BCB 100 - REM

[Ranking Ted]

I've posted a lot about REM in the past and I'm sure I'll do likewise again. At the moment, though, I'm tired and can only be bothered reiterating these self-evident facts:

1. They were great;
2. They recorded at least half a dozen brilliant records;
3. They're barely listenable now: the last 3 records have been progressively worse;
4. Monster's not that bad, actually;
5. Nightswimming, is, after all the debate, a bit of a dirge;
6. They should stop.

Fave: Lifes Rich Pageant narrowly over New Adventures
Song: Fall On Me by default although there's strong competition from Rockville, Heron House, Pilgrimmage...

[Bungo the Mungo]

4. Monster's not that bad, actually;
5. Nightswimming, is, after all the debate, a bit of a dirge.

Thank you.

[Davey the Fat Boy]

5. Nightswimming, is, after all the debate, a bit of a dirge.

Thank you.

I like it more since "the debate."

[Bungo the Mungo]

5. Nightswimming, is, after all the debate, a bit of a dirge.

Thank you.

I like it more since "the debate."

And I would happily stand up and say it's genuinely one of the worst 'songs' I've ever heard. And I'm flummoxed by all this praise.

But I've said my piece!

[Davey the Fat Boy]

5. Nightswimming, is, after all the debate, a bit of a dirge.

Thank you.

I like it more since "the debate."

And I would happily stand up and say it's genuinely one of the worst 'songs' I've ever heard. And I'm flummoxed by all this praise.

But I've said my piece!

Hey - but at least you are getting disagreement. That's a good thing right?

[automatic_drip]

Take_5 - Loved your post.

How many bands, artists, musicians, politicians, thinkers - public people in general - so pervade an area of the culture to the point where it's able to use the fulcrum of it's small scale of influence to change the course of the common vocabulary.

Miles did it. The Beatles did it. REM did it

The Fall did not. Pavement did not. Our BCB band-du-jour will not - (Reigning Sound? CYHSY? Bueller? Bueller?)

Does it matter? Is it admirable? No on both counts, but you cannot dismiss these artists before wondering what would everything that came after would sound like if it wasn't there in the first place.

You don't have to like Miles Davis to understand that he changed everything. You're just swimming in the currents he influenced....

Take_5 is clearly more eloquently stating the same sentiment. I disconnecting my keyboard now... Mouse driven posts like LMAOIMHO for the rest of the week.

[Bungo the Mungo]

Take_5 - Loved your post.

How many bands, artists, musicians, politicians, thinkers - public people in general - so pervade an area of the culture to the point where it's able to use the fulcrum of it's small scale of influence to change the course of the common vocabulary.

Miles did it. The Beatles did it. REM did it

The Fall did not. Pavement did not. Our BCB band-du-jour will not - (Reigning Sound? CYHSY? Bueller? Bueller?)

Does it matter? Is it admirable? No on both counts, but you cannot dismiss these artists before wondering what would everything that came after would sound like if it wasn't there in the first place.

You don't have to like Miles Davis to understand that he changed everything. You're just swimming in the currents he influenced....

Take_5 is clearly more eloquently stating the same sentiment. I disconnecting my keyboard now... Mouse driven posts like LMAOIMHO for the rest of the week.

REM did what exactly? And don't obfuscate!

[Sneelock]

they were much imitated.
many mumbling "indie bands" with jangly guitars popped up in the American landscape like economy motels.

it was a pretty fun time, too!

[Sneelock]

obfuscate!

gesundheidt!

[automatic_drip]

obfuscate!

[Quaco]

Preamble

REM, for me, are like diseases of birds or certified public accountancy: I know some people enjoy these things, even making them their life's work, but I just have no interest in even thinking about them. Not awful per se, but of utterly no interest to me.

Remark

Unfortunately, it seemed like every band one encountered on the road was a bad imitation of REM; so influential were they on the 'college rock' scene, that we'd go out of our way to dissociate ourselves from them. A critic for the LA Weekly once described them as 'The College-Rock Beatles' - and it was hard to disagree, given their ubiquity on the scene.

REM were like what those ready-made folk songs were for earlier generations from the 1960s. They would call "Tom Dooley" or something like that. Getting together with musicians, I remember that someone would call "Gardening at Night" or perhaps a song from Murmur. One guitarist at a college I was visiting showed me how to play the rifts to "Perfect Circle" on guitar. Another band (at another college) that had modelled itself on REM asked me to write a review of their album. I played a mostly solo set once, but recruited two members of another band to play drums and bass for a rendition of "Shaken Through". I first heard "Radio Free Europe" not on record but in a cover version that a college band was playing at a dance.

None of these things necessarily add up to a great band (or reasons to say that REM was a bad band). What the band was, for a particular duration and a particular context was sort of like water or the smell of a certain dining hall or a sort of currency that one traded and used on particular occasions, maybe like subway tokens that they used to use on the NY subway system.

Once these things were everywhere; every New Yorker had them and used them on a daily basis; they were fundamental to the reasons why New York is simply a different city from any other city in the US and why it is more European than any area in America. They were a specific currency that said you are now entering the nation of New Amsterdam. Now these tokens have totally disappeared.

That's what REM feels like, or rather, that's what REM might or might not feel like. I can't tell, just as New Yorkers in the 1900s through the 19..whatever...80s couldn't tell how much these little tokens meant to what it meant to be traveling on the IRT or the A train or whatever line they wanted to take.

