So what would you do if you found yourself at the end of 1993 in the world's most sought-after band? You started out by taking close to a year to record the traumatic, yet brilliant, career reinvention called Achtung Baby Then you spent the next two years on the road hauling around one of the largest stadium productions ever; from the Lake-land, Florida swamps to Tokyo's neon dawn, completing 157 concerts on the way In the middle of an that touring you defied logic by using your "vacation" during an all-too-brief recess between a U.S. leg and the rest of the world to start a series of spontaneous recording sessions in Dublin. As you fastidiously chased the muse and tentative riffs became completed songs you suddenly realized you had run out of time, the European tour began the very next day Nevertheless, you were now fully hooked on your new music and determined to finish an album. You solved the problem by jetting back over the Channel nightly to finish the sessions. Next day you flew back, slept on the Zoo-plane, crashed after soundcheck, picked up 2,5 when, where, and if even Somehow it all got done-another profound musical statement called the Zooropa album, its first video, and the ongoing gigs, but now you're completed drained, not just physically from an that nonstop activity but in full mental remission too. You've got a head full of traffic and as that celebrity as pleasant as it may be at times, doesn't help at an. So what do you do?

The Kurt Cobain route to solace is never a serious consideration, fortunately, since your band's wheels spin on more solid ground. The alluring possibility of a drug-induced calm, the musician's preferred route for years, from Charlie Parker to Eric Clapton to Weiland, is recognized for the annihilative path it is. That sort of comfort reorganizes your priorities in a fairly parasitic way and it may be awhile before you get started on that follow-up, then eventually a comeback album. You could go into a self-imposed isolation, hiding out in your recently purchased and fabulous compound that you never saw because you were never home. Why not enjoy the marble tub or the stables-you paid for them. Or you could go on a quest, seeking out your guru and sitting lotus like on the road to spiritual enlightenment. If you turned the world on its head during your three year; globe-trotting, action-packed adventure story that read like a musical Indiana Jones episode, you've got a right to be confused. You let go of the steering wheel, you got the crush. But now filled by the experience, you're tottering on the brink, wondering if you can ever get back to normal life and then if you can dream it an up again. You're out there on the perimeter; seriously questioning whether or not your bungee cord back to reality is still attached.

But, after returning to loved ones and familiar places, reacquainting themselves with some semblance of normalcy at the beginning of 1994, the drive that has bonded the four members of U2 into their remarkably creative unit began to reassert itself Rather than cast themselves into that narcotic haze, isolation, madness, or any of the destructive possibilities that trash media dies to report stories about, U2's members chose instead to listen to the mantra that has always ordered, and then disordered, their lives. The piper-like thrill of discovering new ways to write a song, use new~sounds and, as Bono has said, "trying to make this record we've always got in our heads." Whether it's being channeled from some higher unconscious source, inspired by gospel singers or street musicians, absorbed in the pounding acidhouse beats at some disco, heard briefly during an elevator ride, or glimpsed in the darter and knock of some industrial machine, the members of U2 have thrived and remained sane by chasing their musical aspirations. By their own admission, a short attention span for similar experiences keeps the four band members moving forward, each album making stylistic and technical leaps from its predecessor The concerns of career: the marketplace, imaging, competition, and sales-as important as they are-always come second.

So now after three years, there's a new U2 album caned Pop and a major American tour about to arrive. A lot of people who've heard the album are already saying it's a real departure for the group. But looking at the band's musical history; its albums, and its many side projects shows that Pop is anything but, and exactly that. Huh? How can those two opposites co exist? Easy In U2's world, departure is something that has come with every release. If that fact is accepted, then the strangeness of U2's new album is to be understood and welcomed even before the music on it has been enjoyed and acclaimed over time. New bears, fresh sounds, and a different mood than any previous U2 album is something about POP that is necessary-or else this particular band wouldn't have any reason or desire to continue. That the band members choose to use each album to explore their own musical hungering rather than reaffirm the success of previous work may be disappointing to some fans at first, but in the long run it's what we've come to expect and what we need from U2. Music business pros are even more prone to the initial disappointment. After the War album's success, how many radio programmers felt thwarted by the mysterious swirling colors, murky mix, and conspicuous lack of radio-friendly tracks on the following Unforgettable Fire? For most, the single "Pride" was the only thing that got that album on the air How' many expressed dismay with 1993's Zooropa when its cyber-flow of synthesized beats and soulful rhythms squeezed the industrial hard rock of Achtung Baby into a recent memory?

