Wrong

1994

Well, that happened.

REM’s latest album is out and it’s hard to see it as anything other than a pretty huge step backwards for a band on a seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory. Perhaps that’s being too hard on a band who are so obviously trying to do the right thing in a difficult position, and maybe the landscape has shifted around them. Of course, it’s not REM’s fault that the alternative scene that birthed and nurtured their growth in the past decade has become the dominant form of rock music since the Nirvanaquake of 1992 and the rise of the Pacific Northwest scene, but it can’t help but make me sad to say the following words: REM has gone grunge.

OK, those last four words have taken it out of me. I’m going to take a quick rest.

Before I go on too much further, let me just say that I’m not saying that grunge is in itself a bad word, and certainly REM has hinted at moving in this heavier direction as far back, say, Turn You Inside Out from 1998’s Green. No I like grunge. Some of my best friends are grunge. Well, not really, but whatever. This album isn’t bad because it’s GRUNGE. It’s bad because REM are not grunge. And, especially after the ecstatic pop of Out of Time and the autumnal grace of Automatic for the People, it feels like REM is soft-pedaling their approach, and pushing those pedals with shoes that don’t really fit. For the record, those shoes are the classic black Chuck Taylors worn by two of the more prominent influences on Monster, the still-lamented Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth leader Thurston Moore.

Let’s deal with Kurt first. His suicide in April is still rippling through music and Monster’s track Let Me In comes in quick succession after Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Sleeps WIth Angels release last month. Where Neil Young opted for a more elegiac tribute, REM go right for the emotion, with a song meant to directly appeal to a friend in trouble. The problem is that Let Me In is drenched in overdriven guitars and the kind of allegorical imagery that Michael Stipe used to excel in before you could really understand what he was saying. It’s called Let Me In, but it pushes you away so aggressively, and comes towards the end of an already punishing record.

Thurston Moore’s presence here is literal on one track (the pseudo-sexy Crush With Eyeliner), but his noisy guitar effects are all over the record. Moore’s (and Sonic Youth’s) abstract chaos does not match well with Peter Buck’s 60’s melodicism. There is  none of Buck’s trademark jangle, and the mandolin and acoustic instruments of the past 3 records are sadly left to gather dust as well. Having said that, the Sonic Youth influence really only extends to the use of the distortion pedal, which is really only a small part of the SY aesthetic and makes REM’s efforts here feel like tourism. It’s hard to not be cynical about the aging band’s intentions here.

So, there are a couple of bright spots. The first single, What’s the Frequency Kenneth, is pretty thrilling, and Tongue is a wonderful oddity. Stipe sings Tongue in a falsetto that provides the only sexy moment in a record that is trying pretty hard to be sexy and trashy. 

But so much more of it is just boring. I still can’t tell the difference between I Took Your Name and Crush With Eyeliner. King of Comedy, Star 69, and Circus Envy try to sound industrial, another flavor that does not suit REM. The last song, You, ends before a single aspect of it makes an impression. Worst of all is Strange Currencies, which is literally a slightly sped-up Everybody Hurts with (of course) distorted guitars.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Monster. There’s no chance that REM would never made a band album, right? Getting nine albums into a music career is an impressive feat given the high standards REM has set for itself. No reason to abandon the ship. And there is a tour supporting this album, the former roadhog’s first since the Green world campaign. Maybe Monster was something that needed to be made to purge something from their system. Let’s hope that this album is just something that happened and that we can all move on from here.

2013

Well, let’s just say that lots of other things have happened since then. 

One of those things is that Monster now feels like the key third part of a trilogy from the world-beating part of REMs career. Yes, I like it more now than I did then. A LOT more. Everything that felt false, flat, and (gross) flaccid back in 1994 now feels like REM’s most emotionally direct and fun record.

