for a saviour to come," don't soar as they once did. Even Pop's pacing is off; songs with similar rhythms are inexplicably grouped together. And the record's intended centerpieces, "Miami" and "The Playboy Mansion," share a flaw. Each is musically inventive: the former a space-age cocktail samba, the latter languid white-boy funk. But their use of, respectively, Florida sleaze and Hugh Hefner's love pad as metaphors for American decay is as old as, well, Hugh Hefner.

Still, Pop can be divine. The stark, ennui-soaked "Wake Up Dead Man," the shimmery electronic soul of "Do You Feel Loved," the groping, snaky "Please" -- each demonstrates how U2 can sonically reinvent themselves and summon the old uplift. Yet Pop leaves you with an uneasy feeling, as if U2 haven't lost faith in rock but in faith itself. They may be draping themselves in irony, but they still take music, and life, too seriously to surrender to camp entirely. On Pop, U2 sound like the last of the true believers, and they know it'll take more than dollops of trash and kitsch to save them.

Grade: B

Posted by Jonathan at 04:11 AM | Comments (0)

March 02, 1997

U2's Super Sonics

The Washington Post, March 2, 1997

U2's Super Sonics

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer

Those who have heard the new U2 single "Discotheque" or seen its hilarious Village People-influenced video might be excused for worrying that the Irish quartet has surrendered its rock soul to the suddenly hip world of dance music.

Them2, so to speak.

What's apparent after listening to U2's new album, "Pop" (Island, in stores Tuesday), is that the lads simply decided not to lock and load with familiar ammunition. Instead, they're adding to their mix some of the new sonic flavors that are reshaping pop's soundscape, albeit more in clubs and edge communities than elsewhere. In U2's case, that means mixing techno, trip-hop and trance with the band's old-fashioned passions, sweeping melodies and guitar-driven rock.

Will "Pop" provide CPR for the ailing record industry? Probably, particularly since, unlike R.E.M. or Pearl Jam, U2 is willing to play the game, supporting its new album with a massive tour.

It's hardly surprising that "Pop" is experimental but ultimately familiar. U2's been breaking and remaking its own mold since 1983's "Under a Blood Red Sky." For the last 13 years, the band's producer of choice was Brian Eno, who has always been more interested in sound than song. Both 1991's "Achtung Baby" and 1993's "Zooropa" were forward-looking and risk-taking ventures. Guitarist the Edge even did a passable techno-rap on "Numb." On U2's recent singles, the band encouraged assorted outsiders to come up with dance mixes to reach a new, different audience. "Pop" simply sounds like a new U2 album that arrives pre-remixed.

Two years ago, the band recorded "Original Soundtracks I," a collection of moody, mostly ambient themes for "real and imaginary films." It was so far off the beaten path that it was released not as a U2 album, but under the name Passengers. That proved to be Brian Eno's last collaboration. "Pop" is produced by Flood and Scottish deejay Howie B. Flood worked as an engineer on "Achtung Baby" and "Zooropa" and has produced Depeche Mode and Smashing Pumpkins. Howie B is best known for ambient hip-hop mixes for Bjork, Tricky and Massive Attack and also worked on the Passengers album. It's Howie B's daft spunk and use of turntables, loops and mixologist magic that gives "Pop" much of its appeal.

"Discotheque" is indicative of one strain on the "Pop" album. Thick and noisy, it's propulsive buzzing techno-funk with just a hint of rock guitar in the middle -- or muddle, as it were. On the surface, the lyrics seem a paean to life in the fast lane, where looking for love in all the wrong places temporarily compensates for an emptiness of the soul. Because the video is so much fun and because the song itself is so energized, it's easy to overlook a spiritually earning that's palpable in the first verse:

You can reach but you can't grab it
You can't hold it control it you can't bag it
You can push but you can't direct it
Circulate regulate oh no you cannot connect it.

Other lyrics and the song's dance-club aesthetic suggest a simpler, physical connection, a celebration of the pleasure principle. But that's just an example of U2's clever use of misdirection, a musical device any magician would appreciate.

At the recent New York press conference announcing U2's upcoming world tour, lead singer-lyricist Bono was asked whether adopting bright shiny beats and pop-friendly lyrics was meant to undermine U2's aura of sainthood. "The honest truth is that U2 are still the bleeding-hearts club," Bono replied. "Our music is still painfully and insufferably earnest. We just got really smart at disguising that fact and throwing people off our trail."

Elsewhere, the Edge has described the new album's themes as "love, desire, faith in crisis, the usual stuff." Faith has been a much-explored topic for this avowedly Christian band, and at least three songs on "Pop" continue the tradition. "If God Will Send His Angels" is a weary, slowly simmering ballad in which Bono acknowledges a loss of faith:

"God has got his phone off the hook babe would he even pick up if he could? It's been a while since we saw that child hangin' 'round this neighborhood".

Somehow, though, the song holds out hope for redemption.

Jesus never let me down you know
Jesus used to show me the score
Then they put Jesus in show business
Now it's hard to get in the door.

On "Pop's" closing track, "Wake Up Dead Man," Bono seems to be calling on God to explain himself, to take some action, to get involved. It's less prayer than challenge:

Jesus, I'm waiting here boss
I know you're looking out for us
But maybe your hands aren't free.

It's delivered in a slightly distorted voice over a stripped-to-basics track. As the title suggests, there's a rudeness born of frustration, millennial blues tempered by doubts that threaten faith:

Are you working on something new?
If there's an order in all of this disorder
Is it like a tape recorder?
Can we rewind it just once more?

U2 doesn't, probably can't, answer that question, but there's some relief in the asking. "Pop" lacks the instantly recognizable anthems of U2's past, as well as the Edge's rock guitar histrionics. You're more likely to hear those elements within a song, not as its core. For instance, the groove-heavy "Do You Feel Loved" reduces the Edge's guitar to squawks, but Bono's vocals, particularly on the chorus, are imbued with a familiar yearning.

The song, which has echoes of "(Even Better Than) The Real Thing," seems to address the dichotomy of obsessive attachment: "Take the color of my imagination/ Take the scent hanging in the air," Bono sings over the cool martial funk of drummer Adam Clayton and bassist Larry Mullen. "Take this tangle of a conversation/ And turn it into your own prayer . . ."

"Pop's" most mesmerizing track, "If You Wear That Velvet Dress," also takes advantage of the Irish ache in Bono's voice. The song's plaint builds gradually, with the singer acknowledging a troubled relationship ("The struggle for things not to say/ I never listened to you anyway/ And I got my own hands to pray") even as he surrenders to sensual desire.

Muddled matters of the heart also get a workout on the trip-hoppy "Please" and "Gone," which deal as much with the search for self as with the search for other. Techno rears its noisy head on "Mofo," which kicks off with some wicked bass 'n' drums before slipping into hyperactive energy with the Edge's distorted guitar jabs. The track's approach is full-throttle, but the lyrical self-examination and anguished declamation are all Bono.

