FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Popmart is where we live, neon lights beckoning us to Hogan Road strip malls, drive-through fast food that overwhelms us with salt and sweet but no flavor, gin-soaked olives in martinis stirred with swizzle sticks, lemons salesmen sell us using smoke and mirrors, cartoon characters living our vicarious lives on television, faceless exotic dancers, electric color without substance, spectacle for a price. Popmart is us on tour with U2.

Critics of the Irish lads have focused on their failure to fulfill expectation. Some are calling the tour Flopmart. While sales of their “Pop” album have been as good as they were for “Achtung Baby” and “Zooropa,” Spice Girls top the charts. Each performance costs $250,000 to stage, sending shivers through bean counters when not all the band’s appearances have sold out.

The only supergroup doing stadiums this summer, U2 kicked off the tour in glitzy Las Vegas in April and ended their first leg before sold-out crowds at Foxborough Stadium July 1-2. The sound that flop makes didn’t happen. The sound that “Pop” makes did.

Emerging Wednesday night before a stage set with a 100-foot yellow arch, a 100-foot swizzle stick topped by a 12-foot olive, a 40-foot lemon and the biggest television screen ever to beckon to a couch potato, the band began the two-hour, 20-something song performance with Pop’s “Mojo” and “Last Night on Earth” with the audience picking up the refrain “You got to give it away,” and front man Bono body-surfing the crowd.

With cartoon figures on the giant TV screen blowing each other away in a glitzy geometry of electronic bloodletting, “Until the End of the World” led into a carnival of neon lighting up the arch and swizzle stick and a celebration of “New Year’s Day” with the brilliant blues and bright, bright white and orange orange of the spotlights on the crowd.

The Edge, the man in black with the black cowboy hat, was masterful on the guitar. Bleach blond Adam Clayton laid down the bass in orange jumpsuit and Poptart T-shirt. Larry Mullen, with the face of a bodhisattva, drummed the soul of Zen into the music of “Pop.” A spangled suited Bono urged “Pride” while the audience sang “In the Name of Love.”

Everyone knows the words, everyone sings the songs.

“This is where we live now,” says Bono. This is “what you might call neon America … It’s the light of this country … Anyway, here we are with a 40-foot lemon,” breaking into “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” segueing into the classic “Stand by me,” the crowd singing, then “All I Want is You” ending with Bono and the Edge at the end of a finger stage snaking out into the middle of the audience for an acoustic “Staring at the Sun, Happy to Go Blind.”

The Edge holds forth in a giant karoake version of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” and then the band is slickly back into tropical images, techno drumbeats, Bono in a bowler hat and check jacket schmoozing with a woman hoisted onstage from the audience, then a heavy techno guitar running into 15 spotlights piercing the night sky to the sounds of “Bullet the Blue Sky,” a comic book jet fighter launching a rocket, exploding a target, Bono with an inside out stars and stripes umbrella fending off fallout.

“Popmart is where we live,” he says.

From there, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” into a 2001 space odyssey tunnel of color, U2 is not nostalgic, not tied to a greatest hits gig. They remix them, rearrange them, re-create them in new sequences, repackage them in Popmart and resell them. Everything is for sale, anything becomes possible welling from the spirit of U2, the image of a white dove winging its way on that huge screen.

Then the stage goes dark, flames flicker. In the lemon, a small red light, then brilliant blue washes the screen, a spaceship appears, a light comes from it, a dancer materializes on screen, her face covered. The lemon becomes a mirror ball, moves out toward the end of the stage in a cloud of smoke. The top of the lemon rises revealing the band leaning against white lights. “Discotheque” booms, and the rains come down into “With or Without You.”

“This is where we live,” says Batman Bono before flashing Andy Warhol images of pop icons from Jimi Hendrix to Marilyn Monroe as he sings the glam-trash “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me.”

“Popmart is a big family,” says Bono, as the band wraps with “One,” flying angels, crawling babies, dancing flowers and chains of people coalescing within a huge heart. Where we live.