U2 POP poll

Last Night on Earth is pretty much the only track on this album I fux with.

I wish I could find the awesome hard house version of "Last Night On Earth" that they used to play on WFNX (RIP)

"Do You Feel Loved," which actually sounds in its first verse....a little bit sexy...?

Their last great album. Voted "Mofo."

'Discotheque'.

Pop could have been potentially been one of U2's better albums, but it sounds like such a goddamn mess. There's a few tracks here that never quite take off the way that they should. 'Please', for example. The studio cut pales massively in comparison to the live versions. Maybe if they'd road-tested some of these tracks first before recording them, it may have resulted in a better record, but I know that U2 generally doesn't work that way. When I listen to this record back to back with, say, Zooropa, it's flaws are glaring.

*its

The band's shitty Day-Glo definition of "doing" irony in its publicity was so at odds with the half-assed electronica and unfinished ballads.

I'm actually giving the album a listen now just to refresh my memory, and one thing that has struck me with the force of an anvil landing on my head from the top of a cliff is how the mixes in general feel a bit lacklustre in places. 'Discotheque' for example, on headphones, has that great swirling intro which sets you up for a thunderous entrance, and then when the song kicks in, it just feels flat. Vocals too loud, guitar too buried... they re-mixed it for the single, didn't they?

On a different note, is it just me or does the chorus of 'Staring At The Sun' sound like Bono had been listening to a lot of Oasis at the time?

Yes -- but the lame Oasis of "Roll With It."

Yeah... I remember having that thought when 'Staring At The Sun' came out as a single. It was around the time that Oasis were at their most popular in the UK, and I just remember watching the video to 'Staring At The Sun' and when the chorus kicked in, I thought "hang on..."

Anyhow, listening to this album again, I don't think the sequencing of 'Miami', 'The Playboy Mansion' and 'If You Wear That Velvet Dress' back-to-back was the best decision. In the case of 'Miami', I wouldn't have put it on the album at all. Awful track.

Revisited this with an open mind recently and it's still poor. Revealing that they can't find anything to salvage from this for subsequent tours. Miami is unspeakable. I only rate Mofo, Staring at the Sun (despite Oasis qualities) and The Playboy Mansion (despite ropey lyrics). Voting Mofo for its sheer extremity. Sounds exactly like a Chems/Underworld remix of itself.

By all accounts the recording of this album was a slow-motion disaster. Too many cooks.

"If God Will Send...,""Last Night on Earth," and "Wake Up Dead Man" were bad enough to get rejected from Zooropa.

The second half of this album is really awful. "Miami" to the end... I don't enjoy listening to any of those tracks. They typically front-load their albums though, and the first half is pretty good. "Mofo" is one of those tracks that should be laughable because of how transparently they were jumping on the big-beat bandwagon, but is actually still great.

"If God Will Send...,""Last Night on Earth," and "Wake Up Dead Man" were bad enough to get rejected from Zooropa.

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, August 13, 2012 9:17 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I honestly don't mind 'Last Night On Earth' or 'Wake Up Dead Man', and find them to be two of the better songs on this record. Wasn't 'Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me' a Zooropa reject too?

yep

The second half of this album is really awful. "Miami" to the end... I don't enjoy listening to any of those tracks. They typically front-load their albums though, and the first half is pretty good. "Mofo" is one of those tracks that should be laughable because of how transparently they were jumping on the big-beat bandwagon, but is actually still great.

― Vinnie, Monday, August 13, 2012 9:17 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I totally agree that the album is frontloaded. I think there's something in 'If You Wear That Velvet Dress', but it does sound very VERY underworked. I do think 'Please' and 'Wake Up Dead Man' are better than the three tracks before it. Overall though, now that I've listened to the whole thing again, I've come away from it with pretty much the same attitude I've always had to it... there's potentially a great U2 album here, but it's very unfocused and very messy. It sounds like they spent too much time trying to find a direction, and then once they'd decided what they wanted to do, tried to make whatever it was that they had on tape WORK. Instead, they should have junked everything, took a break, and started afresh. But I guess they didn't help themselves with booking the tour for the record while they were making it.

i feel like the album is front loaded and back loaded, it's the middle that i have more issues w/but still enjoy. 'gone' is pretty epic and i enjoy the music on 'playboy mansion' but on a whole discotheque/loved/mofo/velvet dress/please/dead man are the ones i'm most down w/

"Mofo" is the only track I still remember liking from this pile of nothing. So that.

