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From The Chicago Sun-Times:

Still big enough to stuff a stadium Jae-Ha Kim

LAS VEGAS - While U2’s album "Pop" hasn’t been the sure thing that the music industry had hoped for, it has done well enough to kick-start the Irishsupergroup’s 14-month, 100-city "PopMart" tour.

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LAS VEGAS — Truth battles packaging in U2’s Popmart tour, the stadium spectacle that the band unveiled here on Friday night at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl. The package is high-concept, high-tech razzle-dazzle: a superstar band shows off its big-budget prerogatives and flaunts its status as a consumer product. But the songs, new and old, tell a different, more introspective story, about private struggles to find faith and purpose. With the Popmart tour, U2 seeks to reclaim its old sincerity using all the artifice at its disposal.

The stadium here, with its 38,000 seats sold out, was one of the smaller stops on the tour. For most of its 14-month, 80-city schedule, U2 will perform in places with more than 50,000 seats, including the show scheduled for May 31 at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. To please such large audiences, U2 provides visual pyrotechnics performing in front of a 170-by-56-foot video screen, under a 100-foot golden arch, next to enlarged cocktail accoutrements: a 40-foot-high lemon and a 12-foot-wide olive on a towering toothpick.

Popmart without the “m” is Pop Art, so to accompany various songs U2 has adapted images from Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and other artists who made commercial materials their own. Animated graphics on the video screen repeatedly showed humans as shoppers, and the golden arch self-consciously defined U2 as a product being marketed worldwide. In fact, the band has been merchandised with impressive skill. Its current album, “Pop” (Island), was No. 1 in 27 countries the week it was released. And on Saturday, the night after the tour’s first show, U2 was the subject of a relentlessly promotional prime-time ABC-TV special. At a time when the recording business faces diminishing sales, U2 doesn’t shy away from the hard sell.

While the tour plugs “Pop,” U2 has also set out to top its own Zoo TV tour in 1992-94, which redefined stadium concerts for the 1990s. In that production, U2 presented itself as part of a media overload, treating the band as one of many competing signals, real and simulated. With that tour and its two previous 1990s albums, “Achtung Baby” and “Zooropa,” U2 broke away from its 1980s role as a band of painfully earnest idealists. Late in the show Bono, U2’s lead singer, appeared in a gold lame suit, sunglasses and devil’s horns, as a character he called Macphisto.

In the Popmart production, Bono is back on the side of the angels, or trying to be. On Friday night, U2 arrived at the end of a set of disk jockey dance music by Howie B, one of the producers of “Pop.” The 1979 novelty hit by M, “Pop Muzik,” segued into the pulsating electronic rhythm of “Mofo,” from “Pop.” But the first words of that song were, “Looking for to save my save my soul.” Throughout the 130-minute set, U2 revived its most high-minded songs from the 1980s, including “I Will Follow,” “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Where the Streets Have No Name.” They went well with the nine songs U2 played from “Pop,” which show a similar yearning.

Yet there were conspicuous differences between U2’s 1980’s anthems and its new songs. Larry Mullen’s drumming and Adam Clayton’s bass lines have shifted the beat from a triumphal march to choppy, sputtering hip-hop or a dub-reggae undertow. The Edge’s guitar can still ring out open fifths, but also uses crackling, caustic distortion, while prerecorded material sometimes adds dance rhythms or surreal ambience. And in the lyrics, true love and transcendent faith have grown ever more elusive. “They put Jesus in show business,” Bono sang. “Now it’s hard to get in the door.”

While the show’s visuals drew oohs and ahs, U2’s music suffered from apparent first-night jitters. Seemingly sure-fire songs, like the hits “Discotheque” and “Mysterious Ways,” weren’t solid in their grooves. And when U2 played its current single, “Staring at the Sun,” the band couldn’t agree on a tempo; after one attempt fell apart, Bono announced that the group was having “a little family row,” and a second attempt was shaky. But there were also moments when ballads held the stadium spellbound, among them “Please” (from “Pop”), “One” and “With or Without You,” despite distracting images of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series. The song sounded like a plea to a lover, not to a pop icon.

U2 is still pondering the links between art and commerce; Popmart’s solution is to delight the eyes while the songs brood at will. In the show’s final image, the golden arch framed a big red heart. It was as if U2 wanted to insist that even the most commercial efforts can still be genuine.

By Jon Pareles, NY Times

By STEVE HOCHMAN

When you see a TV show open with a guy removing his prosthetic nose, you know you’ve got something different from the usual fare. It’s a great attention-getter for the second installment of “Zoo TV,” the three-week magazine-style series airing on MTV beginning Sunday, and it is the crux of the program. Metaphorically speaking, the series takes off its false nose (in the second episode). Normally on TV, the show asks, can you tell when something is fake?