Was it an integral part of New York or was it just a particular coin that people used then and then used no more? Does it really matter that you could have used the same coin that Charlie Parker used? Probably not, not like it matters that you could walk through the same East Village where Charlie Parker once lived, but who knows?

REM has that kind of feel--I'm talking about the subway tokens--of a currency that could be important or could be ephemeral. You can't tell--or I can't tell--because I used that currency to trade for this and that, and so it's hard for me to be objective about this. I no longer know whether these songs are good or not anymore than I know whether a doorstop is a good song or not. All I know is that it's a good doorstop.

That's what REM feels like, or maybe what it feels like is a font like Times New Roman. Prior to word processors, none of us knew what this font was, but there it is now square in the middle of every day you deal with WordPerfect or Word. Or PHP. That's the engine that runs BCB. You spend hours and hours and hours talking in the script that this language sets up and using it to trade away for conversation or information or friendship or something to drive away isolation or whatever it is you use PHP for. It's like the particular ink in a brand of pens you've used since you were in college, and you can't tell whether the way you write is actually determined by the viscosity of that ink.

I keep all of this in mind when thinking about all those endless renditions of "Tom Dooley". Those were subway tokens from the 1950s and the people who traded in them don't have a clue either whether they were great art or not.

I like what you are ssaying here. But, all that being said, had you ever been excited about this music, it would mean more to you than simply being a smell or currency evocative of a certain time. You would know if it was more than just a good doorstop. I mean, people who lived through The Beatles' arc were seriously affected by it -- and those times burn white-hot in their memories.

I do think it's admirable when a band becomes a shared language for many people -- I don't see it as an achievement per se, since no one really sets out to do this specifically, but it is significant -- but it's clear from your post that you had comparatively little passion for them. Think back to our jam sessions on Who songs: there was passion there. You know that The Who is more than a shared language between us, because you have some passion for their music.

[take5_d_shorterer]

REM is a strange band (as I wrote to Davey in a PM) and they are difficult to assess because they trade in being unclear. Are they profound or are they gobbydegook? I'm not really certain after all these years. I still like "9-9" and "Perfect Circle", which I still think is about something like the Salem witch trials, but I can't be sure. If you look at the lyrics, you'll see how any real attempt to justify this will evaporate. Is there really anything there, or not?

"9-9" is even less of a song, but it sounds ominous. It sounds like the sort of song that Richard Thompson could cover, except that the rhythm is totally different from what he would ever use, much more spatial.

Here's something to compare all this to:

Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio

Now this is a well-written lyric with a real perspective and great metaphors. You can see how well this works and how far the Stones have fallen. You don't get anything like this with Stipe. The fact that his singing has actual words behind it and those words have meaning may be the Achilles's heel of this band. If he were singing in another language and I could approach this like opera, this would be a lot easier.

Regarding what The Who is, The Who is besides a shared language and something that I want to listen to...it is also a means of generating writing. It's easier to write about The Who than it is to write about anything else in rock and roll. They are, more than any other band, an essay waiting to happen. I don't feel that way about REM at all. REM is a set of instructional recordings of birds for bird-watchers, all fine and good but there is no claims or conversation in this music anymore than there are coherent arguments when you are lying in bed at night dreaming.

[The Write Profile]

Yes, but by the same token, Take5, don't you think that Murmur is all about that very paradox- the adolescent wanting to express himself and openup, but recoiling back into his shell because he's afraid of saying too much (incidentally, the very subject that became the basis for "Losing My Religion," one of their most famous songs). I mean, the only difference between Murmur and Automatic for the People in their approach isn't attitude, it's age. Those small inferences in, something like "Perfect Circle" and the fact that one of the few lines he actually enunicates is "coin a phrase," or the way that the music seems to skittle along, even when it's drawnout, as in that track. I think the enclosedness and mush-mouthed nature is the very key to its allure. Even the music, so very obviously beholden to the Byrds, and, of course, Wire, sounds like the references aren't enough for them, or maybe too much.

I'm not sure whether this makes any sense, to be honest.

[take5_d_shorterer]

Murmur doesn't feel like an adolescent album at all. It feels like a very definitely post-college album. The ambiguities on that album don't feel to me like ambiguities stemming from being a teenager. They sound like ambiguities very deliberately placed to suggest a semi-submerged frame of mind.

[take5_d_shorterer]

Assessing whether Murmur and Chronic Town are great music is akin to determining whether some Rorschach tests are great visual art. Everything depends in a crucial sense on the interpretations that the observer supplies or the captions that listeners construct. That is, the answer is elsewhere.

[The Red Heifer]

One of the best theres been

Album: Automatic

Song: "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?"

Not that I only rate this period, this is just closely linked to what is Heifer

[The Write Profile]

Murmur doesn't feel like an adolescent album at all. It feels like a very definitely post-college album. The ambiguities on that album don't feel to me like ambiguities stemming from being a teenager. They sound like ambiguities very deliberately placed to suggest a semi-submerged frame of mind.

By post-college, you mean University? I'd go along with that, there isn't really the maturity or awareness in their surroundings that something like Automatic...has, it's incredibly self-involved, but very literate and knowing all the same. I think it carries a lot of the impetuousness of youth as well, those early records were so wiry in their approach.

[Clay Davis]

Album: New Adventures in Hifi
Song: Find the River

Can't really add anything to what has been said before other than add my backing to those who like Monster.... They were a great band who have lost it with the last couple of albums....

[Johnny 99]

Love em.

Song: You Are The Everything

Album: Automatic For The People