Often overlooked but seldom bettered.
I try to avoid U2 these days, I can’t handle the earnestness. I like to leave some room for imperfection and don’t truck much with Bono’s whole, “life, you’re doing it wrong, man” schtick.
I retain the right to f**k up and, with that in mind, I don’t need a sermon among the song titles like ‘Yahweh,’ ‘Crumbs From Your Table,’ ‘Peace on Earth’ or (Yahweh wept!) ‘Love and Peace or Else.’
Bono loves him some peace, so he does.
You have to go back to 1997 for my last bit of craic out of U2. Pop was a more coherent and streamlined version of Zooropa. While it kept the playful attitude from its preceding album, there was something more urgent and less cerebral about songs like ‘Gone,’ ‘The Playboy Mansion’ and ‘DiscPtheque.’
The latter’s tackiness was its strength.
Bono, still four years shy of his 40th birthday at the time of the album’s release, had not yet sunk into parody and there was just a vibrancy around the music and his vocals – ironically, less polished then than it is now, but no less powerful – that disappeared as soon as the band started dismantling atomic bombs and reaching out for some impossible Utopia.
That’s not to say that the entire record was just one big party.
Staring At The Sun straddled both sides of the album’s divide, crossing the playfulness of Discotheque and The Playboy Mansion with the emotive Gone, Please and Wake Up Dead Man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mo9xg-_sSw
Arguably the most powerful moments on Pop were its two quietest.
If God Will Send His Angels and If You Wear That Velvet Dress prove that no amount of showmanship, bombast and hand wringing can make up for the fact that Bono is at his best when he’s looking inwards.
It’s an album of good songs mixed with great ones, forming a whole that’s arguably even better than the sum of its parts. They really haven’t come close to it since.
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