U2's artistic hunger isn't something that developed recently or even in mid career. The instinct developed quickly even as the very first rehearsals of a young Paul "Bono" Hewson, David "Edge" Evans, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen began. The members quickly realized that the versions of popular songs they were attempting to cover sounded horribly lame, exposing their own instrumental shortcomings. Can you even imagine U2 rehearsing the Beach Boys tunes they said they did? The fledgling outfit solved that problem by working out its own sounds and, indirectly, an original style-ringing atmospheric overtones on top of an aggressive punk-inspired beat-which found its way onto Boy, the 1980 debut album. With an already airtight rhythm supporting a singer who possessed little technique, but plenty of fire, and a guitarist whose sparse, chiming tones shared nothing in common with the fast-fingered, million-note solos in fashion at the time, Boy dropped into the scene like a bomb. Well, it was a bomb if you were close enough to hear it and those who did stopped dead in their tracks. In 1980, bands were either hard rock outfits or keyboard-driven new wave dance combos, so U2 sat apart from everybody except for perhaps, Echo and the Bunnymen or Teardrop Explodes (with whom at first they were often compared). But even at this early stage, the following year's October album showed the band flexing mightily in the studio by learning to use more instrumentation like piano (which Edge taught himself during the sessions), trumpets and eerie-sounding uilleann pipes. Greater strides were taken with the lyrical content, a more confident Bono opening up to write bluntly about the band's strong Christian orientation.

War was the defining moment. It marked the first time the band showed a willingness to dismantle its perceived musical strengths for the sake of artistic growth. Gone were the atmospheric, echo-drenched guitar landscapes that Edge had conjured up. His axe was out and chopping wood in jagged swipes on "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Red Light," in your face and visceral on "New Year's Day" and "like a Song." Larry's drums emerged from the mix to sit up front, real close and personal, the military cadence for the former anthem opening the album like a smack across the face. Themes-sages were vivid and poignant, Bono using the graphic images of war to get across the band's album-length sermon about surrender and brotherhood. Although U2 had broken with its own tradition, the changes on War produced a global hit and the first time most people had ever heard of this mercurial band from Ireland. Music industry marketing logic would dictate another smart-bomb in the same location to consolidate and enlarge the audience, but U2 chose to do no such thing when, in 1984, they reconvened to record after a long year of touring Already bored with the recording process, the band wanted to shake it down to its very toes. U2 hired the esteemed artist-producer Brian Eno to reorient their own artistic habits, then drove off to Slane Castle north of Dublin to escape the familiar confines of their customary Windmill Lane Studios In a freely floating summer session stream-of-consciousness ideas poured from the members and were put to tape in the various grand rooms of Slane. Bono described the project and the freedom it brought as "breaking up the band and reforming it under the same name and the same people-only [this time] there were no rules." Al-though further grueling months of revamp work were required back at Windmill, what emerged as the album The Unforgettable Fire, with the exception of its one hit "Pride," was hardly traditional. The drums were now muffled, Edge swathing the beat in thick layers of lush instrumentation as a dense web of strings and keyboards transformed U2's previous guitar-driven approach. Many of Bono's ad-libbed first takes were left in place by Eno because they captured what the producer believed to be essential moments. Al-though most of the early reviews of The Unforgettable Fire caned attention to flaws, they lauded the group's courage to experiment. The album's, beauty remains in its out-of-focus quality, an impressionistic painting with the artist showing possibilities, not necessarily answers.

