Product Description

Like much pop music in the mid-1990s, POP is cobbled together out of buzzy synthesizers and reverberant keyboards, techno drum loops and funky live drums, guitars distorted into clouds of metal, vocals you sometimes have to work to hear, and songs that seek God and sex and other important stuff in the world's trash heaps. And it's obsessed, more than anything else, with pop itself. At its most frisky, as on the dance-club single "Discotheque", POP sounds like Oasis backed bythe Chemical Brothers (see that combo's recent single "Setting Sun" for comparison). Drop the club beat and add a bright acoustic guitar, as on "Staring At The Sun", and POP sounds like, well, Oasis.
This is the kind of future-pop U2 introduced on its watershed 1991 album ACHTUNG, BABY, and POP completes a sort of trilogy. Whereas 1993's ZOOROPA played up the "art" side of this experiment, POP, which finds art-rock influence Brian Eno gone from the producer's seat and techno wiz kid Howie B. taking up some of his space, plays up the pop side. It's the most playful album U2 has ever made, with grooves made for dancing, not thinking, and melodies that explode in your face like bubblegum. Lyrically, U2 is still looking for what it hasn't found, in such places as nouveau-riche "Miami" and the celebrity trash receptacle that is "The Playboy Mansion". Musically, though, U2 seems to have found it, in the simple, ecstatic click of a dance beat.

Track Listing

1. Discotheque
2. Do You Feel Loved
3. Mofo
4. If God Will Send His Angels
5. Staring At The Sun
6. Last Night On Earth
7. Gone
8. Miami
9. The Playboy Mansion
10. If You Wear That Velvet Dress
11. Please
12. Wake Up Dead Man

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36170 in Music
• Released on: 2005-05-30
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 60 minutes

Customer Reviews

Why are you even thinking about this ?
I mean really ? Discotheque aside, there is no reason to listen to this album, ever. If you're a U2 fan then why aren't you listening to Joshua Tree, Actung baby, Zooropa or Unforgetable fire, all waaaay better than this. If you've never really heard of U2 then go and buy one the U2 albums I just mentioned. It's not a rubbish album by any means, but if you're going to listen to this band go for the good stuff, there's nothing on this album they haven't done a billion times better elsewhere.

stray effort
U2 I feel tried to become a part of the times with this album, and in my opinion, it didn't suit them. If you can imagine a middle aged man going through a midlife crisis, dancing badly in a discotheque and trying to be cool. Thats my anagram for this album.
This album is sometimes hit, but mostly miss. They are better playing in the rock genre. And when they do and are at their best, they set the bar for any other act out there.
U2 have never been conventionl but I feel 'Pop' was a step too far.

Don't give it away!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This album is great, they need to finish it. Although they've left it a bit late.

Try and get hold of the single releases.

Word has it "Last Night on earth" was recorded at 4am on the last day of recording. Talk about pushing it.