The U2 album Bono and The Edge both agreed was a mistake: “We just misfired”
Bono was never one to apologise for any move that U2 made.
As much as they may have had divisive albums that didn’t register with the public, he was happy to be taking chances rather than spending his entire life mining the same kind of dad rock that everyone else did. The Irish legends weren’t built to have that kind of career, but when the rest of the band starts to have questions about what the hell they’re even doing in the studio, that’s when you start to encounter the real problems.
But for a long while, U2’s track record was comparable to almost any other classic rock and roll band on the planet. Sure, they had some DNA that was linked to the punk scene, but when listening to their evolution from Boy all the way to The Joshua Tree, they had sought to do everything they could until they were one of the biggest bands to walk the Earth. And I’m sure once they perched themselves atop that mountain, they all had the same question: now what the hell do we do?
It’s never an easy question to answer. The Beatles had discovered the ceiling when they had to take a break from the road, so the next option for the band was to follow in the footsteps of the Fab Four and start experimenting. Achtung Baby wasn’t exactly Sgt Pepper’s by any means, but it did get them back into people’s homes again. They had broken the mould by embracing irony, but that also meant dancing pretty close to fire.
After all, Bono could play up the angle of being over the idea of the pampered rock star, but it’s also not as convincing to see him frolicking around in makeup as a piece of performance art while people like Pearl Jam were opening up for them. It still worked well enough for the album Zooropa, but when Pop came out, it was clear that they had started to bite off a little more than they could chew.
If it wasn’t abundantly clear from their outfits in the ‘Discotheque’ video, this was their dance album, and while the idea of combining a rock band with the sound of the Chemical Brothers sounds fun for a second, it doesn’t really suit their strengths. Bono always sounded larger than life, but judging by Larry Mullen Jr’s facial expressions in the video, it’s not like it was his favourite genre to play, either.
When looking back, even The Edge called the record among U2’s biggest mistakes, saying, “On Pop, we had deconstructed the concept of the rock ‘n’ roll band and then on the PopMart tour we’d celebrated the surface of things, not in a cynical way but in the spirit of Warholian pop art. Even so, I think we also realised that in the process we had lost something.” And while Bono did stand by the record for a while, it didn’t take him long to come around, either.
Looking back, he singled out Pop as one of the few moments where they went too far, saying, “[It’s] an earnest band with political overtones [that] kicks off their boots for dancing shoes. Supposed to be the return to pop from the experimental period that included Zooropa. Great idea for an album. We just misfired – booked the tour before we finished the album.”
To their credit, the songs do sound like the kind of music that would go off a lot better in a stadium rather than on a studio disc. All of the major beats are checked off for it to be a great danceable record, but for a band that was known for their earnestness every time they played, this ended up feeling like a bit of a step backwards in many respects.
And it turned out that most people didn’t realise how far the band had started until they realised what they could sound like on All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. Both of those albums were far from their most experimental projects, but at least got U2 back to sounding like themselves again.