Given two years to become accustomed to U2's new direction, most everyone was thrown off when The Joshua Tree arrived. When asked to compare the two, Edge told me, "It's more finished, more in focus. We attempted from the onset to work within the idiom of the song, which is something we never really thought too much about in the past. [We] accepted the idea that a song was [a] straightforward arrangement stripped down." Those songs would go on to become some of U2's biggest hits. They exhibited newly acquired fascinations with blues, gospel, folk, and country styles that the band members had encountered while touring America. Again, U2's ideas did not reflect the popular spirit of the time which favored brightly polished, thumping pop, and faux metal's hair band culture, but The Joshua Tree did help spark a back-to-the-roots movement which was soon reflected in the music of John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. The Irish band's 1988 movie project Rattle and Hum reaffirmed its explorations of roots music, but effectively ended another musical phase. When U2 returned to America three years later, the group would inaugurate another one of its surprising chameleonlike shifts.

How many programmers and fans scratched their heads while listening to the angry snarl of "The Fly" for the first time? In 1991 U2 returned with its rough, raw and heavily-industrialized Achtung Baby. Although this dark, brooding music had been afoot for years in the work of Trent Reznor and many lesser-known bands, never before had an artist of this magnitude hitched its star to such a dubious possibility. Achtung Baby, however, was filled with such great songs and the band members' mastery of the new sounds was so complete that the album's alien presence surrendered itself after just a handful of listens, becoming for listeners a natural part of the U2 canon. In that one statement, U2: band of the eighties became a force to be reckoned with in the nineties. This is more than just a neat journalistic parable-the chaotic shift in musical priorities between 1989 and 1991 sent many flourishing groups accustomed to arena and stadium tours back to doing their own laundry; The old world was gobbled up by the new school so suddenly that many bands laboring in the studio unaware found their eventual releases to be lamentably obsolete. If Nirvana's Nevermind effectively ended the previous decade, then Achtung Baby kicked it away to a safe distance. Speculation about U2's following release favored that the band would toss off aback-to-the-roots album in unplugged form, a style that had picked up tremendous popularity and had been used by U2 itself during the small stage segment of the Zoo-TV tour But we got Zooropa instead, a cybernetic-inspired curve ball that took off into icily soulful electronic worlds. Even if one expected the shift, the forewarned still had to be surprised by a bubbling computerized tale of sin and redemption that featured Johnny Cash and the Talking Heads-like take on "Disco Duck" entitled "Lemon."

Now it's 1997 and four years have passed since Zooropa. The band members have been far from idle, however. Larry settled in New York City for awhile, took drum lessons, and joined with Adam to play on a Nanci Griffith album. Then the rhythm team surprised us by revamping Lalo Schifrin's famous sixties TV theme on the big screen version of Mission: Impossible, turning it into a sizable international hit. Bono teamed up with Dublin music-mate Gavin Friday to write and record two songs for the soundtrack of In The Name Of The Father, then grabbed Edge and went off to Italy to sing with Pavarotti and raise money for Bosnian relief U2 lent "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me," a Led Zeppelin-derived rocker deemed unsuitable for the streamlined Zooropa, to the producers of the Batman Forever movie and soundtrack album. The much anticipated release of the latest James Bond thriller Goldeneye featured a brand-new Bono/Edge-composed title track delivered by the sultry Tina Turner On less-restrictive and often avant-garde projects such as these the members of U2 often "road test" their solo ideas into eventual group breakthroughs, the most important to lip being the band's involvement with Eno in the Passengers album. Essentially this 1995 project featured U2 as the musical backing unit for their familiar mentor on a series of fourteen soundtrack songs accompanying obscure and sometimes imagined films. Many of the devices and industrial sounds that had wired U2's two previous albums into the nineties were revisited, as well as haunting ambient textures and an introduction to hip-hop, especially on the cut "Elvis Ate America" which featured frantic scratching and an in-your-face mix from Howie B. U2 escaped its own mortal coil to indulge its musical whims as inspired sidemen, free from the pressure of producing an official band album.