Albums are fixed, but our feelings aren’t. Why does the 40-harrumph version of me love an album that almost physically hurt my 25 year-old self? It’s tempting to say that my standards have been eroded by time, that everything from my younger self is better now than it felt at the time. Nostalgia smoothes over every crack. Perhaps there’s something else that I was craving from music in 1994, but REM was celebrating it’s 10th anniversary as my favorite band. They were my band and formed the bedrock of my personal musical foundation. Perhaps that accounts for the bitterness of my reaction to Monster at the time, which I have endeavored to recreate above. Monster was sufficiently different from what proceeded and that difference alone was enough to distort my view. 

It’s foggy now, but I remember taking grunge pretty personally. The weird music was taking over, but it wasn’t the 60s influenced guitar pop that I grew up on. It was this aggressive macho stuff that I fled from in high school. And REM was where I fled to. This sounds so melodramatic now, but there was a time when “alternative” was an epithet. Post-Nirvana, it became the standard all of a sudden and the social cost to being different was nullified. I always felt like an outcast in high school, although I now see that as so much a product of my own actions than it ever was anyone else deciding to keep me out of some secret club.

Maybe there was some other distorting agent. At that point, I was still pretty uncomfortable with, uh, what do you call it?, sex.I remember having crushes on girls that they. Could. Not. Find. Out. About. Mind you, I was out of college at this point. Lame, right? So here come my heroes, who had heretofore never troubled my ears with anything funky. Except they’re now kind of drunk and wearing a shirt with spangles on it and just putting. It. Out. There. Things that no one was supposed to know about. Secret things that were just between me and my own brain. Of course, marriage (or any long-term relationship) demystifies all of that stuff, quite wonderfully so. In any case, that barrier to enjoying Monster has been fucked away (high five).

As someone who thinks about music and other cultural ephemera, it’s always tempting to confuse my reaction to a thing with the thing itself. Monster is not the thing I hear. it’s the thing that REM made. There is an argument to make that all expressive art is incomplete until it is reacted to, and I’m sympathetic to that argument, but I have to remember that my own biases can be corrosive agents. My biases can, and should, be questioned at every opportunity, especially the ones that feel like capital-T truth. For so long, Monster felt to me like the beginning of the end of my pure, my innocent love of something important. In fact, every album REM has released since Monster has cracked away further at that foundational love. Or at least that’s how I used to feel before I started listening again. 

I was wrong about this album. I wonder what else I’m wrong about.

The world is collapsing around our ears.

This has been seen before in other places, but moving here so it's all under one umbrella. And maybe you've never seen it before. So here it is!

The spring of 1991 was swelling with possibilities. I was about to graduate college, and my friends and I had just decided on a post-graduate course that felt...revolutionary. That spring felt warmer and wetter to me than any I remember. As if all of this wasn't enough to get excited about, my favorite band in the world was about to release their 7th album. REM had made a successful jump to Warner Brothers with Green, and the following tour had put them on the cusp of world domination. I wasn't the only one about to graduate...

The album's release was proceeded by "Losing My Religion," which integrated Green's mandolin fixation into the kind of durable popular song whose impact would not be diminished by heavy rotation. In fact, even 17 years later, it still works. The plaintive melody, the hand claps, the familiar mandolin riff, and typically inscrutable Stipe-isms may not have been enough to overtake Natalie Cole's "Unforgettable" ghostly duet at the Grammys, but it's still the kind of song that always feels good to hear. I've never been sure about what it is about this song that made it so huge, and yet so personal. Like so many REM songs, the words sound like musical hooks, instead of the delivery device for some sort of message. This song makes me feel like Forrest Gump, so I'll just finish my paragraph by saying "that's all I have to say about that."

The album's other big single is the notorious "Shiny Happy People." This song has always been a pretty huge dividing line between fans. Actually, that's not quite the case. It's been a dividing line between me and every other REM fan, as I seem to be the only person in the world who likes this song. I get why people hate this song, but man every time it kicks in I don't care. What can I say? I've always been a sucker for the string intro, Kate Pierson is a babe, and no song that has Mike Mills singing on it can be all bad. What is wrong with you, world? Is it the words? Can you seriously not deal with shiny happy people who like to hold hands and laugh? I mean, generally I want to punch those people in the face too, but I don't hate them so much that even a song that talks about them makes me mad. I like plenty of songs about people that I probably couldn't stand if I met them in real life. Strip away the words, and you have a beautifully constructed song. Maybe you can't do it. Maybe you're incapable of ever truly being happy. Or shiny. But try and take it on those terms the next time in comes up in shuffle. Listen to how the strings weave in-and-out. Luxuriate in the Rickenbacker arpeggios. What's wrong with your life? For 3:46, not much at all.