Several songs offer variations on "Discotheque's" questioning of the culture of pleasure and consumerism. "Miami" and "The Playboy Mansion" are trip-hop diatribes with clever lyrics and supple grooves, but they're far less interesting than "Last Night on Earth," which manages to meld cutting commentary on club- life hedonism, a soaring chorus and guitar-meets-turntable effects into one roaring rocker.

To hear a Sound Bite from this album, call Post-Haste at 202-334-9000 and press 8161.

@CAPTION: U2 shows its mirrored image on the new album "Pop," due in stores on Tuesday.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:20 AM | Comments (0)

U2's Striking 'Pop' LP Both Pushes, Polishes The Edge

San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper, March 2, 1997

U2's Striking 'Pop' LP Both Pushes, Polishes The Edge

Rating: 4 stars

by George Varga, POP MUSIC CRITIC

Forget what you've read or heard. Or to invoke the Firesign Theater-inspired slogan from U2's 1992-93 "Zooropa" tour, everything you know is wrong.

At least it is when it comes to "Pop," the bold and audacious new album by U2, the Irish rock supergroup that performs April 28 at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

"Pop," contrary to previous reports (and there have been many), is not U2-goes-techno. Nor is it U2-goes-disco, U2-goes-trip-hop or U2-goes-berserk in the recording studio and loses its direction, along with its heart and soul.

The album does contain obvious elements of techno (the hyperactive, Prodigy-inspired "Mofo" and the current, dance-happy single "Discotheque") and trip-hop (the satirical "Miami" and the deliciously wry "The Playboy Mansion"). But "Pop," which is due in stores Tuesday, assimilates these styles in much the same way accomplished painters might utilize new color combinations and techniques to expand their range and choice of options.

"Pop" represents an evolution, not a revolution. Even in its most daring moments, the music is carefully considered and executed, not a wild and random explosion of ideas that may or may not stick.

Working for the first time in 13 years without erstwhile producer and musical provocateur Brian Eno, who is replaced here by Flood and Howie B, U2's four members looked both inward and outward for inspiration. What they've found (or, given the high level of angst on many of the songs here, haven't found) is worth shouting about, even if lead singer Bono operates most effectively at a whisper during some of "Pop's" best moments.

Abandoning cliches

On the band's previous two albums, 1991's "Achtung Baby" and 1993's "Zooropa," U2 reinvented itself in much the same way the Police did a decade earlier with its 1983 album, "Synchronicity." Understandably alarmed at the prospect of growing stale and predictable, U2 abandoned the oft-copied modern-rock sound it pioneered in the 1980s (chiming guitars, bigger-than-life vocals, galloping rhythms, quasi-mystical lyrics and epic, fist-clenched anthems).

In its place came "Achtung Baby's" stripped-down yet highly textured sound and "Zooropa's" raw, experimental edge and disorienting moods. And where the band's previous tours had been serious, almost solemn affairs, U2 suddenly embraced all that was gaudy and pompous about stadium-rock showmanship -- then took it to a new, even more overblown level by celebrating (and ridiculing) the band's own celebrity.

"Pop" is another, equally intriguing story. Moody and introspective without being cold or detached, the album continues the band's previous penchant for experimentation but achieves its greatest impact with its subtlety. What makes "Pop" memorable is how intimate its best songs are, and how refined the band sounds even when audibly pushing to expand its musical envelope.

Drummer Larry Mullen never has sounded better or played with such funk-driven authority. Guitarist Dave "The Edge" Evans is at a creative peak, producing distorted shards of sound one moment and bluesy contrapuntal lines the next. Adam Clayton's pulsating bass work provides a firm yet flexible anchor. Together, with Bono, they perform with liberating force and -- when called for -- impressive restraint.

Bono has declared publicly that "Pop" is a "man's record." Happily, that designation does not refer to macho bluster or hard-assed, tough-guy posturing. Rather, it refers to maturity, the quest for meaning and wisdom and the inevitable need to question in order to find answers.

Undeniably, some of "Pop's" dozen songs rock as hard and ferociously as any in U2's formidable past repertoire. Particularly impressive is "Last Night on Earth," which boasts a stirring, Beatles-inspired chorus and chronicles a young woman's potentially fatal, live-hard/die-young attempts to numb the pain of everyday existence.

Bono sings: She's not waiting for a saviour to come . . . she's not waiting for anyone . . . she's living next week now, you know she's going to pay it back somehow.

If "Last Night on Earth" questions the very real dangers of such a devil-may-care attitude, the midtempo, acoustic-guitar-driven "Staring at the Sun" examines the challenges of retaining faith in an increasingly grim world. Performing in a falsetto-inflected voice, Bono sings: Do you want to see what the searching brings? Waves that leave me out of reach . . . God is good but will HE listen? I'm nearly great, but there's something that I'm missing.

As good as these songs are, U2 scores just as strongly on "Pop" with several quiet yet edgy ballads that probe issues of personal faith and spirituality with unflinching candor and naked honesty.

Witness such striking songs as the dread-filled "Gone," the angry, questioning "Wake Up Dead Man" and the half-hopeful, half-cynical ballad "If God Will Send His Angels." In each instance, Bono sounds very much like a man who is questioning his beliefs in the face of the often unspeakable horrors in the world around him.

Jesus, Jesus help me, Bono sings on "Wake Up Dead Man." I'm alone in this world, and a f---ed up world it is. Tell me, tell me the story, the one about eternity and the way it's going to be.

With "Pop," U2 sets to music stories that pose questions, which go unanswered or are not answered satisfactorily. And those questions about faith, temptation, sin and the hope that redemption is still possible are as pertinent to an unemployed laborer and music-loving high-school student as they are to multimillionaire rock stars like the members of U2.

Ultimately, "Pop" is the sound of a band growing and searching, musically and spiritually. If U2 is far better at asking questions than answering them, well, the band's members are only human. But their quest for answers is what gives "Pop" its unmistakable emotional resonance.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:18 AM | Comments (0)

U2 Goes On A Successful Spiritual Quest With 'Pop'

Orange County Register, March 2, 1997

U2 Goes On A Successful Spiritual Quest With 'Pop'

By Mark Brown

+++++ (5 stars out of 5)

Fooled again.

Just as it's done the past two times out, U2 released a single that makes fans wonder if the band has lost its collective mind. And just like in the past, the album has finally arrived to set things straight.

This time it was "Discotheque" with its slick dance trappings and the noticeable lack of a good song underneath it all. They may have been a bit too good at setting up the bait-and-switch this time. Between the disposable single and a flurry of "We've gone techno!" interviews with the press, U2's concert sales have been slack, and there's a distinct absence of buzz around "Pop."