Pop will generate as much of the usual head-scratching that accompanies any new U2 album. Although fans should now expect the band to essentially reinvent itself with every release, few rarely predict the results. The biggest rumor about the album was that it would be a techno tour de force, helping to knock the alternative dance format into the fun-blown mainstream. Not true. Bone spent a lot of time talking about hip- and trip-hop leading to speculation that the album would sound like a Portishead or Tricky release. Again, not true. One other idea that gained favor was that U2 would march dumb and happy to the commercial landscape into which Phil Collins dragged Genesis, a lucrative but terminal move. Don't worry, Pop is not Abacab. But, all these influences and even some classic-sounding U2 musical elements do make their appearances on the new album. It is all of those things, yet in typical tl2 manner, the influences are so incorporated into the band's chemistry, so enjoyed and learned, that they are completely natural in the members' delivery Howie B. was retained as a kindred spirit, working with Flood, who twiddled the knobs for Zooropa, to influence and channel U2's fusion of ideas into the new album.

After a couple of listens, Pop sounds like three albums: a danceable techno introduction, more traditional rock and singles-oriented section, and then a final "laid-back" trip-hop grouping of songs. With more listens, these distinct parts fade into a whole, which sounds more restrained and introspective than any U2 release since The Unforgettable Fire. The new release is held together with the trippy and ambient house music that has formed a scene in the nineties out of electronic music and soul fans. It binds together and runs through all of the songs on the album. The most energy comes from the single "Discotheque" (a tongue-in-cheek update of "Lemon") as well as the full-blown techno rave-up called "Mofo." Both will sound alien to many fans since they leave the rock firmament solidly behind, but the former song still pounds along to Larry Mullen's unrelenting and familiar thump. The latter might be 'tailor made for the disco, but right there in the middle shimmers a guitar tone right out of The Unforgettable Fire. Yeah, this is new territory, but it's still U2.Just as "One" formed a touchstone in the midst of Achtung Baby, "If God Will Send His Angels" sits like a pearl in this new oyster An older song, dating back to the Zooropa sessions but never recorded until now, this beautiful ballad moves along with a light house shuffle and Bono's low-key delivery. As in "With or Without You," Edge caps this melody with a similar sounding guitar figure. Not too much imagination is required to peg this one as a future multiformat staple.

Edge explained to me in 1993 about how the sounds of the guitar had become cliche, losing their power to move a listener He spent a great deal of time trying to find new sounds for Zooropa and only partially succeeded, the keyboards grabbing more of his eventual attention on that album. On Pop, the guitar regains much more of the once-pivotal role it commanded on most of U2's earlier work. Edge combines familiar sounds with a plethora of fresh approaches. Already out of the gate as the second single and a favorite at rock and alternative stations is "Staring at the Sun," its appeal owing as much to Bono's distinctive chorus as Edge's distorted "underwater guitar" "Last Night on Earth" and "Gone" are other rock tracks before the album gives way to softer, soulful textures on "Playboy Mansion," "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" and "Please." "Miami" is a hip-hop speed bump in between that rolls over a tape loop of studio junk and sounds, punctuated by buzzsawing guitar and Bono's shouts. Finally, "Wake Up Dead Man" offers a startling coda to those who believed that U2's singer had abandoned his spiritual inspirations on the past two albums and drenched his hands, MacPhisto-like, into the mortal world of lust and sin. That he may have done to a certain extent, but this track acknowledges that Bono is, like the rest of us, a lonely traveler in this world desperately in need of heavenly succor.

If you look closely enough, you will find some similarities with past U2 efforts and even a few obvious strategies used on previous songs The important thing, though, is that a fresh embrace with style and influence easily overwhelms these older devices. They are merely used to help U2 attain its new goals and evolve creatively Imagination and risk take the front seat on the latest album just as they did with the group's previous work. The job for programmers then, is to try to listen to Pop for enjoyment, allowing the album to work its magic before the business side of us all tries to place the music in a box, concluding its appropriateness for this or that particular format, or what single goes with what station. Alter all, truly great albums oftentimes lead taste and trends around by the nose, into and through barriers that we've erected around ourselves. Whether or nor Pop is a great album only gets proven in time, but it should be given the proper chance. That's our side of the deal. U2 has already completed theirs. As Bono stated at the Grammys a few years back, "We shall continue to abuse our position and fuck up the mainstream." It was a great challenge to themselves. Funny that it's reached fruition on an album as ironically entitled as Pop

Carter Alan