It must be a terrifying feeling to follow your easiest-to-make album with your hardest, like "Shit, where did all the good songs go?" The worst thing about it was it took a year, several producers and a vast amount of money and still sounded underworked. After all that effort you'd at least want the airless proficiency of a New Jersey.

lucky for U2 their New Jersey was around the corner

Poll's not over yet, it might still turn out to be Rattle & Hum!

i'm probably the only U2 fan who prefers this to any of their subsequent albums or doesn't think it was a mistake of some sort. that might include the band members themselves

I'm NOT much of a U2 fan but i prefer this to any of their subsequent albums. the road not taken afaic

further proof of my non-fan appreciation of U2: my favorite album is October which the guys themselves consider a dud

I think all I've heard is "Wake Up, Dead Man" from aQ compilation, and it's no worse than the other stuff on there.

also prefer this to their subsequent albums. LOVE gone, do you feel loved, and the single mix of please. also would go to bat for mofo and maybe wake up dead man. at the time LOVED discotheque but last time i heard it the production was lacking. very sure if i had voted in that u2 poll i would've had gone very high.

at the time LOVED discotheque but last time i heard it the production was lacking.

that's how I feel now. Also, I realized I overrated it because of the reactions in early '97 from conservative clubfooted U2 fans horrified by the video.

that approaching guitar storm at the beginning still sounds great, i would love if u2 made a total dreampop/shoegaze album. right in their wheelhouse (unforgettable fire and achtung baby are a zip code away) but 'relevant' enough to be attractive and give them a way forward now that they've maybe exhausted 'well we'll just give ppl a archetypal u2 record'.

regardless of quality, I still get "looking for to fill that god-shaped hole" and "looking for the face I had before the world was made" in my head about as often as any NIN lyric

Mofo is the I came to love when we did the big U2 poll; o/w this album passed me by when it came out & still does

they hate it now don't they? they rarely play stuff off this live iirc. is there a non-single on this that the hardcore fans love, like say Best Days off of Blur's Great Escape?

my first and favorite u2 album

they hate it now don't they? they rarely play stuff off this live iirc. is there a non-single on this that the hardcore fans love, like say Best Days off of Blur's Great Escape?

― piscesx, Monday, August 13, 2012 8:55 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

closest thing to a 'deep cut' placing on the ilm U2 tracks poll was "Mofo" outside the top 50 (apparently it was a single in some European countries?), so i guess not.

i think maybe U2 are such incorrigible populists that they wouldn't know how to disagree with the public if they actually did love a record that failed.

"gone" is all right iirc

that still from the tour makes me cringe, though. why were u2 so goddamn literal-minded about everything.

this song is about the corporate world....some like to play in the day(up with the sun)and some like to play (sleep) at night......i believe angels play at night but very few frolick during the day......i like the day and night....and enjoy both.....it's about the old comparison of night and day and what involves both....U2 is funny that way or brilliant....
Billy Jones 1 month ago

^^^feel like this is a very bono-style interp

it's funny to me that they basically managed to be a tongue in cheek pop band with a bunch of subversive pop art imagery in the Achtung Baby/Zooropa era in a way that their classic rock audience totally embraced. and then they just took it a tiny step further and suddenly "disco" in the lead single's song title and overt corporate consumerism themes and Bono's goofy muscleman shirt spelled backlash.

older fanbase (1997 was the first but certainly not the last time i felt 'old' for liking u2) blanching at 'techno' (and perceived selling out - i remember rob lowe joking about this on an snl monologue at the time) plus delayed backlash to zooropa which i know alot of ppl that could hang w/ achtung baby didn't care for really.

even w/ achtung i can remember ppl i knew that were wary until they heard 'one'. and achtung baby the actual record doesn't engage in any of the postmodern or ironic gestures that zooropa did (well) or pop did (poorly).

yeah i guess there was so little riding on Zooropa given its origins as a stopgap EP or secondary status as merchandise for the neverending Zoo TV tour that nobody seemed to blink at "Numb" and "Lemon" compared to "Discotheque" (xpost)

thinking of achtung as joshua tree maybe zooropa = those fairly stellar joshua tree b-sides ('lemon' as 'sweetest thing' in the why don't you guys pull stuff like this off more often race) and pop = rattle and hum, where the working model becomes unbearable, the album seems forced by outside forces, bono's 'thoughts' are too much a factor, and the producer hasn't worked w/ them before or since really. of course rattle and hum was a massive hit w/ songs that have persevered on oldies radio and their setlists whereas the only thing i miiight hear from pop on radio is 'staring at the sun' and that's as likely as hearing 'two hearts beat as one' tbh so the comparison has flaws.

which is funny to say since later "Sweetest Thing" basically became the palate cleanser pop hit after Pop lacked hits

i have to say seeing the popmart tour in chicago in '98 was vv interesting in that the crowd seemed baffled by the songs that U2 was touring in support of, perhaps even more baffled by the choice of 'second toughest in the infants' by underworld playing on a loop in the two hours before the show began, and simply flummoxed by the choice of fun lovin' criminals as an opening act at soldier field (i was with them on that last bit.)