That should end in two days, when the album hits stores and fans' ears. Despite some odd guitar and rhythm sounds, the boys for the most part have put together a nice little rock 'n' roll album. It's a different suit for sure, but it's the same four guys wearing it.

Not as complex as "Actung Baby" or "Zooropa" and more accessible that either of those great discs, "Pop" completes a trilogy of searching, questioning works where Bono looks for meaning in a modern world by alternately embracing and disdaining its trappings.

It's a tack that, surprisingly, is not tired yet. U2 does it with grand statements "Wake Up Dead Man") or with tiny snapshots. "Miami" looks at the surface of that city and its people in a vivid portrait of what's real and what's not, powered by a funky little bass groove chugging through it. The Edge's guitar on "The Playboy Mansion" plays a sly musical pun, echoing the distinct ring of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" while Bono mockingly ponders what a mere mortal has to do to pass through those heavenly gates.

"If God Will Send His Angels" provides the emotional core of the album with the same unflinching confessional honesty as previous tracks "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" or "Stay". "Please" takes the theme of "Stay" a step further, wallowing in what hurting people will do to fulfill their emotional needs: "So you never knew love until you crossed the line of grace/and you never felt wanted till you had someone slap your face."

U2 looks at the flip side of that in "Gone," where Bono mournfully sings, "You hurt yourself, you hurt your lover/and then you discover what you thought was freedom is just greed." The listener is left to ponder what kind of freedom it might have been -- financial? sexual? emotional? -- before concluding it could be all of them.

It's one of the band's more spiritual outings, despite the coarse language sometimes used to make the point. The album-closing "Wake Up Dead Man" is directed at none other than Jesus, bordering on the blasphemous while seeking answers. "I know you're looking out for us/but maybe your hands aren't free."

Some fans think the band has left its ideals behind. That's not true; U2 is as self-aware as it was in the "Joshua Tree" days. It's the music that's more challenging as the band refuses the easy path, either musically or spiritually. In tone, message and sound, "Pop" is a simple triumph.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:13 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 1997

U2's Pop Salvation

Addicted To Noise (ATN), March 1997

U2's Pop Salvation

By Michael Goldberg

For at least a decade now, U2 albums have provided the soundtrack for my escapes from the daily grind. I remember playing The Joshua Tree as I drove along a one-and-a-half-lane road to a wooded Northern California getaway, and a having a feeling of unlimited possibilities inspired by Bono's uplifting vocals, and the majestic guitars of the Edge. Achtung Baby was blasting all the way into Death Valley one winter. And as I walked on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Point Reyes National Seashore recently, U2's "Last Night On Earth," a song off Pop, played over and over in my head.

I was gazing out at the water, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. I felt a million miles from civilization. Just the sun, the sand, the water and a cool breeze. And I thought that rock & roll is about a lot of things, and two of those things--maybe the most important ones--are freedom and dreams.

No band better expresses both a sense of freedom and the belief that one's dreams can come true than U2.

A lot has been made these past months about U2 embracing electronica or techno or dance, depending on the terminology you want to use for the flavor of the moment. Certainly its true, as Bono and the guys have said in interviews, that current underground and overground rock, pop and dance has had its impact on them. That is also beside the point.

Pop is a great, grand U2 album. Not because U2 dip into the sounds of the moment, but because whatever raw materials they happen to make use of, the results are nearly always something that is both uniquely U2, and, more important, a piece or work that connects to listeners in a powerful emotional way.

Rather than sounding trendy and slight, this album sounds big, confident and timeless. U2 delivers the goods from start to finish. In the end, whatever the sonic dressing, it is the songs that determine whether we'll be listening to this in a decade, or will have long ago tossed it into the garbage with the ephemeral schlock of Celine Dion and LeAnn Rimes.

So let's get right to heart of the matter. "Last Night On Earth," from it's moody Zooropa-like false start, to its relentlessly infectious uptempo rock rhythm, is a masterpiece. "Well she don't care what it's worth/ She's living life like it's the last night on earth," sings Bono about a free spirit who is living life for the moment. Classic U2 chorus. Cool weird sound effects. Falsetto vocals bits. The kind of song that forces you to set the CD player on repeat for like three hours. At a time when everything feels up for grabs, when nothing seems certain, "Last Night On Earth" perfectly captures the moment.

"If God Will Send His Angels" is a gorgeous, moody love song that hearkens back to "One" off Actung Baby. Beginning with the most minimal of accompaniment, Edge arrives with an elegant guitar line around the second verse. In contrast, "MoFo" is a full-on techno extravaganza that oozes with rave energy. "Looking for to save my save my soul" are the first words we hear from Bono, after a minute of pulsing rhythm.

No song on this album tracks in at less than four minutes in length; seven of them are in excess of five minutes. This allows for extended intros and the occasional unorthodox bridge. At an hour in length, this is an album that feels like it was made with the CD format in mind. What I mean to say is that free from the constraints of both vinyl and cassette, U2 has created an extended sonic world that one can enter and explore for a full hour. Put on the headphones, turn out the lights and...

The other major ballad here is "If You Wear that Velvet Dress," which opens with an organ line, some acoustic guitar, and plenty of mood. Bono is so faint at first that one can hardly make out his words. It's over a minute and 45 seconds before he really begins to sing. But when he does, his delivery is all charm and sweet seduction.

But those are just my favorites of the moment. "Do You Feel Loved" is funky techno-pop cut with some pure old school U2 moves. "Staring At The Sun" is majestic folk-rock that expands in a Beatlesque number. "Gone" is all sonic grandeur as Bono sings "I'm not coming down, I'm not coming down" over a raw Edge riff.

It will be months before the all the themes that run through this album emerge. But certainly this is an album that deals with hope and promise, disillusionment and abandonment. As usual, Bono is trying to make sense of the world. Sometimes he succeeds, more often he simply presents the dilemmas that we all must face.

With the last track--U2's version of folk-blues--Bono seems to be saying that we've been lied to by nearly everyone, right up to the Lord himself. "Jesus, Jesus help me/ I'm alone in this world/ And a fucked up world it is too," he sings in a coarse voice. Then the key line: "Tell me, tell me the story/ The one about eternity/ And the way it's all gonna be." Yeah, another story, another fiction for us to buy into. Just like the one about that great piece of vacation property down in Florida somewhere.

U2 makes music that keeps me sane, that makes the frustrations and uncertainty bearable. Pop has already helped me make it through another night. Perhaps it can offer you some comfort too.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

U2: The POP Interview

Reverberation online magazine, March 1997

U2: The POP Interview

PC Hewson and his balding, guitar-playing, mate find it all a bit laughable. In fact, they'd rather not talk about it; unfortunately, world domination and this "Pop" business they're about to launch does need to be put in some kind of context. After all, this is U2 and March 3 will be Monday, Bloody Monday in the ongoing saga of maybe the greatest argument that ever echoed down the windy halls of rock's pantheon of opinion.

