PopMart: Live from Mexico City

PopMart: Live from Mexico City is a concert film by Irish rock band U2. It was shot on 3 December 1997 at Foro Sol in Mexico City, Mexico, during their PopMart Tour. It was released on VHS and Video CD in November 1998, and was re-released in September 2007 on DVD. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video in 2000. Select songs from the release were featured on the 2000 live album Hasta la Vista Baby! U2 Live from Mexico City.
The show opens with the non-dance version of "Mofo", and contains standard PopMart setlist inclusions. Bono forgets some of the lyrics of "Desire" during the acoustic set. While minor edits were made before release (such as Bono telling a fan to turn his laser pointer off at the end of "New Year's Day") this is the only U2 home video to date that contains a concert's complete setlist. Selected tracks from this performance were later released on the 2000 exclusive fan club-only live album, Hasta la Vista Baby!
Beginning on 8 June 2000, PopMart: Live from Mexico City was webcast online for three weeks using Burst.com's streaming technology.
The concert was one of the first titles slated for release in the DVD format and previews for it appeared on PolyGram DVDs of the time. PolyGram quietly cancelled the release. In July 2007 Universal Music announced a September 2007 DVD release, under the Island Records label. The DVD was released in one and two-disc editions, similar to the preceding DVD release of Zoo TV: Live from Sydney. Both editions feature the concert in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, remixed with Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, and PCM Stereo audio. The two-disc format features the following bonus features on disc two:
On 15 March 2021, U2 announced a concert broadcast series called "The Virtual Road" in partnership with YouTube, by which four of the group's past concert films were remastered and streamed on the band's official YouTube channel for 48 hours each. Popmart: Live from Mexico City began streaming on 1 April, with a pre-recorded performance by Mexican musician Carla Morrison serving as an "opening act". To coincide with the broadcast event, a four-track EP of songs from PopMart: Live from Mexico City was released to streaming services and digital stores.
Rob Brunner of Entertainment Weekly said that "unless your living room is the size of the Mexican stadium where this show was shot... the TV version of the PopMart behemoth will seem numbingly excessive, despite energetic versions of 'Where the Streets Have No Name' and 'New Year's Day'". Ben Wener of the Orange County Register said the video "convincingly argues that the much-ballyhooed south of the border jaunt.. wasn't as bad as first imagined" and that though it is unlikely to change fans' minds about their "mediocre tunes" of the time, "it does prove that, in the show's best moments, U2 was trying to accomplish something beyond flash and kitsch". Lawrie Zion of The Age said, "though hardly groundbreaking, the Popmart tour turned out to be an above-average fan pleaser and the video shows a band that obviously knows how to get the most out of the stadium environment". She singled out the Edge's solo performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" as the highlight.
Reviewing the DVD, Raoul Hernandez of The Austin Chronicle lamented the group's wardrobe and lemon prop from the tour, adding, "Equally dated, Pop's disco beats can't smoke and mirror their compositional backbone of the two-hour set, 'Gone,' 'Last Night on Earth,' acoustic Bono/Edge duet 'Staring at the Sun,' 'Please,' and encore 'Discothèque' highlighting the distracted circus onstage." Bob Gendron of the Chicago Tribune thought the tour pushed "ironic spectacle to laughable extremes", with a stage design that dwarfed U2 and silly attire choices. Despite this, he said, "Sometimes the biggest mistakes make for great entertainment", adding: "The pageantry works on DVD. See it if only to witness an ostentatious concept that raises the question of why nobody possessed the sense to prevent it from happening." John Kosik of the Associated Press called the DVD "an indispensable snapshot of the band at the close of the most adventurous period of their career". He praised the group's reworking of past songs and said the transition between Pop's "Mofo" and early single "I Will Follow" shows "that even U2's wildest experiments are still rooted in their past – and that notion is sprinkled throughout the two-hour concert".
All songs were written by U2, except for "Pop Muzik," which was written by M's Robin Scott.
"Pop Muzik" and "Lemon" (Perfecto mix) are pre-recorded and played as the band makes its grand entrances through the audience at the beginning of the show and via mirrorball lemon for the first encore.
Selections from the Mexico City concert were released on the live album Hasta la Vista Baby! U2 Live from Mexico City. The album was released exclusively to members of U2's fan club magazine, Propaganda, in 2000. It features 14 songs from the band's 25-song performance.
Footnotes
Bibliography