BCB 100 - REM

Threads and discussion dedicated to major acts.
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Moleskin
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Postby Moleskin » 25 Jul 2006, 20:08

Song: 'Cuyahoga' today. Yesterday it was 'What If We Give It Away'.

Album: Life's Rich Pageant, though only Monster is a real turkey prior to Bill's departure. Since then, they've been competing directly with Bernard Matthews.
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McBastard
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Postby McBastard » 25 Jul 2006, 20:16

Album - New Adventures In Hi Fi

Song - Carnival Of Sorts (Box Car)

I wonder if anyone can tell if I'm a big fan or not from those choices?
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brassneck..
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Postby brassneck.. » 25 Jul 2006, 21:49

Album - Life's Rich Pageant

Song - Don't Go Back to Rockville

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Postby jude » 25 Jul 2006, 21:55

Dunno if this has been posted on here, but: REM to release IRS anthology.
Betty Denim wrote:And, quite frankly, if I had been raped and you said to me 'well yeah, it's crap innit; it's like that time I had to have a turnip curry' I'd do more than insult you.

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Zong
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Postby Zong » 25 Jul 2006, 22:15

Album: Out of Time

Song: Don't go Back to Rockville (if only for the pause in the middle)

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Postby jude » 25 Jul 2006, 23:01

Just realised i haven't answered the thread properly!

Album - Automatic For The People
Song - Electrolite*

* this will probably change pretty soon, but it's been my fave of theirs for the last year or so, when i went to see them.
Betty Denim wrote:And, quite frankly, if I had been raped and you said to me 'well yeah, it's crap innit; it's like that time I had to have a turnip curry' I'd do more than insult you.

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Davey the Fat Boy
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Postby Davey the Fat Boy » 25 Jul 2006, 23:02

Jude wrote:Just realised i haven't answered the thread properly!

Album - Automatic For The People
Song - Electrolite*

* this will probably change pretty soon, but it's been my fave of theirs for the last year or so, when i went to see them.


Nice to see a few votes for Electrolite. Great song.
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bixhenry
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Postby bixhenry » 25 Jul 2006, 23:14

Davey The Fat Boy wrote:
Jude wrote:Just realised i haven't answered the thread properly!

Album - Automatic For The People
Song - Electrolite*

* this will probably change pretty soon, but it's been my fave of theirs for the last year or so, when i went to see them.


Nice to see a few votes for Electrolite. Great song.


It was a tossup between that one and 'Fall On Me' for me, with the latter just barely beating it out.

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Beno
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Postby Beno » 25 Jul 2006, 23:18

bixhenry wrote:
Davey The Fat Boy wrote:
Jude wrote:Just realised i haven't answered the thread properly!

Album - Automatic For The People
Song - Electrolite*

* this will probably change pretty soon, but it's been my fave of theirs for the last year or so, when i went to see them.


Nice to see a few votes for Electrolite. Great song.


It was a tossup between that one and 'Fall On Me' for me, with the latter just barely beating it out.

It would have been my second choice after 'Nightswimming'.

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Postby jude » 25 Jul 2006, 23:19

bixhenry wrote:
Davey The Fat Boy wrote:
Jude wrote:Just realised i haven't answered the thread properly!

Album - Automatic For The People
Song - Electrolite*

* this will probably change pretty soon, but it's been my fave of theirs for the last year or so, when i went to see them.


Nice to see a few votes for Electrolite. Great song.


It was a tossup between that one and 'Fall On Me' for me, with the latter just barely beating it out.
Oh FUCK! I completely forgot about Fall On Me! :shock: :oops: :roll: :?

Erm...I'm not sure now...I'll probably stick with Electrolite, but Fall On Me is a damn close second.

Anything else i might have forgotten about? :oops:
Betty Denim wrote:And, quite frankly, if I had been raped and you said to me 'well yeah, it's crap innit; it's like that time I had to have a turnip curry' I'd do more than insult you.

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Tom Violence
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Postby Tom Violence » 25 Jul 2006, 23:44

Jude wrote:Dunno if this has been posted on here, but: REM to release IRS anthology.