The verbal and philosophical stoush has been on for ages - 12 or 13 years, perhaps. Simply put, U2 are either the saviours of rock'n'roll, the single most important band of the past two decades and one of the very few capable of turning the contemporary muse on its generally flat ass or the exact antithesis of that: a self-serving, self-ingratiating, bombastic, over weaning mix of twee, socio-political and aimlessly passionate dreck posturised in any number of over-produced musical disguises.

And, of course, the man who was Mister MacPhisto and the man who's always been The Edge are right: it's as fundamentally daft and overtly serious as the argument is pointless. What rock has always needed - and relied upon - is bands capable of lighting the fuse, sufficiently talented to take the raw stuff of any time and give it a tweak that sends the ordinary running for cover and the aware off thinking about how exactly they can take that spark and light their own unforgettable fires.

When you get right down to it U2's music is and has always been primarily about the search for God and the spirit's struggle to articulate its immortality within the very framework of man's own simple mortality. It's a forum and pulpit for age old questions: the conflict between spiritual longing and worldly desire, moral grace versus comfort, soul versus flesh. And in the coolly agnostic world of rock they are high ground, high culture.

It is the very reason why U2 have so polarised the world and the very reason why they are so damn successful and so damn important: rock's responsibility to at least point generations in some direction, open the mind, ask the big questions and equally let the good times roll. What makes U2 great is their ability to do both and that, in turn, makes this Irish quartet the quintessential rock'n'roll band of their time and a target for every emotion, desire and expectation we can throw at them.

This is, after all the band that has already redefined rock twice, perhaps three times: certainly with "The Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby" and also it could be argued with "War" or "Unforgettable Fire". All of which makes "Pop" the most important record of 1997.

So let it be said that with the Flood/Howie B produced "Pop" U2 have delivered an album that once again does that "something" for the contemporary muse: spooks it right out of its listlessness and general inability to decide which direction - if any - to embark upon, and in one stroke of sublime genius takes the essence of rock, pop, techno, drum'n'bass, ambient and jungle and fuses, melds, caresses it into a new shape. Not dramatically but subtlety and sublimely. Pop is going to scare a lot of people, and throw a curveball in the face of predicability. A record of the '90s for the '90s.

Its creators, meanwhile, seem much the same as ever; a little more grounded than last they strode the world stage with the manifestly religious Zoo tour and Bono's Macphisto persona: the devil inside. If there's a difference it's in their own rejection of the technology that so dominated "Zooropa": frankly, they admit they lost the plot a bit. Larry Mullen summed it up straightforwardly recently when he said, "A lot people are saying, have you become dance or trip-hop? You hear all these terms used. I'm not comfortable with any one particular genre of music, I just like the idea of taking whatever is out there and fucking with it.

"It's very easy to just lose what's special about a band through technology, and we've touched on that a couple of times. 'Zooropa' was the start of it and we got away with it, but in 'Passengers', we were just about to cross over into an area that I wasn't comfortable with. So this record was actually an opportunity to take it back to ... there's no word to describe it as such. But I am concerned about these reference points. It's a load of bollocks, we're just messing with different things."

Throw that line at The Edge, over the years as easy as anybody in U2 to chat with, and he puts it in a nutshell, "With this record, there was a lot that we were trying to take on. We wanted it to be a record with some real songs, some discipline and some focus in the material. We also wanted to take in some new ideas from the world of dance music and hip hop, or whatever, because we felt strongly that that's where music is at its most interesting at the moment. So, a lot of the time, it was really about finding our way into these worlds of trance and techno and hip hop, and learning how we could operate in those worlds, then integrating it back into the songs we'd started to write. So there was an awful lot to pull off on this project."

And pull it off they did: perhaps the key word in it all is songs - and that sense of the big questions. The U2 for 1997 evokes the essence of The Joshua Tree - one of the defining records of the '80s - and exactly a decade later, as Bono says, has delivered its logical extension.

It's scope is vast: on Mofo, they mine the essence of Underworld and Prodigy yet fall away in the middle to allow Bono's vocals to float, haunting, over a distant atmosphere, whispering to his mother "now I'm still a child" and end on an outro that is simply breathtaking; by contrast the following If God Sends Us His Angels is to use the Edge's description country hip-hop and it's blindingly gorgeous. A velvet crush of a song in which Bono whispers "nobody made you do it, nobody put words in your mouth ... " And if its essence is accountability so too are U2 throughout Pop. And the Edge's spiralling, picked chords just float off.

Welcome back, the Edge: a hallmark of U2's best has always been that glacial, ethereal guitar; on Pop it's a distant sun that floats through the mix, colouring the textures built around Bono's best vocal performance in years and a bottom end that works some extraordinary magic with Clayton and Mullen running their bass and drums against one another, shaping impossibly demanding polyrhythms as a bed on which to colour a shifting spectrum of sound.

Staring At The Sun is psychedelic-edged pop that's already drawn comparisons to the Kinks and Bowie's Soul Love. It's single bound at some stage. Last Night On Earth is classic U2 rock, a return to the sense and sound of Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, updated by a cool, spacey groove that gets all edgy in the middle and bites back at the song before working back into the main chorus and verse.

It's a technique U2 use throughout the album - shifting the middle ground into cut out beats, strange textures, slowing it down, spinning out, allowing trip-hop/hip-hop guru Howie B room to mix it up - but now they, unlike Zooropa, don't forget the song.

The Edge considers his role in all of this, admits that right now the band is still way too close to "Pop" to really understand what they've done. "I definitely went into this project wanting to play more guitar for a number of reasons," he says. "Firstly, because I thought I'd played so much keyboard on 'Zooropa' and even the guitars on that sounded like keyboards, so it was time to move back to the guitar again.

"I also think the guitar has been kind of coming back but it's been coming back in a very straightforward way and a very retro way and I thought that there was an opportunity to use the guitar but push it forward. To actually try and find new things to do with the instrument and that this would be a good time to do it.

"Since everyone is going in that direction I just wanted to go the opposite direction and when you do that you often find you're in some very unusual and unchartered territory and that's, from my point of view, the best place to find yourself because your solutions are always unusual solutions and you find inspiration that way."

Bono laughs, "What he was saying before about the music though is true. We wanted the music to have vitality. We wanted to make something fresh. Something that, there's a surprise there like there should be in rock'n'roll. There should always be a surprise and there was a time when people heard like Jimi Hendrix for the first time and there were sounds and noises and feelings that no-one had heard before.

