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April 25, 1997

U2's Popmart: Sincerity Masked by Artifice

Las Vegas Popmart concert, April 25, 1997

U2's Popmart: Sincerity Masked by Artifice

By Jon Pareles, NY Times

LAS VEGAS -- Truth battles packaging in U2's Popmart tour, the stadium spectacle that the band unveiled here on Friday night at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl. The package is high-concept, high-tech razzle-dazzle: a superstar band shows off its big-budget prerogatives and flaunts its status as a consumer product. But the songs, new and old, tell a different, more introspective story, about private struggles to find faith and purpose. With the Popmart tour, U2 seeks to reclaim its old sincerity using all the artifice at its disposal.

The stadium here, with its 38,000 seats sold out, was one of the smaller stops on the tour. For most of its 14-month, 80-city schedule, U2 will perform in places with more than 50,000 seats, including the show scheduled for May 31 at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. To please such large audiences, U2 provides visual pyrotechnics performing in front of a 170-by-56-foot video screen, under a 100-foot golden arch, next to enlarged cocktail accoutrements: a 40-foot-high lemon and a 12-foot-wide olive on a towering toothpick.

Popmart without the "m" is Pop Art, so to accompany various songs U2 has adapted images from Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and other artists who made commercial materials their own. Animated graphics on the video screen repeatedly showed humans as shoppers, and the golden arch self-consciously defined U2 as a product being marketed worldwide. In fact, the band has been merchandised with impressive skill. Its current album, "Pop" (Island), was No. 1 in 27 countries the week it was released. And on Saturday, the night after the tour's first show, U2 was the subject of a relentlessly promotional prime-time ABC-TV special. At a time when the recording business faces diminishing sales, U2 doesn't shy away from the hard sell.

While the tour plugs "Pop," U2 has also set out to top its own Zoo TV tour in 1992-94, which redefined stadium concerts for the 1990s. In that production, U2 presented itself as part of a media overload, treating the band as one of many competing signals, real and simulated. With that tour and its two previous 1990s albums, "Achtung Baby" and "Zooropa," U2 broke away from its 1980s role as a band of painfully earnest idealists. Late in the show Bono, U2's lead singer, appeared in a gold lame suit, sunglasses and devil's horns, as a character he called Macphisto.

In the Popmart production, Bono is back on the side of the angels, or trying to be. On Friday night, U2 arrived at the end of a set of disk jockey dance music by Howie B, one of the producers of "Pop." The 1979 novelty hit by M, "Pop Muzik," segued into the pulsating electronic rhythm of "Mofo," from "Pop." But the first words of that song were, "Looking for to save my save my soul." Throughout the 130-minute set, U2 revived its most high-minded songs from the 1980s, including "I Will Follow," "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "Where the Streets Have No Name." They went well with the nine songs U2 played from "Pop," which show a similar yearning.

Yet there were conspicuous differences between U2's 1980's anthems and its new songs. Larry Mullen's drumming and Adam Clayton's bass lines have shifted the beat from a triumphal march to choppy, sputtering hip-hop or a dub-reggae undertow. The Edge's guitar can still ring out open fifths, but also uses crackling, caustic distortion, while prerecorded material sometimes adds dance rhythms or surreal ambience. And in the lyrics, true love and transcendent faith have grown ever more elusive. "They put Jesus in show business," Bono sang. "Now it's hard to get in the door."

While the show's visuals drew oohs and ahs, U2's music suffered from apparent first-night jitters. Seemingly sure-fire songs, like the hits "Discotheque" and "Mysterious Ways," weren't solid in their grooves. And when U2 played its current single, "Staring at the Sun," the band couldn't agree on a tempo; after one attempt fell apart, Bono announced that the group was having "a little family row," and a second attempt was shaky. But there were also moments when ballads held the stadium spellbound, among them "Please" (from "Pop"), "One" and "With or Without You," despite distracting images of Warhol's Marilyn Monroe series. The song sounded like a plea to a lover, not to a pop icon.

U2 is still pondering the links between art and commerce; Popmart's solution is to delight the eyes while the songs brood at will. In the show's final image, the golden arch framed a big red heart. It was as if U2 wanted to insist that even the most commercial efforts can still be genuine.

Copyright © 1997 NY Times. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:33 AM | Comments (0)

April 12, 1997

Stylish 'Zoo TV' Blurs Fact and Fiction

Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1997

Stylish 'Zoo TV' Blurs Fact and Fiction

By Steve Hochman

When you see a TV show open with a guy removing his prosthetic nose, you know you've got something different from the usual fare. It's a great attention-getter for the second installment of "Zoo TV," the three-week magazine-style series airing on MTV beginning Sunday, and it is the crux of the program. Metaphorically speaking, the series takes off its false nose (in the second episode). Normally on TV, the show asks, can you tell when something is fake?

Or, as the Firesign Theatre so succinctly put it in its '60s media satires: What is reality?

Spun by creator Roger Trilling out of the media-saturation themes of U2's 1992-93 concert tour of the same name--and with the blessing, partial financing and score music (but not appearances) from the Irish band -- the series consciously attempts to blur the distinctions between truth and fiction. And it comes close to succeeding in several instances.

Did hip-hop really start at a late-'70s suburban pool party where a white kid "discovered" record-scratching while trying to wipe a spilled meatball off of an Abba record? Of course not, but that's no more "unreal" than many factual things shown in other segments of these shows.

Sure, we've seen that sort of thing before. The fake segments and commercials could have come from vintage "Saturday Night Live" or "The Groove Tube." But it's done with entertaining flair.

What takes this series -- with episodes addressing television, the body and the concept of "alternative" -- into its own space is a dark current of Orwellian paranoia. Hosted by 11-year-old Nataliya Abramovitch, a Wednesday Addams variant speaking to us from a desolate landscape (representing TV's vast wasteland, no doubt), "Zoo TV" follows the premise that we are all targets of mass marketing. Everything we say or do is merely research fodder for multinational overlords to use in keeping us happy consumers. You can't even go underground, because that's been mass marketed too.

That message is presented in compelling, stylish packages. But it's also done without much humor or hope. Where, for example, Michael Moore's "TV Nation" used the reality TV format to inspire vigilance in the face of tyranny, "Zoo TV"--whatever the intent--leaves the feeling there's little choice but to surrender.

"Zoo TV" premieres Sunday at 11:30 p.m. on MTV.

Copyright © 1997 Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 08:23 PM | Comments (1)