00:00I think, in retrospect, the pop album has been slated more than it should be and partly because
00:05Bono himself has sort of disowned it, saying, oh, well, it was a rush job and we needed to get it
00:10done before going out on tour, but actually it was incorporating a lot of the interesting sounds
00:16at the time and techno and dance and really that slightly jaded, flippant tone. I mean,
00:25that was very late 90s and maybe with further hindsight, if you like, people will look at the
00:30pop album again and think, well, actually, you know, that was an important album and a really
00:34important part of their development. Following the relative disaster of pop, the first seeds
00:39of U2's millennial rebirth would be sown in 1998. Accompanied by the release of the single
00:46The Sweetest Thing, a revamp of a 1987 B-side, U2 unveiled their first greatest hits compilation,
00:53The Best of 1980 to 1990. With the focus on their earlier, less obtuse material,
01:01the band was putting out a significant message. The experimental U2 of recent years
01:06was hitting the back burner. The mood was being set for what was soon to come.
01:12She won't catch me, I'll break my fall, oh, the sweetest thing.
01:19I mean, it's interesting that in 98 they released The Best Of and that was the beginning of their
01:25move back to the traditional U2. And I really think that that was sort of like saving a marriage,
01:32basically. You can argue that The Best Of was some, you know, divinely calculated avenge in
01:38the sense that it was a sop to the old U2 audience and the world at large that they
01:44were coming back with a record that was more orthodox, palatable and mainstream. So I guess
01:49in that sense it was calculated. On the other hand, you'd have to say that they took the concept of
01:55The Best Of very, very seriously and were willing to make an artistic statement out of it in itself.
02:02And I think they deserve a certain degree of artistic credit for that and a certain degree
02:07of a pat on the back from the business point of view of, hey, you know, they probably made
02:11ultimately far more money out of constructing a decent Best Of as an anthology as opposed to
02:16a cheap cash-in greatest hits, which most other artists consistently have done.