"We felt that rock and roll had gotten too safe and people knew what the sound of a Marshall guitar was when it was turned up to 11. There was no surprise to it, so we had to try and start again and find something fresh which entails, really, breaking up the band and starting again which is what we did for the 'Unforgettable Fire', which is what we did for 'Achtung Baby'. You have to keep it interesting for yourselves if you want to make it interesting for other people."

The Edge carries on working laterally off Bono's references, "I think on this record, maybe because we spent a year away from one another and a year exploring what was going on out there in New York, in London, wherever we were, I think we feel more part of what's happening. It's like we were writing this record from the inside as opposed to other records where we had a sort of perspective of what's happening.

"I think there seems to be a lot of themes that are common and one is the moment, where it's like just live it." Bono nearly interrupts but holds back as The Edge continues, "Don't think too much. Just live it and in a weird way as we went through this record and wrote these songs with that spirit we found ourselves coming right the way back in full circle. Of our most recent records it's the one I feel is closest to what's happening out there. I think this is what people are thinking about. It's certainly what we've been thinking about. Again, that just happened. That's where this work has led us."

This is really the core of what all the fuss in the next few weeks will be about. The creative process for "Pop" is similar to that for "The Joshua Tree" and as Bono pointed out "Unforgettable Fire" and "Achtung Baby"; somewhere in all of this is an equation which makes U2 recurringly and increasingly great and you sense that it fascinates both men as much as it will the listening world.

If there was a patented formula for reinvention, it'd be a damn sight easier for everybody but the creative spark is an ever-changing flash in the night and its inconstancy is the precise reason why progress is possible.

"Yeah, that's interesting," says The Edge. "I don't think we are the band that could recreate something really because for us music is something that's so much to do with the time that once you've done it, it would be impossible to kind of go back. I think the truth of it is that whenever we go in to make a record, we always go in to make the same record. It's just every time it comes out differently for a number of reasons. First of all because we're listening to very different music and being inspired and turned on by different things and because we're different people.

"We've seen, learnt, heard so many more things in the interim period that have interested us that inevitably we come out with different things and also we forget the things we did know. I mean I would love to be able to sit down and write tunes like we wrote on the 'Boy' album but I've forgotten how. That sounds very glib and throwaway but in some ways there's some truth to that.

"You know I listened to some of the earlier records not so long and I thought 'wow there are some fantastic ideas there, some really great things going on' and how the hell did we come up with those. I have no idea, no memory, recollection of coming up with that music so I don't think we could recreate anything really."

For Bono the answer is simple: "It's about keeping it interesting for yourself. That's really what we're about and whatever rock'n'roll is - and I'm not sure what it is - it seems to be about the moment and being in that moment and what we're trying to do with this record is take all the ideas that are in the air, you know, musical or even just what's out there. You know, what people are thinking and just try to put it all into one record. I'd like to think that in U2 there are lots of different colours and different feelings and that's what a rock'n'roll band has to do now."

So, gentlemen, to end, describe 'Pop' and why, for that matter, is it 'Pop'? Apart from the fact that it'll catch on, it's damn easy to market, has tons of possible run-offs and run-ons, and loads of meanings.

They've, of course, figured this one out by now, but the answers are refreshingly multi-faceted. Right now, the general impression is that U2 are quite happy to be back and working it again.

"It sounds fresh cause it is actually fresh," The Edge says. "It's not over worked. In fact, it's our most diverse record ever, sonically and in terms of the influences and in some ways that's why the title 'Pop' seems somehow appropriate at the end is because it's sort of a broad term. It doesn't really tie you down to one style, one idea. It's quite open.

"The only consistent factor is that it's music that's of the moment and I suppose in some weird way that's what we were trying to do, was to produce a record that just was very immediate. It crystallised a moment for us in our own music and also referencing music that's going on around us because I think all the influences, musically, for the record were quite contemporary things and things that could describe pop music in the '90s.

He pauses, and concludes slyly, "What we mean by pop music of the '90s is maybe not what everyone else thinks but it's pop to us."

Bono adds the footnote: "Everything is very different on this record. So we're just really, we're greedy, we want everything for our band. We want to be the loudest, we want to be the poppiest, we want to be the funkiest, the freakiest, you know, we want everything for it. Some of the songs on 'Pop' are just very straightforward, simple, you know just the band playing. And some of them have me dressed as a policeman."

PC Hewson and his guitar playing mate start nattering about how this and that will work on stage when the bigger-than-Zoo, PopMart world tour kicks off in April; after all they have to consider how the hell all this going to pan out in a setting that will boast the world's largest video screen, a 100-foot high Golden Arch, a 35-foot high Mirrorball Lemon and a 12-foot wide illuminated stuffed olive on a 100-foot tall toothpick.

"You now, it really costs a fortune to look this trashy," quips the enforcer. "I think the tour will be equal parts kitsch and content. We just figured out that we're still the bleeding heart's club; that's the truth. Our music is painfully, insufferably earnest. We've just got really smart at disguising it and throwing people off that trail."

Or, maybe, if truth be told, putting them back on it. On "Pop's" extraordinary Americana/Spaghetti Western closer Wake Up Dead Man, he sings "Jesus help me, I'm all alone in this world and a fucked up world it is too/ Tell me, tell me, tell me the story, the one about eternity and the way it's going to be ..." Redemption, hope, possibility. U2 have finally found what they were looking for. Again.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

Pop, Pop, Pop Music

Q Magazine, March 1997

Pop, Pop, Pop Music

U2's New Album, Track by Track

DISCOTHEQUE The first single, complete with "boom"-enriched outro and accompanying video featuring soon-to-be-legendary appearance of U2 as the Village People. Bono: "When we were recording that, we had the whole studio in mirrorballs and disco lights."

DO YOU FEEL LOVED Heavy groove-based rocker in the tradition of "Even Better Than The Real Thing." Very likely single. Wry personal reference suspected in the opening lines:"Take these hands they're good for nothing/You know these hands never worked a day."

MOFO Sonic assault as U2 are possessed by the twin spirits of Underworld and The Prodigy, with Bono at his most cathartic. Breakneck double-tracked drumming quite likely the highlight of Larry Mullen's recorded career.

IF GOD WILL SEND HIS ANGELS Slow-winding ballad constructed around a title that existed during Zooropa sessions. Bono: "It's this guy beating up his girlfriend about her searching for answers and just telling her to look around. It's like science fiction gospel. Edge is calling it country hip-hop."

STARING AT THE SUN Infectious, sky-scraping pop song with echoes of Ray Davies and Bowie's Soul Love. Notable alone for middle eight couplet, "referee won't blow the whistle/God is good but will he listen?" Dead-cert summer number one.

LAST NIGHT ON EARTH U2 play Oasis at their own game. Steaming rocker with powerful Beatle-y chorus. The last track to be finished, with vocals recorded at 7am on the day of the album cut. Bono: "It felt like the last night on earth, alright."

