Arch Deluxe

In other words, U2 have progressed through the stages of consumer culture from denial to parody to, now, acceptance. This time, there's no Fly or MacPhisto characters to distance the band from the spectacle they've created.

Bono wants to mix up the shopping cart musically, too: "Music is most interesting when it's neither in one camp nor the other, neither simply club-and-DJ culture nor plain-brown-colors rock, but where it's colliding. We want to be right there. I'm surprised there aren't more people. You have Garbage, Nine Inch Nails.... There's not many in this patch — but there will be, because it's fun."

Lyrically, though, Pop ended up being the band's most theologically inclined work since 1981's October — albeit in songs that evoke the absence of God more than His presence — and many of the electronic elements that were hyped in advance got discarded through the song-weeding process. Says Edge: "It was a surprise to me at the end, stepping back to listen to it, to realize how spiritual it was. I thought we were making quite a light record. Some of the lighter pieces just evaporated, and we hung on to the intense ones, even though we tried to get something throwaway on the record ."

One of the techno pieces that made the cut is "Mofo" — though, dealing as it does with Bono's feelings of loss over the mother who died when he was a teen, doubts about his own fathering skills, and a crisis of faith, it hardly qualifies as light. "'Mofo' is probably the most personal song Bono's ever written — certainly the most autobiographical," says drummer Larry Mullen Jr. "It really shook me, because I'd never heard him be so open."

The aggressively melancholy "Mofo" opens the PopMart shows, with Bono vamping lines like "Miss you, Mother." When the set goes straight from that into 1980's "I Will Follow," hard-core fans know the connection goes deeper than just juxtaposing new and old, for "Follow" was about Bono's late mother as well. Isn't it a little bizarre to have such a vulnerable hello-how-ya-doin' for a show whose outsize staging veers between a neon-lit Shop Rite and a circus?

"Yeah, it's a gambit. But," Bono adds, "I'll make sure to wear some shades."