Rethinking Pop

Irish Voice

October 10, 2007 - October 16, 2007

IT goes against the grain for a music reviewer to say the next three words.

I was wrong.

Allow me to paint a picture. I was in the backyard of a musician friend of mine. We love impressing one another during monthly listening nights with our encyclopedic knowledge of music as we create mixes of old and new music on our hard drives.



On one such evening, I found my head cocked upward as the adult beverages hit my nervous system. Dull lavender clouds illuminated by the harvest moonlight scattered quickly across the sky.

A tight, constipated guitar solo grunted over the sexiest funk beat I've heard in years as that familiar voice sang "if coke is a mystery/Michael Jackson, history/if beauty is truth/and surgery the fountain of youth/ what am I to do/have I got the gift to get me through the gates of that mansion."

"Who is this, Bono?" says I.

"Yeah," came the reply, garnished with a satisfying smile. He knew he caught me with this oddity. "It's The Playboy Mansion' off of Pop, dude. I know you've hated this disc, but it's hot!"

Pop? The album where U2 lost their way? That abomination had something that sounded as good as "The Playboy Mansion" on it?

I was glad he had a copy to let me borrow. Otherwise, I would have had to reclaim it from the used CD store that I sold my copy to in a cloud of disgust.

I wouldn't have believed it unless I heard it with my own two ears - the decade old piece of turd called Pop has grown satisfying little musical mushrooms with the passage of time that make an incredibly bountiful harvest for the U2 fan.

Even the band has slagged the disc in the past. "There were some great songs, but I don't think many of them got finished," said Larry Mullen Junior. "A few more weeks would have made all the difference in the world.

"The tour was booked before the album was finished. Imagine having to schlep your arse around the world promoting an album you feel is unfinished."

With Flood, Howie D. and the band producing the disc, Edge has commented that the piece "suffered from too many cooks."

I'm not sure how to explain this, but when you dust off Pop you unleash a body of unfinished songs that are restless, engaging, and utterly contemporary. I guess you listen to enough Bjork and Massive Attack in your quest to be cool in your forties and Pop starts to make sense. Who knows?

One of the nicest things about Pop is the portrait it paints of the singer. Bono wasn't the globetrotting saint at this point (or at least he wasn't doing it so publicly); he was the ironic Irish pop star prowling the neon allure of Miami's Collins Avenue for inspiration.

For those who have not been to this seaside cluster of art deco hotels, this is a place where long legged aspiring models strut to the Eurotrash disco beats that echo off palm trees lining the grimiest streets on the eastern seaboard. A hiccupping march of a beat ushers in the track that pays homage to the town and, its "pretty shirts and southern accents, cigars and big hair."

With Mullen and Adam clayton dragging Bono into the clubs and feeding him cigars to rough up his voice, dropping world debt was probably the furthest thing from his mind.

This new found appeal of Pop might be shaped by events that have occurred since the band released it. "September streets capsizing/spilling over the drains/shards of glass just like rain," sings Bono over an abstract, tentative beat on the track "Please."

"It was the Docklands bombing in London that it referred to and the breakdown of peace talks in Northern Ireland," the singer recalls in the book U2byU2. "After 9/11 it became nearly impossible to sing."

Fans of the band might have been turned off by the club beat camp of songs like "Discotheque" and "Mofo" but "Please" proves that it's not all about the dancing.

U2's Pop takes the listener from the party to the hangover all in one record. It's a trip that gets better with age!