GONE Soaring uplifter oddly reminiscent of The Verve, replete with darkly spiritual lyric. Likely to be emotional highpoint of candlelight vigil if U2's plane ever goes down. Edge: "There's many layers to that song and there's another level to it which I haven't figured yet."

MIAMI The strangest track of all. Electro experimental before Mullen kicks in with weighty John Bonham-styled groove. Lyrical snapshots of a band trip to Florida in spring '96. Edge: "It's sort of creative tourism."

THE PLAYBOY MANSION Touching tale of lottery playing average Joe fantasising about gaining entry to Hugh Hefner's private Disneyland, set to '60's flavoured trip-hop. Return to knowingly delivered truisms in verses, including the maybe libellous, "If coke is a mystery/Michael Jackson.....History."

IF YOU WEAR THAT VELVET DRESS Muted and frankly, horny ballad with echoes of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game." Something for the weekend. Edge: "That was a song that basically came out of improvisation with Nellee Hooper."

PLEASE Shuffly meandering and moody bid-pacer. Edge: "One of the most intricate pieces of music we've ever written."

WAKE UP DEAD MAN Spaghetti-western atmosphere bristling with distant radio voices. A distorted Bono voices his frustration to Jesus "I'm alone in this world/And a f*cked up world it is too."

Posted by Jonathan at 04:28 AM | Comments (0)

Rolling Stone Pop Review

Rolling Stone, March 1997 (issue 756)

**** (4 stars out of five)

It is hard to believe we're a whole decade away from "The Joshua Tree" - U2's very own "Born in the U.S.A.," their "Purple Rain," their defining moment of megastardom. Seems like only yesterday that the band was gazing out from the widescreen desertscape sleeve of the 15 million-selling album: four Dublin boys against the world, about to conquer it.

Then again, so much has happened since U2 packed the stadiums of America with soul-stirring anthems like "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Like all of rock's most astute operators, the band has striven to reinvent itself at every turn, to stay at least one step ahead of the game. Most boldly of all, after "Rattle and Hum's" muddled flirtation with America's roots music, U2 pulled up stakes for dark, kinky Berlin and turned themselves into the mischievous, neo-glam rockers of "Achtung Baby" and "Zooropa." It didn't matter that the Zoo TV Tour was postmodern posing of the worst kind (who could forget Bono's cringe-producing telephone calls from the stage?), for U2 had succeeded in changing the way we looked at them. Even if you took Bono's demonic Mister MacPhisto, his Last Rock Star alter ego, with a large pinch of salt, you still had to credit the guy with a canny awareness of pop's cultural bankruptcy in the late 20th century.

Advance word on "Pop," the new U2 album, suggested that it would edge still further away from rock & roll heroics - that the band was even experimenting with the spooky, film-noirish soundscapes of trip-hop. The album's very title seemed to indicate a conscious rejection of "rock," a shrewd move at a time when America is tiring of alternative guitar sludge and even Billy Corgan is talking of using "loops" on his next record. (R.E.M., U2's greatest rival in the Biggest Rock Band in the World stakes, may have called their last album New Adventures in Hi-fi, but the adventures in question sounded suspiciously old.)

As it turns out, you won't find much evidence of trip-hop on "Pop," although sections of "Miami" and "If God Will Send His Angels" come close to that mutant strain of the genre. What you will find is a whole arsenal of sound effects, tape manipulations, distortions and treatments designed to mask the fact that U2 are still essentially a four-piece male rock band. Unlike R.E.M., U2 know that technology is ineluctably altering the sonic surface - and, perhaps, even the very meaning - of rock & roll. In that sense, their competition now is not so much R.E.M. as it is Orbital or Prodigy.

What we can say immediately is that "Pop" sounds absolutely magnificent. Working with Flood, who engineered "Achtung Baby" and co-produced "Zooropa," the group has pieced together a record whose rhythms, textures and visceral guitar mayhem make for a thrilling roller-coaster ride, one whose sheer inventiveness is plainly bolstered by the heavy involvement of techno/trip-hop wizard Howie B (familiar from his work on Passengers' "Original Soundtracks 1").

Having messed with conventional rock sound ever since hiring Brian Eno to produce The Unforgettable Fire, on "Pop," U2 stray considerably deeper into the world of loops and samples - of remix culture in general - than they did on "Achtung Baby." There's a Byrds riff here, a snatch of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares there. There are endless fascinating bleeps, squawks, drones and juddering - and a good deal less rattle and hum. (U2 aren't interested in "roots" anymore, or at least no longer treat them as articles of faith.) Even in the realm of the once-trusty electric guitar, the distortion of sound is so radical that you barely recognize the instrument. Indeed, the Edge has a veritable field day on "Pop," one minute out-Neil Younging Neil Young, the next taking the psychedelic funk of "The Fly" and "Mysterious Ways" to new extremes. Those searing, sheared harmonics are still there, but they're compressed and warped and mangled into crazy new shapes.

And yet what makes U2 so fiendishly clever is the way they reinvent themselves without sacrificing the driving riffs and rhythms that have always powered their greatest songs. Coming after the superficial thrill of the glib opener, "Discotheque" - no more than good INXS, which isn't good enough - "Do You Feel Loved" arrives as a triumphant reaffirmation of U2's strengths, built on an Adam Clayton bass line as dominant as the one on "In God's Country" and boasting an instantly unforgettable chorus. And for anyone who finds the more experimental stuff on "Pop" too twisted, there's a trio of, well, rockers ("Staring at the Sun," "Last Night on Earth" and "Gone" ) that are going to sound just dandy in the coliseums this summer.

Interestingly, there's also a marked throwback on "Pop" to Bono's soul-searching of yore. References to God and Jesus abound, far more so than on "Achtung" or "Zooropa." "Jesus, Jesus, help me/ I'm alone in this world/And a fucked-up world it is, too," he sings with a groan on the closer, "Wake Up, Dead Man." "So where is the hope and where is the faith . . . and the love?" he asks on the tremendously pretty "If God Will Send His Angels." U2 may have given themselves permission to guzzle Dom Perignon and cavort with supermodels, but Bono badly wants us to know that he's still deeply perturbed by the ruin and spiritual decay of the world: "Intransigence is all around. . . . Military still in town/Armor-plated suits and ties . . . Daddy just won't say goodbye" ("Staring at the Sun"). Is this man having a crisis of faith or what? Maybe it's just a crisis of conscience: On "Gone," which can be read as a desire to shake off fame ("this suit of lights"), Bono confesses that "you get to feel so guilty, got so much for so little."