Each of those singles are followed by songs played pretty extensively on the preceeding Green tour, "Low" and "Belong." "Low" is naked and dramatic and sounds nothing like anything else they had ever done to that point. Although the words are obscure, the song feels so personal and intense that it's placement (track 3) threatens to derail the album. But one of the pleasures of Out of Time is its variation. "Low" is one of the few songs on the album to not have any layered vocals, any layered anything really. It's just bongos, creepy organ, strings, and some seriously angry, but still controlled, guitar. And of course, Michael Stipe chasing himself down some strange wordholes, focusing on a right white bright light, that again doesn't really make any literal sense, but still feels ominous and kind of sexy. The weaving strings add texture, and some valuable almost-dissonance during the threatening-to-unhinge bridge. "Belong" is all texture, but still beautifully constructed.

Maybe a bad rap that Out of Time can take is just that: without question, it's a beautifully made record that chooses to not really put too much on the line emotionally. Well, REM have never been an especially revealing band, and they've never really lost their cool on record. It's not really a question of commitment per se, but rather an honest struggle between communication and privacy. That tension has always been in REM's music ("9-9": "conversation, fear"), but Out of Time is on a bigger scale. They're a bigger band, with a bigger recording budget and the support of a bigger label, but they're not necessarily bigger people and the problems they're trying to solve with music aren't bigger either. To some, this might result in some emotional distance and lend the album a certain coldness. Faced with professional-sized salaries and opportunity, they made a professional album, detractors might say.

One of the most interesting aspects of REM is how they rode the tension between traditional rock band and...something else. Despite the standard rock lineup, REM rarely sounded exactly like a standard band, and on Out of Time they blow that out even further. With the strings, keyboard, and guest vocalists, this album doesn't sound like anything else in their discography. Green featured a few mandolin songs, but they were cul-de-sacs (or is it culs-de-sac?). "Half A World Away" indulges their mandolin habit, and adds another layer of wimpiness with a harpsichord. It's certainly a heartfelt song, but I'm not sure it covers any ground that "You Are the Everything" and "Hairshirt" didn't. It's a beautiful song, but as on the rest of Out of Time, the mandolins are just another spice in the gumbo, which is a horrible analogy as this is a terrifically un-funky record. Except for the first song.

I've sat in cars and heard albums for the first time many times before (although that experience is consigned to the dustbin of my personal history, what with my ipods and car-less Manhattan swinging lifestyle), but there are few car-ride maiden voyages as memorable at the one I took in March, 1991. You may know (and love!) my co-rider (although I think he was driving?) as (Mister) Parenthetical, king of Twitter and Middle8. We'd kind of circled around each other the first couple of years of college, but by that spring, about to graduate and change the world together, our friendship was solidly settled, and we'd begun fueling each others' obsessions. (Maybe one day we'll talk about the Steely Dan wars of 1997/8.) If I recall, he was a bit of a late-comer to REM, but was suitably knocked out by "Losing My Religion," and always up for a car-ride on a Tuesday. I don't think we cut class, but it was definitely possible. I do remember that it was a fantastic day to roll the windows down and head to the Carytown Plan 9. We ripped open the longbox, and threw the cd in the player, and stayed still for the entire "Radio Song." It was such a different sound for them. Who knew that Mike Mills could slap bass like that? KRS-ONE? This was not limp, jokey funk, and it didn't sound anything like REM, but it worked. It's loose and fun, and certainly makes a point. Of course, back then REM were all over the radio, and it's a testament to the times that I wouldn't even know what station to tune in to hear a band like REM nowadays.

