U2: Pop

Read any media analysis of the slumping record industry, and you'll likely be inundated with insider quotes about how electronic music is the Next Big Thing, and how the fate of the industry rests on how many units U2's brand-new, heavily hyped, electronically enhanced Pop moves. Of course, the list of related ironies is endless: There's the fact that no one knows what the next big thing is; for all we know, there's a commercially viable second wave of grunge coming. There's the fact that people have been making electronic music for ages—U2 dabbled in the genre on 1993's Zooropa—and that many of them sounded stale years ago. There's the fact that electronic music is already commercially huge: See Nine Inch Nails and its 10,000 lame imitators. There's the fact that the record industry's sales slump has a lot to do with people no longer needing to buy CD copies of vinyl records they already own; it's not like people need a new U2 release to remind them that record stores exist. And, of course, there's the fact that with the exception of a few decidedly techno tracks, Pop itself sounds like little more than a decent new U2 record. Never mind the overexposed "Discotheque" single: When experienced as Pop's opening track, it sounds even more unfinished and emptily stylish. What's really noteworthy about Pop is that the tiny handful of jarring, propulsive dance tracks is outnumbered by Achtung Baby-esque ballads you're bound to hear on the radio every 20 minutes for the next two years: For months, everyone will be shocked about how different "MoFo" sounds, even as "Staring At The Sun" enjoys hourly radio rotation into the next millenium. There are plenty of hits here, to be sure: "Last Night On Earth" is packed with swooning drama a la "Until The End Of The World"; "If God Will Send His Angels" is pompous in a characteristically U2-ballad sort of way; and "The Playboy Mansion" is a shuffling midtempo track full of pop-culture references for critics to overanalyze from now 'til Christmas. Thanks to that sort of incessant media hype, a larger-than-life stadium tour, and saturation of both radio and video, you'll hear lots of Pop in the months and years to come—especially given the band's passion for exploiting popular culture while claiming to satirize it. The good news is that despite all the anticipation, and despite all of Pop's fussy idiosynchracies, the album itself shouldn't disappoint anyone who isn't expecting a full-blown music revolution.