Along with the wracked soul-searching comes a return to the singer's old preoccupation with Bad America. "The Playboy Mansion" is all about the sick faith in America's dream of redemption through glamour, decked with references to O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson (and talk shows and Big Macs). On "Miami," a kind of reprise of "Bullet the Blue Sky," the city becomes a sinister pinky-blue dystopia, with "surgery in the air." (There's a witty touch, incidentally, when Larry Mullen Jr. kicks in, playing the sampled-to-death drum pattern from Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks.") While Bono the lyricist can still be unbearably gauche ("It's the blind leading the blonde/It's the stuff of country songs") or just pompously vague ("The more you take, the less you feel/The less you know, the more you believe"), at his most focused he can touch raw nerves like precious few other pop megastars. And all this without even mentioning two highlights that also happen to function as the poles between which "Pop" operates: the nightmarish industrial maelstrom of "MoFo," complete with shards of slashing guitar and a deranged lyric about incest, and the exquisite "If You Wear That Velvet Dress," a shimmering ode to a moonlight siren who beckons Bono away from the healthy, honest sunshine.

"Pop" may turn out to be a make-or-break album for U2. Alone among the giants of the '80s, they have a chance to carry their musical vision into the 21st century while still selling a ton of records. Are people still listening, or has rock & roll splintered into too many different tribes for a single band to shoulder the weight of our faith in its dream? Well, if people have stopped caring, it won't be U2's fault. With "Pop," they've defied the odds and made some of the greatest music of their lives. Pretty heroic stuff, come to think of it.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:15 AM | Comments (0)

Propaganda Pop Review

Propaganda U2 World Service magazine, Issue #26 1997

A FEW YEARS BACK THE ACCLAIMED IRISH POET BRENDAN KENNELLY WAS INVITED BY AN IRISH NEWSPAPER TO REVIEW U2'S ALBUM ACHTUNG BABY - AND, IN RETURN, BONO REVIEWED KENNELLY'S EPIC POEM THE BOOK OF JUDAS. KENNELLY HAS REMAINED A FAN OF U2 AND PROPAGANDA INVITED HIM TO CAST HIS POET'S EAR OVER THE LATEST U2 RECORDING.

No album that I can recollect begins with a climax since a climax is a moment of passionate utterance which has to be assiduously prepared for. Yet this is the first daring feature of 'Pop'. 'Discotheque' is a sexual- spiritual climactic song, a musical peak, and it booms us, from the very opening moment, into a world in which love is scrutinised from many angles, different perspectives, and in an astonishing variety of voices. I say 'variety' deliberately, even though, obviously, we hear only the voice of Bono. Yet surely that voice contains within it an entire range of beautifully controlled voices ranging from the primitively energetic to the poignantly yearning, from the abrasively physical to the soaringly spiritual, from the deeply serious to the cheekily flippant. Within that voice is the soul of the seeker, the indomitable spirit of a person searching for love and peace in a world torn apart by hate and mayhem. It is as if Bono had allowed the obscene, destructive energies of our world into his own heart so that he can give shape and authority to his vision of peace and love. Yet this vision is being constantly assaulted, even, at moments, deeply wounded, with the result that many of 'Pop's' memorable songs are riddled with doubt, ambiguity, a pervasive sense of hurt and a dark sense of loss. Even, or perhaps even especially, a central human relationship, that between man and woman in love, is constantly darkened by an underlying menace which will not go away because violence, in one form or another, thrives at the heart of things.

Love's a bully pushing and shoving In the belly of a woman Heavy rhythm taking over To stick together A man and a woman Stick together (Do You Feel Loved?) The emotionally glutinous nature of relationship is closely examined, and convincingly celebrated, in these songs. Yet few of the songs could be said to be fully exposed; they are, instead, sensitively tentative, brilliantly suggestive, bristling with implications that haunt the listener as he or she listens time after time to words, to phrases that haunt the imagination and the feelings long after the last song has ended. It doesn't really end at all, in fact. Instead, 'Pop' insinuates itself, slowly and deliberately into our minds and hearts and finds its own special place there.

She feels the ground is giving way But she thinks we're better off that way The more you take the less you feel The less you know the more you believe The more you have the more it takes to-day (Last Night on Earth) 'Last Night on Earth' searingly explores the tensions between giving and taking, in love. The insistent refrain, 'You've got to give it away', co-exists with the sense of hurt and the sense of rewarding fulfillment, which are in turn inseparable from the sense of magnificent squandering and ecstatic abandonment implicit in that memorable repeated line: 'She's living like it's the last night on earth.' There are moments when Bono's voice has a similar ultimate urgency.

We live in an age when sexuality and spirituality are usually treated as completely separate realities despite the fact that down through the ages some of the greatest poets and songwriters identified the presence of the one in the other. Think of Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience', D.H. Lawrence's poems, stories and novels, and some of W.B. Yeats's greatest poems. (Yeats, in fact, is a strong and perfectly absorbed influence on Bono).

Much of 'Pop's' deepening appeal lies in its splendid attempt, largely successful, to wed the spiritual and the sexual, to acknowledge the strange ways in which darkness yearns for light, to express the recognition that sexual passion may be a kind of prayer. Take the colours of my imagination Take the scent hanging in the air Take this tangle of a conversation And turn it into your own prayer (Do You Feel Loved?) 'Discotheque' says 'you cannot connect it' but 'If God Will Send His Angels' searches, despite the fact that 'they put Jesus in show business', for love and faith in a passionately lost kind of way. In a world where 'freedom is just greed', such a search, consciously conducted, seems doomed to disappointment. And, to tell the truth that I see, it is the greed that dominates, greed is king and freedom a hungry child who, if fed and kept alive, may well grow up to serve that greedy king. And yet U2 go on to recognise and express the greed and to cultivate the fragile seed of freedom, just as, in many of these songs, Bono strives to connect sexual and spiritual energy. His is one of ever expanding largesse of mind, heart and soul.

All this might seem to suggest that 'Pop' is an unremittingly serious, even solemn, album. It is serious, but it is also, and primarily, stunningly lyrical and musically magical. Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen have years of experience behind them now. 'Pop' is a resonant distillation of all that experience. The more you listen to that fabulous four, the better they get. The beautiful clarity of Bono's voice as he sings his explorations of love, sex, and spiritlife in our mad world of violence, greed, and exploitation is a singing beacon of hope in contemporary darkness. The challenging words and music of 'Pop' should ring and echo through all our lives.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:14 AM | Comments (0)

U2 Is Still U2, Even When Using The Tools Of The Techno Trade

The Boston Globe, March 1997

U2 Is Still U2, Even When Using The Tools Of The Techno Trade

By Jim Sullivan, Boston Globe Staff

"Discotheque," the advance single from U2's "Pop" album (out Tuesday on Island records), is something of a tantalizing tease, with its oozing hedonism, its dizzy disorientation and clattering electronic rhythms. The video has the four Irishmen dolled up as ersatz Village People. Is U2 - singer Bono, guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. - continuing with the pseudo-Elvis, faux-glitz approach from their Zoo TV tour, in effect, deciding that they're eager to pay the price - willful irony - for their younger passions? Are they issuing a challenge to the denizens of the dance floor, the highly charged 120-beat-per-minute Wizards of Oz who rule the chemically inflected world of techno or electronica?