So: "Radio Song," "Losing My Religion," "Low." What the hell kind of record is this? Wait a sec...here comes another curveball: "Near Wild Heaven." Holy crap...it's the Beach Boys! The band with the lead singer so shy that he used to ask to keep turning the dial on his vocals down is now multi-tracking a "Sloop John B"-style breakdown. And, again, the strings. Here's the part where I bring up Pet Sounds. (Sorry. As a licensed and bonded Music Critic, I have to bring it up.) There's only a billion other places you can read about how awesome Pet Sounds is, and I don't think I can say much other than I love it too. I love how sad it is, how the ultimate summer band made one of the best winter albums, etc. etc. etc. Well, it's obvious that REMloves it too, as tracks like "Near Wild Heaven," and its instrumental follower "Endgame" show. All of the technical things that make Pet Sounds so awesome are relatively easy to recreate with modern technology, so while it's easy to recapture the sound, finding the songs and the feelings to evoke Pet Sounds remains an elusive challenge. I guess it's probably obvious to say that I think they do just that with these 2 songs. The oddball instrumental piece of the Pet Sounds legacy tends to get left out of most appreciations, so I'm super happy to see REM play homage to it here, as well as finally put one of their cool mood-piece instrumentals on an album instead of consigning it onto another b-side.

That leaves 3 songs left to talk about. The last 3, and the place where this album really takes off into the stratosphere. Mike Mills took the lead, vocally and via high-in-the-mix bass, on "Texarkana." Between the sweeping strings and slide guitar, there's a distinct Moody Blues feel to this one, but the band really sells it, and Stipe's "all alone"s build a stupendous bridge. We're partial to a well-built bridge around these parts. We then enter some seriously strange and ambiguous territory with "Country Feedback."

I used to write poetry in college. I often found the ones that I just kind of wrote without thinking about, without any plan to express anything in particular, were the most successful. The ones where even my role as the author lent me absolutely no ability to say what's going on were the ones I loved the most. Lucky for you, my poor memory and terrible filing system keeps me from quoting myself at length, but I have one poem describing that magic trick where the magician rolls up a newspaper and pours a pitcher of water into the roll. Of course, the water disappears. I have no idea what I was on about with that image, but there you go. Sometimes you have to follow instinct and worry about meaning later. REM is in that mystical improvisational zone with "Country Feedback." It's a classic REM, nobody-is-the-leader kind of song, but with the comforts of melody and structure mostly stripped away. It's one of those songs that it's probably useless to try and figure out, much less write about. So I'll stop trying.

"Me In Honey" takes the tension from "Country Feedback" and just plain releases it. It's one of the most cathartic album closers ever, despite it's obtuse vocabulary. Once again, I have no idea what the song is "about" and once again I don't care. All I need is that Lindsay Buckingham bass/guitar riff, the driving pace, and, once again, Kate Pierson. It's the kind of song that could go no other place than at the end of an album, even though it makes no attempt to summarize or condense or finish anything at all. The album begins with a political kind of alienation ("I can't find nothing on the radio"), ends with "what about me?" and there's no place left to go.

And here is where I think Out of Time is such a monumental piece of work: the tension of confidence and confusion. In many ways, this album is a standard high-profile, big-budget affair. But if you scratch the surface, and listen all the way through, it's just as fucked up as you are. Seriously, is there a more perfect way to describe what a graduation is? You've finished something big, but you have no idea what to do now. Your whole life is structured around one thing, but now it's finished and you've got to find something else to do. You're filled up and empty all at the same time. You've run out of time, and you're finished. You're too young to be responsible, and too experienced to not be responsible. I'm pretty sure that REM didn't know I was about to graduate college when they released this album, but they knew, and better yet, made a perfect album about, how it feels to move through life, space, and time.

Birdie in the hand

Today is as good a day as any to take the tarp off of an ongoing project. I was lucky enough to live through REMs career, and here is the first of a series of essays about my life and how I lived it.

