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.