Well, no. For all the murmurings and mutterings about U2's immersion in the world of techno - and, yes, U2 is using the tools of that trade here with co-producers Flood and Howie B. - U2 remains identifiable as U2, and this work might also be titled "Conversations With God." As with Prince, it's been a thread that's been woven through much of the group's work since they were teenagers in 1980, and it remains so here.

U2's ideas do come near the realm of traditional Christian rock - Bono bemoans Jesus's dive into show biz (come to think of it, probably the same way old U2 fans might) - and it closes with "Wake Up Dead Man," Bono's rousing plea for Jesus's help because he's alone in this, uh, messed-up world. (It wasn't Jesus who dove into show biz, actually, in "If God Will Send His Angels"; it was those fundamentalist hawkers using TV Jesus.) In "Mofo," Bono's "looking for a place to save my soul...looking for to fill the GOD-shaped hole." "Mofo," a tense, pulsing song, has Bono looking down from the mountain he once looked up at. "Boy," their first album, is all about the bridge from boyhood to manhood. Here, at manhood, Bono asks, "Mother, am I still your son?" The song also has a nice twist on the Tubes' "White Punks On Dope" with a "white dopes on punk" line.

Make no mistake, though: This is a serious record - more art than rock, more meandering and moody than exhilarating and defiant, more intimate than broad-based. In this it's much like "Zooropa" or the Passengers album they recorded with longtime (but not here) producer Brian Eno. It certainly doesn't sound like stadium rock, and those are the venues the band will be playing this summer, reportedly opening up shows with a string from "Pop." U2 has long been about finding new language, struggling to maintain integrity in the face of superstardom that borders on worship.

On "Pop," U2 finds itself asking us to look for meaning, be it love or faith, amid the chaos and media onslaught of the modern age. "Last Night on Earth," with its urgent "You got to give it away" refrain, is about living each day as if it might be your last. Not as Pink Floyd once put it - "shorter of breath and one day closer to death" - but with a sense of purpose and community.

The lyrical content is often at odds with the dark-tinged musical content, which creates, mostly, agreeable tension. Bono's the voice, but the Edge is the sonic master, his guitar style ever expanding beyond the chiming riffs of yore. There are nods to U2's anthemic rock past here, especially in "Do You Feel Loved" and "Gone." But there's a lot here that is watery, and nearly everything moves at a midtempo drift, with techno beats, Clayton's ominous bass lines, and Edge's scrapings and scrawlings adding detail.

It gets quieter, but more engaging, near the end with "If You Wear That Velvet Dress," "Please," and "Wake Up Dead Man." It's in the last song that Bono's voice takes on the most urgency, a wake-up call to himself, if he feels dead, and you, if you do. Edge has a brilliant riff that jars you and sucks you further into the vortex.

"Pop" is a moving record, but it is not a thrilling record. While not quite up to "Zooropa" or "The Joshua Tree," it is by no means the misguided stretch of "Rattle & Hum." Its charms are subtle, and its distance from today's common currency - be it Live or Oasis - is profound. Will fans follow? The name-brand stamp of the band suggests many will, especially those who've followed it through "Zooropa" and the Passengers. Those new to the U2 game or those missing the call-to-action anthems will likely pass.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:06 AM | Comments (0)

All Star Magazine's Pop Review

AllStar Net Magazine (http://www.allstarmag.com/), March 1997

By John Bitzer

Album Rating: 8 (out of 10)

Let's get one thing straight: despite the utter inanity of the now- ubiquitous "Discotheque" and a plethora of hype to the contrary, U2 has not reinvented itself as a techno band. Pop is not exactly the document of a band's brave new step into electronica; it's simply Achtung Baby, Part Deux -- and that's a good thing.

Sonically, Pop again makes liberal use of all those bells and whistles that first appeared on Achtung -- Edge's watery guitar sound of "One," the siren of "Until the End of the World," the loops of of "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" and even Bono's falsettos and newfound yodels are sprinkled lovingly throughout Pop. Along the way, the band throws in more intriguing loop- de- loops, buzzsaws, and wacka- wackas along the same lines, and with the same taste. It's a rich, delicious meal, one that takes multiple listens to digest, and leaves a ghost of a sense memory.

But ultimately, like good real estate agents with their location, location, location mantra, U2 prides itself on songs, songs, songs. And it's surprising how little credit they receive for it these days. Achtung Baby was remarkable for the personal touch of its lyrics (the downright sadness of songs like "Until the End of the World," "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses," and "Love is Blindness" was often overshadowed by the band's bluster, perhaps intentionally). Here the touch is just as sensitive in some places, more sensual in others ("If You Wear That Velvet Dress" is all lust, yet scarily romantic).

And curiously, at the core of Pop lies a sober spiritual center. The members of U2, you may recall, are deeply religious, and despite their efforts to playfully portray themselves as decadent rock stars, they take the opportunity here to sneak in works of ascetic contemplation and urgent prayer: "If God Will Send His Angels" is achingly beautiful; "Please" is this album's "Acrobat" -- its anger scorches as it builds to a dramatic climax; and the album's closer, "Wake Up Dead Man," is a bitter plea to Jesus to return to fix the world's ills.

For the last few years, U2 has operated with a public private duality: while piling on a thick layer of irony on grotesquely overblown tours, they've quietly written very personal songs -- and crafted them elegantly. The band's standards don't seem to allow for anything less.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:05 AM | Comments (0)

The U2 Station News Blog

March 26, 1997

Various would-be song titles for Pop

One Tree Hill

Edge on Macphisto and Batman

Sunday Morning Fever

Bono Explains It All For You

Pop & more

March 23, 1997

Sunday Times Pop Review

March 13, 1997

U2's 'Pop' Pops Off to a Good Start

Salon Pop Review

March 12, 1997

Wall of Sound Pop Review

March 10, 1997

Bono on the Pop album and tour

March 09, 1997

St. Paul Pioneer Press Pop Review

March 07, 1997

Rattle And Hymn

March 02, 1997

U2's Super Sonics

U2's Striking 'Pop' LP Both Pushes, Polishes The Edge

U2 Goes On A Successful Spiritual Quest With 'Pop'

March 01, 1997

U2's Pop Salvation

U2: The POP Interview

Pop, Pop, Pop Music

Rolling Stone Pop Review

Propaganda Pop Review

U2 Is Still U2, Even When Using The Tools Of The Techno Trade

All Star Magazine's Pop Review