'staring at the sun' gets some play here and there on recent tours iirc, usually in a more 'meaningful' interpretation w/edge on acoustic in a spotlight and bono kneeling somewhere else in another spotlight, but everything else is buried. shame, since i think some of the deeper cuts like 'please' are pretty strong, always liked that one's northern ireland's troubles as abusive relationship lyrical gambit.

they even still drag out the occasional 'passengers' cut, they played 'miss sarajevo' and 'your blue room' on recent tours.

"Staring At The Sun" seems to have disappeared from alt-rock radio playlists after being huge at the time, i blame that Gorillaz plagiarism

everybody's down on it, but in retrospect, i wish U2 records still sounded like this. dark & physical, engaged w pop, a little daring. i don't love many of the tracks on it, but i like the first five okay. i suspect that a good deal of the hostility directed towards it is a rejection of the overt & then-trendy electronic dance moves. i mean, "do you feel loved" hints towards what should have been more than actually delivers, but it's still pretty nice. "mofo" smokes, though. and "staring at the sun" is better, fucking brilliant single.

oh wait, forgot about "gone", that's great too.

at least half recant fingering "electronica" as the reason this album gets such a bad rap, though. underdeveloped tracks like "last night on earth", "miami" and "if you wear that velvet dress" really drag things down.

The lyrical collapse on this album is dramatic too. Achtung Baby worked because all the here-come-the-90s stuff (more notable on the tour than on the album really) was grounded in the personal: it's about going out and coming home, gluttonous hedonism and hungover regret. And the more self-consciously pomo songs like The Fly have some genuinely great aphorisms. Then with Zooropa the lyrics are looser and less weighty so that's fine too. But my reaction to Pop at the time, as a huge dance music fan willing to like another electronic U2 album, was that it wasn't what it pretended to be - lyrically it was stiff and portentous, not fluid and trashy. Even Discotheque sounds like someone describing fun from a distance rather than from the inside and Miami is his worst lyric this side of Elvis Ate America. It's like they misunderstood every lesson from the success of the early 90s, and PopMart just rammed it home - everything clever and oblique about Zoo TV became clanging and obvious. Even the title, Pop, feels misjudged and overstated compared to the weird humour of Achtung Baby. I think the reason the band hate it now was because they'd spent a few years successfully shattering all the limitations people thought they had after the 80s, then with Pop they hit the wall and exposed their limitations in the harshest possible light.

As far as lyric writing goes, I'd point to Pop as the point at which Bono The Globetrotter produces fuzzy, generic work that he and other more sympathetic critics think are "loose." You really see the damage on ATYCLB and Atomic Bomb. It's like all he can think seriously about now is honing a Nobel Prize speech he'll never get.

i actually tend to find a lot of the lyrics on this album to be among their best. some are just sort of serviceable but others (velvet dress, please, mofo) rank pretty high imo. shows me that they're capable of vv good lyrics when they want to make the effort but too often over the last decade-plus they've gone for generic lyrics on their big hits. i do think there are some cuts on the last one that hit some fine lyrical heights albeit a few steps below their '90s stuff.

People are justifiably hard on "this album" but imo overly-hard on "the band for making this album". They weren't Not Writing Songs so much as they were trying to make something that, well, couldn't be made and hasn't been made afaik: a successful songwriting-oriented album of stadium-electronica. You can't really write a song (in the traditional sense) over a big-beat anthem or you get, I dunno, Republica "Ready to go" or something. Imo the problem was that they tried to play tourist to a genre that couldn't take them / didn't want or need them

but New Order and the Chem Bros did it!

btw "Mofo" and "Do You Feel Loved" do boast good lyrics.

addendum: A good lateral example would be like Bowie's "Dead man walking" and though I love that song it doesn't exactly function as either good Bowie nor good drum-and-bass.

Chem Bros did it! You're right. But like, once with that Liam song imo. And Bernard has always put his voice + lyric + personality at the service of the mood, kind of the opposite of Bono.