There are already two perfectly adequate overviews of this period of the band (if you want just an overview), this one looks worse than either of those to me. Ah well, reissue repackage repackage and all that.
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Owen
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Postby Owen » 26 Jul 2006, 00:05

Fall on me is one of their 3 claims to greatness, electrolite is one of the best things they've done in a while but theres no comparison

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BARON CORNY DOG
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Postby BARON CORNY DOG » 26 Jul 2006, 00:22

Sir John Coan wrote:I just think the board would be marginally more lively if strong points of view from both sides were put across, on a regular basis.


You're assuming there's always another point of view. There isn't. Sometimes things that are part of "the canon" are there because they are unquestionably great. Being bored with a viewpoint or a widely held opinion is just boredom.
take5_d_shorterer wrote:If John Bonham simply didn't listen to enough Tommy Johnson or Blind Willie Mctell, that's his doing.

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Postby geoffcowgill » 26 Jul 2006, 06:33

Matt Wilson wrote:
Sir John Coan wrote:
Matt Wilson wrote:
Sir John Coan wrote:
Bad Ambassador wrote:I seem to remember Stipe requesting apple juice and it being rushed up to the stage within seconds and him using a stand for the lyrics. Not that this is especially useful info.


It is, and in a way it summarises Stipe - tosser that he is.


Is every iconic singer/band a tosser to you?
Save your usual suspects, of course.


Oh really, Matt... :roll:


Seriously, John.
That seems to be your entire M.O.

Get us to believe all the bands in the canon really weren't so good in the first place. All the bands save Can, the Fall, the Stooges, Capt Beefheart, and a few others.

Now those bands are above criticism and only praise should be heaped on by the shovelfull.

Everyone else however...

C'mon--tell me I've got it wrong.


I feel like the guy that says "Hitler couldn't be all bad seeing as he was a vegetarian", but...

John did start a thread a while back about criticizing your favorite band and he commenced with what seemed more a fair, objective look at the Fall's shortcomings than a parody of the criticisms they may get.

Just sayin'...

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My name is Spaulding
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Postby My name is Spaulding » 26 Jul 2006, 09:30

Song: I think I´ll go for "World leader pretend", if only because seeing the live performance with Stipe hitting a chair with a drumstick was what got me interested in R.E.M. in the first place.



Album: Somewhere between "Green", "Automatic", "Document", and "Monster", but they´re all patchy.

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Joeantboy
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Postby Joeantboy » 26 Jul 2006, 21:09

Album - New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

Song - Walk Unafraid (Much better live)

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Tom Violence
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Postby Tom Violence » 26 Jul 2006, 21:18

Look up, what do you see?
All of you and all of me
Fluorescent and starry
Some of them, they surprise

The bus ride, I went to write this, 4:00 AM
This letter
Fields of poppies, little pearls
All the boys and all the girls sweet-toothed
Each and every one a little scary
I said your name

I wore it like a badge of teenage film stars
Hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras
Dreaming of Maria Callas
Whoever she is
This fame thing, I don't get it
I wrap my hand in plastic to try to look through it
Maybelline eyes and girl-as-boy moves
I can take you far
This star thing, I don't get it


Could have sounded like pretentious guff, but it doesn't, it sounds fantastic.
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Davey the Fat Boy
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Postby Davey the Fat Boy » 26 Jul 2006, 21:32

Owen wrote:Fall on me is one of their 3 claims to greatness, electrolite is one of the best things they've done in a while but theres no comparison


Owen wrote:Fall on me is one of their 3 claims to greatness, electrolite is one of the best things they've done in a while but theres no comparison


C'mon Owen. If posting here has taught you one thing it ought to be that there is ALWAYS a comparison.

I love "Fall On Me" but it doesn't hit my sweet spot the way "Electrolite" does. Not sure there's any rhyme or reason to why that is though. Nice to see a late career song rate as highly as it does for people though. That says something.

It is amazing to me how many great songs REM have. I don't think of them mong my favorite bands, but in addition to many of the songs nominated on this thread, "The One I Love," "Maps and Legends," "It's the End of the World As We Know It," and "Drive" all spring to mind as worthy picks. How many bands don't have one or two songs that good?
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Tom Violence
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Postby Tom Violence » 26 Jul 2006, 21:41

It's a good yardstick of greatness: does the band have 50 great songs? If so, they are amongst the very elite. Not that the Sex Pistols aren't in there as well though.
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Postby take5_d_shorterer » 26 Jul 2006, 21:58

Preamble
Quaco wrote: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

bixhenry wrote: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.


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