Or, as the Firesign Theatre so succinctly put it in its ’60s media satires: What is reality?

Spun by creator Roger Trilling out of the media-saturation themes of U2’s 1992-93 concert tour of the same name–and with the blessing, partial financing and score music (but not appearances) from the Irish band — the series consciously attempts to blur the distinctions between truth and fiction. And it comes close to succeeding in several instances.

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By David Childers
The Daily Collegian

‘Pop’
U2
Island Records
B+

ith today’s release of their new LP “Pop,” U2 makes another musical metamorphosis. The jump to a more “techno-pop” sound is not a severe one though. It’s a matter of direction - the direction that the band has taken since their more traditional rock early days. After all, it has been ten years since “The Joshua Tree” gave the band their peak of commercial success.

Six years have gone by since “Achtung Baby” seemingly severed the ties that “The Joshua Tree” planted. With 1993’s “Zooropa,” the move toward more “dance-ability” was begun. And what better name than “Pop” for the album that certainly is the destination that the band was searching for. Never one to be associated with dance halls and $2 beer night, “Pop” has the potential to make U2 new regulars on the scene. The first single, “Discotheque,” was born on the dance floor and should enjoy quite a comfortable life there so long as Alternative Night exist.

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THE PROFESSIONALS
Move over, World. U2 have come back to sort things out. In New York, their latest LP, entitled Pop, pending, Bono gives a beggar $200, but doesn’t pay for his vodka; Edge gets nervous around Neil Diamond; Adam stays on the wagon and Larry holds the whole caper together. “Look,” they shout at Tom Doyle, “we’re not gonna suddenly turn into Bon Jovi.”

It’s 4.30 a.m. in Bono’s hotel suite on the 49th floor, and lights in the top-floor windows of Manhattan skyscrapers sparkle below. In the near distance, the traditionally green-hued peak of the Empire State Building is tonight bathed in cool blue to mark the suitably dramatic occasion of Frank Sinatra’s 81st birthday. Our khaki-capped host - despite an evening necking Stolichnaya vodka and the preceding afternoon downing cheap red wine, which he thinks may or may not be responsible for the nasty rash now itchily developing around his hairline - is in the suite kitchen, expertly jemmying the tops off bottles of lager. A mere seven days after finally completing U2’s ninth studio album, the wryly named Pop, Bono is clearly enjoying his renewed freedom after such a lengthy creative stretch. Earlier in the week, the New York gossip columns had reported U2’s arrival in town with a sighting of their garrulous leader vaulting the bar of a downtown drinking establishment to mix improvised cocktails for Evan Dando and Helena Christensen. Dimming the lights above the lounge table, a silhouetted Bono sparks up a Camel (now a confirmed smoker after he began inhaling the dang cheroots) and the conversation begins to steer bladderedly through a variety of topics that might reasonably appear unrelated to those not pleasantly lathered at this comfortably indecent hour: the hitherto unexamined similarity between Snoop Doggy Dogg and Steely Dan; the fact that Ash’s songwriting suggests to Bono that there’s something going on that’s “smarter than your average bear”; the sorry tale of The General, a Dublin gangster gunned down on his way back from the video shop with a tape of Scarface under his arm. Then there’s a lovingly delivered anecdote about a waster acquaintance of the bands in the early ’80s, who broke into Bono’s flat while U2 were on tour, cooked himself a meal, did the dishes, and then legged it with his TV and video. Months later, the petty burglar cheerfully admitted the crime to his
>famous victim in a Dublin pub.

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Feb. 12 — U2 took to the lingerie department of a K-Mart in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village to announce plans for a suitably extravagant North American tour.

The scene was every bit as surreal as it sounds, with the band performing "Holy Joe" under a K-Mart section sign that read "Pop Group" while a blue light flashed in the background. But after the music was over, Bono pointed out "We’re here on business."

With that, the band discussed details about their new album, Pop (due March 4), and their eagerly awaited PopMart tour. MTV viewers will be able to purchase tickets for U2’s tour before they go sale anywhere else, and can tune in at 8 p.m. Friday, February 14 for more details about tickets. The band will also play the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards in September.

The band’s last outing, the group’s Zoo TV tour was a spectacle in its own right, but U2 declared their plans for an even more ambitious tour this time out, with Bono boasting that it will be "bigger" than before. And, of course, it will not be cheap. "It costs a fortune to look this trashy," Bono deadpanned.
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