AH fuck forget it, Tammy Wynette + KLF is a pretty fucking awesome example, forget I said anything; "Pop" blows

i think the electronica thing might be a little overstated if only because i think they dispense with any aspirations to dance music after the first three tracks, the rest of the songs are fairly conventional structurally w/merely unconventional production touches. probably the "weirdest" of the subsequent tracks is 'miami' and it doesn't sound that much weirder than 'new york' on ATYCLB.

xp yeah, KLF beat everyone to the punch by several years, the peak of their 'stadium house' period being 1992?

But like, once with that Liam song imo.

'Setting Sun', but that was Noel on vocals 'Block Rocking Beats' was pretty good as well.
And don't forget Orbital. The live version of 'Satan' was released as a single and was huge late 1996/early 1997.

na na I know "Block Rocking Beats" is like a big hit single etc. but it's a big-beat Song, not a U2 song that could be played at an acoustic session (unlike "Justified and Ancient", "Setting Sun" etc.) but I've given up on this point

I think that one way of looking at AB/Z/P is that 'Achtung Baby' was written as an album first, then it became a huge multimedia live show. 'Zooropa' makes the most sense within the context of the Zoo TV Tour, as extra material along with the spoof adverts and video sketches. 'Pop' feels more like the band started off by saying "let's do another big $$$$ multimedia tour", and then they had to write songs to fit the action on stage ("here's where Bono comes on as Mephisto", "here's where the audience will hold their lighters in the air"). It's like a musical, but without a proper plot to give it structure, like Starlight Express. Or like the videogame Smash Bros (Nintendo characters do their typical Nintendo character type things, Bono does Bono type things).

if this album were half as good as smash bros, we wouldn't be having this conversation

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wish i'd voted for "If God Will Send His Angels," really nice track

It might be the nostalgia kicking in but i heard "staring at the sun" on a house party today and it sounded like one of their best singles of all time.

iirc they felt Staring at the Sun was a good song botched in the recording. It sounded great the one time I heard them play it live.

They actually re-recorded it for one of their decade compilations

Man, the photo in the o.p. has to be the exact moment irony-period U2 swallowed it's own tail.

They actually re-recorded a bunch of the tracks after the fact and they're all the better for it. Gives you some idea of what the album would have sounded like had it not been a rush job with a hundred different producers.

you see i read/heard all this re the new versions, and have the original album, and the decades release.
however, i dont get the negativity re the original recordings.
in fact, having just played them back to back, i think i prefer the original pop album as it is.

.. and i fucking love 'staring at the sun'.

reviving this bc of the discussion on the Zooropa thread and also holy shit this album turns TWENTY in two days

and it sounds like it was made by 80-year-olds.

listen just because there was a song about Miami on there doesn't make them the golden girls

as much as i love these dudes there should maybe be a poll about which U2 song that's an homage to a place or person is most wildly inaccurate

remember the grainy little webcam they had set up in the studio?

Such a long thread for such a poor album. The only U2 record I enjoy from start to finish is "Boy". Still such a fresh sound.

HAPPY 20th BIRTHDAY

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/7710077/u2-pop-album-anniversary-review

This article calls it "unequivocally U2’s most neglected album", which...well, I don't know. The last couple feel a bit more neglected.

It's the last one in their discography I'll really bother with, even with its flaws.

'Please', for example, is one of my favourite songs of theirs from this era, but I don't think they managed to capture a great version of it in the studio. The vocal sounds like Bono threw down a guide vocal and they kept it, and the mix during the middle 8 feels a little undercooked. Live versions are far superior.

Also, I'm sure 'Wake Up Dead Man' is the only U2 song with an f-bomb in it (I can't think of any others at this stage)

'Last Night on Earth' was a brain dead single, wasn't it?

that was a weird pick. surprised that Do You Feel Loved? and Gone weren't released as singles. after LAoE they put out Please(!) as a single.

it's so warm you could toast marshallows on the title track.

ignore me that was Zooropa i was thinking of. #notevendrunk.

I agree, 'Do You Feel Loved?' does sound like a far more obvious single than 'Last Night On Earth' and 'Please', though I really like those two.

listening to this for the first time ever! (I know MOFO but o/w missed this album before). "Miami" and "The Playboy Mansion" are pretty ok; I suspect the lyrics are dreadful but first time through they made no impression. tbh I'm feeling the 2nd half more than the 1st.

Last Night On Earth; under-rated.