Here’s a trick. First, get in a bad mood. Feel that mood. Meet everything that comes upon you in that bad mood. Get right up to the edge of depression and refuse to listen to reason. Soon, the fog will overtake you and your mind starts to go. Answer me a question. You can’t itemize. You can’t think clearly.

OK. Are you in it? Are you feeling stuck, stupid, alone, angry and hopeless?

Put on Lifes Rich Pageant. Try staying in that mood. By the time the tambourine kicks in during the bridge of Begin the Begin, you’re done. Congratulate me.

All the people gathered...

I was 17 in the summer of 1986, an age that feels way too young and a little too old all at the same time. I used to spend a week each summer with my grandmother in Richmond, Virginia. She lived in the unfashionable area south of the James in a neighborhood that had steadily declined, and didn’t start at a high perch, since the 50s. This yearly ritual was a remnant of late childhood, and represented my first steps of independence out from under my parent’s roof. By the time I was 17, and able to drive, this yearly trip felt more like holding on to something from my past, a way to delay adulthood. When I started these yearly trips at about age 10, my grandmother’s indulgences felt special. In 1986, they still felt special, but with an undercurrent of my own restlessness and fear.

The 1986 Richmond trip fell on the same late July week at the release of REM’s 4th full-length album, the aforementioned soul-cleaner Lifes Rich Pageant, complete without the apostrophe in full Stipean idiosyncratic linguistic glory. This was the second album I consciously remember waiting for (the first being Seven and the Ragged Tiger), counting the days and weeks down in way that would soon become a familiar, and sometimes completely dominant, mode of relating to the world. I’m not necessarily proud of my musical obsessions, but they are an elemental part of me. And a big brick in that particular wall was built that hot week in Richmond in 1986.

So here I was, in the shitty part of Richmond during a hot summer in a house without central air, waiting. There were two record stores nearby that I knew about, and I began pestering them both on the Monday of that week. Naive, right? I mean, pretty much everyone knows that records come out on Tuesday, not Monday, right? Like I said above, I was way too young. I’m going to say the next part with some delicacy, especially given Richmond’s unique role in what is colloquially known as the War Between the States. Let’s just say that the record stores I found near my grandmother’s house south of the James River were not the, um, type that would be predisposed to carry a record by four such pale gentlemen who were yet to have their first major hit.

Surely, some of you are thinking about the Peaches that used to be across from Cloverleaf Mall. Of course, you’re right, and that’s where I eventually found it. On Wednesday. I know. To quote Mike Birbiglia, “I’m in the future, too.” What I cannot know is why it took me a whole extra day to access something that simple and obvious. Like I said above, I was way too young.

So I finally found myself a vinyl copy, which I opened and played post haste in the room down two stairs between the living room and the carport on the Fisher stereo that usually played Caruso and Humperdink records. What did it sound like in the summer of 1986? It sounded pretty much exactly how it sounds today. Like the least disappointing album ever made.

Look up “1-2 punch” in the dictionary. The third definition in my copy, right after Citizen Kane/The Magnificent Ambersons and Woodford on the rocks/proscioutto, reads Begin the Begin/These Days. Begin the Begin sounds like the first shots in the most beautiful battle ever, and serves as that soul sponge I started with. It also tops one of the best lists ever made, the list of Awesome Tambourine Parts That Make Your Heart Beat Faster. And these days kicks right in, ratcheting up the tempo and the optimism. At the show I saw at Smith Auditorium on the campus of the George Washington University later that summer, REM began with These Days and there was a screen behind them that I didn’t see until the fast film of a roller coaster cresting a hill illuminated and my head briefly exploded.

