Customer Reviews

Pop

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Please, my friends, don't heed the hype and don't listen to the band. POP is brilliant, painful, powerful, angry, angsty, and more heartbreakingly human than any U2 album since Boy. They've come down off their pillar of just-short-of-godly genius to roll in the mire with us mere mortals. It hurts, but in a good way.

As a U2 fan of seven years, I would have to say that this is their album I'm most inspired by. Pop is flawless. Its an album that feels like your life. Pop, AB, and Zooropa are the best albums U2 have done. If you like U2's 80's stuff, this album is less accesible, but if you really listen to it you will fall in love with it. Its amazing the way U2 incorporated elements of club culture and made it their own. Definatly their most underrated album.

With Pop, U2 ventured into new territory yet again, with slightly less stellar results than they had achieved with Achtung Baby. Nevertheless, the songs on Pop stand right up there alongside the rest of their work. If the album was just a little bit more cohesive, with slightly better production, it would be of a 5 star calibre. As it is, I love it for its bold experimentalism, Bono's dead-on lyrics, and its heightened sense of the moment. When you listen to this album, you know it must have been created in the late 90s, and other than Radiohead, I can't think of any other rock band that seem to be bothering to try to articulate these times we are living in. Highlights include Wake Up Dead Man, a gothic prayer with excellent lyrics; Gone, yet another great guitar anthem by Mr. Edge; MoFo, the only real venture into Techno territory, it proves U2 can do whatever they want to do; and If You Wear That Velvet Dress, a dark, quiet, brooding piece of music full of mystery and longing. Please, also, is great, but I feel Edge's guitar is way too low in the mix. Still, great album, lads. Can't wait for the next one.

Excellent album and all of the B-sides that go with this album are amazing too. This is a great U2 album. I am a huge U2 fan and this is one of my favorite albums. All of the U2 fans who dis this album are afraid of change. I say bring it on!

I bought my copy of this for relatively cheap and I never got the oppritunity to listen to it on the vinyl format but I'm sure it's genuis. that said it remains one of my very favorite U2 albums, it's very dramatic and yet so sublime. highly recomended for any music collection

Let me preface my review with stating that when this album came out, I was discovering music both backwards and forwards simultaneously, ie, I was discovering classic rock and current rock at the same time. That said, I was comparing this album just as much to the burgeoning genius of Radiohead as I was to U2's earlier work, which I also became a big fan of around the same time. I think this album is a very good album not Great status like "Joshua Tree", "War", and "Achtung, Baby", but just below that, on par with Zooropa, I think. And also a direct result of Zooropa, I will never belittle a band for experimenting with sound and not settling for remaking their last big hit album. As long as the melodies and the lyrics are good, I will never belittle experimentation. If you do, you're halting the progress of the band. What if someone had told the Beatles they had to make "With the Beatles" again instead of "Sgt. Pepper"? I'm not comparing them as bands or album to album, just conventional vs. experimental, but just the ridiculousness of trying to force a band to play like they used to play. It's idiotic. If you want a band to sound the same all the time, buy some Nickleback and shop at Wal-Mart. This album is unfairly criticized and has one of the greatest U2 singles, in my opinion, with "Please". I love that song. I also really love "Wake Up Dead Man", "Staring At the Sun", "Last Night On Earth", and even "Discotheque". There is some kind of backlash against this album that I do not understand. And all of you haters came right back for the next album "All That You Can't Leave Behind". Fickle, fickle, fickle. Just proves that you are not fans of the music, you are fans of whoever is "cool" at the moment (if that even exists, I don't think it does-ask Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, or Woody Guthrie, who paved the way for everything we call rock now, if they were ever "cool"). Let a band experiment, otherwise you are the dumbass in the crowd who still yells "Free Bird!" without knowing that you are an idiot and everyone else in the crowd hates you after you do it (not to mention that you actually belittle Lynyrd Skynyrd when you do it because you don't understand that band at all, god, I hate you Free-Bird-yellers). This is yet another U2 album that was before its time. It will be better appreciated in the coming years, I'm gonna hold onto my release-day copy, it's gonna be worth something later, when this album is given it's just dues.

although not their best CD it still comes across as hard hitting and profound - which may be mis-understood to the world audience who expects the same U2. For a band to grow it needs to change. It has. Look for them to go back to the WAR days in their next CD, meaning the music not the words.

The first time I listening it, I was disapointing! But Pop is not "popular music", you must try many times: More listening: More good. A very good album.

from the disco to the absence of God, its hard to think of a stone U2 has left unturned in this beautiful, hard edged piece of satire. once again, U2 proves today's most intelligent rockers as they continue to poke fun at what society would have us believe is important. bono's lyrics once again cut to the chase with songs like "if god would send his angels","mofo" and "wake up dead man". the edge's ripping guitar work can be heard throughout but especially in "last night on earth", "gone" and "discoteque". and as always adam and larry meld it all together with brilliant rhythm. all this combined with howie-b at the helm provides for a sound that is rich with depth and scope. don't listen to those who would tell you that U2 has sold out and is finally on the downhill. they're only acting like it to prove that they haven't.

P.s. hint:those of you that understood my last statment are exactly the type that would appreciate this album!

Pop is in some ways the height of u2's career, but it is also, like zooropa, more a collection of songs than an album in the way that War, Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby are albums, in other words though it has an intellectual theme, it lacks a consistent musical one. Still, it is in many ways bold and certainly an essential part of any u2 collection. Like Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins said, in many ways Pop sounds like a greatest hits cd.