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 The Legends of Laurel Canyon
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die
It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best
Karen Dalton
Transfiguration of Vincent
M. Ward
Muswell Hillbillies
Kinks
Christmas in the Heart
Bob Dylan
Glitter and Doom Live
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Let It Roll: The Best of George Harrison
George Harrison
Secret, Profane & Sugarcane
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Songs Around the World
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Is it too soon to get all nostalgic about the ‘90s? “Popmart” was a soup-to-nuts live experience from 1997 that captured the multi-dimensional, multi-media experience of a band with multi-cultural appeal, but did the world’s biggest rock and roll band need to go this far? I still genuinely like U2 – I say this because I sense a backlash developing, perhaps due to overexposure – but the show documented in this DVD focuses inordinately on the spectacle, which has the net result of dehumanizing the band and the emotional content of its music. “Popmart” places U2 closer to Michael Jackson than, say, Eddie Vedder, and that is not a good thing, especially from a contemporary perspective. To the band’s credit, they do an admirable job of breaking down the semi-impenetrable wall that they built for themselves, but the intrinsic flaw in the tour’s presentation lies in its bigness.
The lighting designer and stage technicians deserve extensive credit for creating something so spectacular that it could work at Epcot, but in the process, each fan is forced to decide if the special effects aid or impair the band’s ability to connect. For me, it’s all too much. The whole lemon business is utterly ridiculous, suggesting a millionaire’s version of Spinal Tap self-irony (or self-delusion). For the first part of the show, U2 perform like 25th century android entertainers on Alpha Centauri. The bar scene in “Star Wars” is downright quaint in comparison. Yet the songs survive the onslaught. “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and “Until the End of the World” seem to thrive in the ambivalence of the imagery, while “New Year’s Day” and “Pride (In the Name of Love” puncture the airtight choreography by virtue of their innate strength as songs of human spirit.
The stage lighting is so elaborate that I couldn’t help but wonder if the poor people of Mexico City were experiencing a brown-out. Furthermore, the elaborate backing tracks that accompany the band’s performance left me wondering if they were genuinely live, or pre-recorded. Such production values give the impression that nothing was left to chance. A missed cue, flubbed stage direction or a bad note appears impossible under these circumstances. For the band, this must have felt like a victory, but to fans of the music, it was disconcerting, as if an airtight vacuum sucked the vibrancy from the stage. As a timepiece, “Popmart” is an extraordinary document, but I am grateful that U2 stripped things down on subsequent tours. The trappings of the “Popmart” trek suggest contemporary relevance, but in an age when we already felt alienated and betrayed by our leaders, did we need automatons conveying spectacle before heart? No, no, no. In this day and age, we’d all have welcomed a little more humanity, please.
Grade: 
 
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