And then we get to Fall On Me, which is quite simply the most beautiful song in the REM catalog, not least because of Bill Berry’s indelible “it’s gonna fall”s in the right channel during the later choruses. There. Are. No. Words for that bridge, are there? “Ask the sky.” And then there’s Cuyahoga, which I’ve always liked better than anyone else’s national anthem, save maybe Canada’s. There’s some really lovely and subtle organ work in the verses here, but the whole effect is just sparkling, isn’t it? And let’s just say that on an album full of amazing bass and backing vocal work from Mike Mills, he’s on a summit here. Hyena, much like the similarly-placed-on-side-two’s Just A Touch, serves as a fun burst of noisy rock, mostly because the record just can’t keep ascending, right? There’s some nice, Murmur-ish piano on Hyena, and the chorus is just as dumb fun in its way as Louie Louie. (Underneath the Bunker is next, which is as much as need be said.)

(Now is as good as place as any to say the thing that everyone says about this album, but isn’t really that important to me. This is the first REM album to put vocals (not just Stipe’s, but everyone’s) front and center, in the traditional rock sonic space. While I think that it certainly helps this album to be as joyous and celebratory as it is, it’s not like it makes a bit of difference in understanding the lyrics. While “understandable” lyrics are pretty low on my personal totem pole, I would be be skeptical of anyone who says they like the words on any REM record above the rest of what’s going on. One of my favorite things about REM is how they subvert so many things about rock bands. While this is not quite as true today, back in the IRS days, REM presented themselves as a totally united front, minus the personality templates that had served the first three generations of rock bands. Even punk bands used the Almost Famous template of outsized lead singer/guitarist with mystery. Not REM. Everyone had mystery. Again, this is not true of their latter period, but Lifes Rich Pageant was the first time you could clearly hear the words, and they were neither great enough to stand on their own, or distractingly terrible. They are good enough to sing along to, and that’s pretty much the most important thing that good lyrics need to do.)

I used to list things like My Favorite Guitar solo, and Peter Buck’s work on The Flowers of Guatemala was neck-in-neck with George Harrison’s in the (the album version, NOT the single version of) Let It Be. But really, all of the guitar on this song is just amazing, from the arpeggio/feedback duet at the start all the way through. But it’s really that solo and it’s brief squeal of introductory noise during the bridge that continue to kill. Oh, and there’s another amazing chorus on an album bursting with amazing choruses. I Believe works wonderfully in the “let’s do These Days again with a banjo!” slot that almost every album would be improved by remembering to include. What If We Give It Away? is the closest this album ever gets to mediocrity, but it serves as a little breather before the wild ride of the end of the album.

Why REM chose to bookend one of the most beguiling songs in its catalog with one burst of punky original garage rock and a fun cover, I’ll never figure out. But there Swan Swan H sits. Look I don’t know where I’d put it either, and I’m very happy to have it, but it only works where it is by totally not fitting in. It’s kind of like a swan between two hummingbirds, but Stipe certainly performs its nonsense admirably. There is something vaguely Civil War-ish about it, but other than the reference to Johnny Reb, I couldn’t say why. And we’re at the end with some insane-sounding German string-pull doll falling right into REM’s most light-hearted moment on record to date. I knew that REM was no longer my own secret special thing when I heard the Drill Team practicing to this one after school as I made my way to the theater to rehearse Thorton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. This made me mad and happy the way most girls did in high school, but who can deny Mikey Mills his moment in the lead singer spotlight? I’ve never heard the original, by the Clique, and I never need to.

So what does all of this mean? This is many people’s favorite REM record, and while it’s not mine, I can certainly understand why it is. It’s out there in front like no other record they’d ever made to that point, surely thanks to the wide-open sound they got in Don Gehman’s Indiana studio (a welcome change from Joe Boyd’s beautiful muddy London sound). As I said above, there are miles and miles of the most wonderful choruses you’ll ever hear. And yet there is something underneath, too. Both sides end with something vaguely German and sinister. What does Michael Stipe believe? Among other things that, “my throat hurts.” The record sounds too young to be 25 years old, and yet feels much older than anyone’s fourth album. Or 17th summer. The title is a bit of Stipean sarcasm, used whenever something went wrong in the studio. But none of it sounds like anything that’s gone wrong. To be more precise, it sounds like the putting right of things gone wrong. And that’s why it still works both as music, and as a floor-cleaner.