It’s hard to understand what the band was thinking, releasing an album dominated by electronic dance music (title of first single: “Discotheque”) to a certifiably uninterested, even hostile, American rock audience. If chart domination was their goal, this was a bewildering miscalculation. And no matter what the record eventually came to mean to me, I can’t deny my first impression was one of great disappointment. The album struck me as dense, lethargic, and endless. Whenever I begin to get carried away these days with a neglected-gem train of thought, I have to remind myself of this initial reaction, because first impressions are important. Maybe I know better now; but on the other hand, maybe I knew better then. And I do, even now, see unquestionable flaws in the thing. It’s too long. It lacks top-shelf tracks. The album took forever to make, and over the course of that long process its focus drifted—it was both an electronic dance album and an answer to the Britpop that was overtaking the charts at the time and rendering U2 passé. “Mofo” sounds straight out of a Bristol club, but “Staring at the Sun” is pure Oasis. Hard to make a cohesive record when you’re chasing after both Leftfield and Noel Gallagher. Not surprisingly, this schizophrenia not only weakens the record; it exposes U2’s oldest, deepest flaw—trying to be all things to all people. Their other big flaw—that they’re closet squares—also rears its ugly head. Not very reassuring when you’re hawking hip dance music.
The record sold 6.7 million copies—where their last major release, Achtung Baby, sold 18 million—and the stadium tour they insisted on played to half-empty houses in the U.S. It would take the European and South American legs of the tour not only to fill the seats but to hone the show itself into perhaps the most musically and conceptually rewarding of the band’s career. No matter how much was eventually salvaged, however, the damage was done. The record was seen as a misfire—perhaps most importantly by the band itself.
It’s U2, more than anyone, that cultivated the failure narrative. It goes like this: the Popmart tour loomed, and so they had to release the record before it was done. Another few weeks and it would have been perfect, they’ve often remarked. Consider me skeptical. It’s hard to see how a few extra weeks, after a year or more of work, would have made the crucial difference. If anything, the album feels overwrought, not undercooked. The snippets in this work-in-progress video made for the Island Records execs have an eye-opening rawness that suggests they worked too long on the eventual product. And yet, two songs were in fact remixed for their releases as singles and three more for the Best of 1990-2000 album. They are our only indications of what a longer gestation might have done for this material. Not one is an improvement, however, and the “Discotheque” and “Staring at the Sun” remixes are distinctly inferior to their Pop versions; to my mind, they amount to mutilations of the original songs.
I think U2 was borderline traumatized by the album’s relative commercial failure. So they threw it under the bus; they classified it as their obligatory dud, which every great rock artists has at some point—their Self Portrait, their Goats Head Soup. Called it “prog rock.” Apologized for it. The album was conceived during a year of downtime in the south of France, when the band learned to relax, to even party; it was supposed to reflect that carefree mood, Bono has explained, but instead felt like the long hangover. They went too far with their experimenting, we're told in hindsight, and lost the plot. There’s a fair amount of control freak in U2, and if their record was going to fail, then they’d be the first in line to explain how exactly it had failed. It was damage control presented as candor.
When they reemerged—humbled—in 2000, with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, it was a return to a conventional U2 sound—anthemic songs with big hooks, earnest lyrics, every wild hair trimmed away. More conventional, actually: even U2's most straight-arrow records from the past had had a strong sense of a band pushing itself, hard. All That You Can't was a sizable hit, and in the time since, they have never much wavered from its formula. After all, it restored them to rock royalty, which I believe is their highest priority. (Never mind that over the past decade they have fallen back out of fashion. Now what?)
Since my initial, underwhelmed reaction, I’ve come to love Pop, but only very, very gradually. Every year a little more: I liked it more in 1999 than I did in 1997, more in 2011 than I did in 2004. It has chiseled away at me for twenty years. I no longer know if my attachment to it is based on realizing better what U2 were up to—that is, that I’ve caught up to it—or based on an intense nostalgia for the era in which it was made. Since then, the rock world I grew up in has disappeared beneath my feet. Maybe I’m gathering up those stray, under-appreciated pieces of a suddenly very finite adventure.
This is the most supple, sensuous music the band ever created. The ten-minute soundscape of the DM Deep Extended Club Mix of “Discotheque” is a soft, druggy bed with pillows of soft blue pulsing light that I can lie down on and curl up in, a 3 AM sweet spot. I find this beautiful detached quality in other, similarly ambitious music from that time—Portishead’s Dummy, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, the early Björk records. It was a supremely expressive period in music, dreamy as opposed to heroic. When I listen to a recent U2 album—anything from the past decade or more—I know I’ll never again hear anything from this band like that languid guitar on “Velvet Dress,” the perfect dissonance of the sampled Hindi singer on “Wake Up Dead Man," the nuked-up sonic rush of "Gone" and "Last Night on Earth." Or that rising bass line at the end of each verse of “If God Will Send His Angels” that is a thing of rare beauty (the chorus is a letdown—they just don’t bring the song off). U2 dismiss this record, but how could anyone ever create something like "Do You Feel Loved" and claim to not cherish it at least a little bit?
Pop is probably closer to a good record than a great one, but you hear U2’s dreams on it; and by dreams I also mean nightmares, as well as the boredom and surprise of actual dreams. Some would argue that their work in the time since then possesses a welcome discipline, and the band have rationalized their recent hit-chasing as a dedication to songs that communicate. But they are keeping their dreams to themselves.
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