R.E.M.’s Murmur (2005)

J. Niimi’s 33-1/3 entry departs in some interesting ways from the usual in this series. His track-by-track rundown is more abbreviated and his history of the band is a bit of a rush job. Murmur is R.E.M.’s first full-length album, though they had already hit by then with a first single in 1981 (“Radio Free Europe,” an alternative version of which kicks off Murmur) and followed it with an equally auspicious EP in 1982, Chronic Town. The album was thus eagerly anticipated and for many fulfilled all expectations. Niimi sprinkles in some personal details of buying it when he was a young teen and how much it meant to him. He bought the cassette tape from a store in greater Chicagoland. But he seems more interested in exploring the lyrical strategies of the album, the singer, and the band. Full disclosure, Murmur has always been mostly lost on me though I’ve come to make my peace with it. In this book, written around 2004, I wish Niimi would have written more about what followed for R.E.M., because what interests him most about the album—the (enduring) mystery of its indeterminacy—is something that changed across the band’s career. Niimi passes along, with a straight face, a story about how the title Murmur was chosen because someone in the band (I think it was singer Michael Stipe) read somewhere that it’s one of the easiest words in the English language to pronounce. Fair enough, and ha ha ha, but let’s also look at a dictionary definition: “a soft, indistinct sound made by a person” (Encyclopedia.com, emphasis mine). The indeterminacy of the lyrics is mostly what Niimi is focused on here. He’s read reasonably widely in semiotics and such and has the wit to pull in both David Johansen and Wire as influences on either side of Stipe in terms of lyrics. I’m generally dubious about the project of focusing on lyrics over anything else in rock music. Niimi has some balance and perspective, but the mystery of the lyrics remains his defining quest with Murmur. I more hear an interesting variation on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September Song” or the Cocteau Twins, who came after R.E.M. All those syllables come across to me like blank slates on which to project. Nearly as often they sound like people who ran out of time or inclination to say anything distinctly. I like Murmur now, but it has never sounded or felt profound to me. If you feel another way about it then this book might be just what the doctor ordered.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)

In software development circles, a "1.0 person" is someone who likes to be in on the start of a project. To be a 1.0 person is a badge of honor. You are an innovator or inventor, creating the future. By contrast, I have found I am more of a "4.0 person"—my term for preferring to wait to work with something until it has had the bugs thoroughly worked out but is not yet bloatware. A 4.0 person is no badge of honor, of course, but it saves me a lot of glitchy beta-testing headaches. I know I can take this to extremes—it took me 10 years to get wi-fi, and I only recently finally got a smartphone, which technically I think makes me more like a 13.0 person. I mention this because I noticed Lifes Rich Pageant is the fourth album by R.E.M., a band I've never been entirely easy with. But I certainly loved this album more than any of their others. They perfected a certain R.E.M. look and feel here. I hasten to say the 1.0 / 4.0 thing falls apart a bit when you consider I did like "Radio Free Europe" and the Chronic Town EP quite a bit. Murmur was where I fell out of step on this journey although I have since made my peace with that album—not bad! But the next two seemed weak and weaker and I thought I was done with R.E.M. when Lifes Rich Pageant came along. Wikipedia declares it a bridge between R.E.M.'s alt-rock origins and their later commercial fortunes as the wise old alt-men of the '90s. I'm not even sure how I came to own Lifes Rich Pageant, but once it was in my house it was on all the time for months. It starts a bit slow but with the third track, "Fall on Me," it takes off into open-hearted soulful regions they had never really embraced before, though you can hear the origins of it in "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)" from Reckoning. I really loved that song too and then used it up until Lifes Rich Pageant came along, which I went ahead and used up too. I mean, it was nice to revisit it a few more times recently, but it hasn't changed much in the years since I played it lot. It's one of those things that seem smaller with time, perhaps, like your old grade school. Stipe's singing and the songwriting let loose in nice big ways that had seemed small and guarded before. It felt liberating and revelatory at the time. It's easier to make out the words, and they're more heartfelt: "Don't FAA-AAALLL on meeee" and "CuyahOOOga" and "Eye YAM Superman." It's a groove album—most of the songs are basically in the same one—and if I can only hear memories now of what I used to love at least I've got, etc. For a year or two, until Document, I could feel more onboard with the legions of fans who adore and still adore this odd classic rock band.

Murmur (1983)

I did not care for the first full album by R.E.M.—well, perhaps more accurately, I did not care for the worshipful reception it received from all sides. In time, this proved to be one of my more abject collapses in judgment. Worse, I had to write a review of it and gave it a lukewarm one. I know, I know: "Better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." I have wished many times, including the day I got the assignment, that I could squirm out of that review. On the other hand, I truly did not recognize the virtues until years later—in fact, listening to it recently, it has never sounded so good. All the things people were saying that sounded so odd to me are now the things I want to say: it's powerful, allusive, strangely stirring, moving with audacious confidence. It feels like coming home to a home one never knew before. I don't know exactly how they are doing it. I think this may be the last time they did it so consistently, except in patches, the longest of which, perhaps (to me), is found on Lifes Rich Pageant (I only say this, as an already suspect evaluator of R.E.M., because that is where I truly fell in love with the band, as opposed to keenly liking, as with the EP Chronic Town). I remember hearing people talk about the Byrds but I don't hear much of that. I don't hear much of anything that came before it, in fact—I think it's almost breathtakingly original. There's a democracy of the parts that fell away as Michael Stipe became the star. Stipe's contribution here is barely formally "lead vocal" as the singing is deliberately blurred over and made fuzzy of its meaning and intent, sliding around to feel for its notes, even as words and phrases can be easily gleaned from the tumult passing by. Why do I feel reasonably certain this was a deliberate decision on their part? In retrospect because Stipe enunciated just fine on other occasions. Also I can't help thinking the cover art is evocative of an aesthetic. There is also the scope and tenor of the song titles: "Pilgrimage," "Laughing," "Talk About the Passion," "Perfect Circle," etc. This is an album and a band reaching very far, and even within the context of mumbling singer guitar bass drums, it not only has an astonishing ability to reach very far, it also has much more grasp than one would normally expect from a rock band in their mid-20s, just starting out. Jesus, no wonder everyone was so excited.

R.E.M., "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)" (1984)

(listen)

From the chronicles-of-taste files: Back when I was instinctively resistant to R.E.M.—around the time of Murmur, though I did like both the original "Radio Free Europe" single and the EP that followed, "Chronic Town"—a concerned friend wanted badly to swoon as much for Reckoning as he had for Murmur, and he wanted me agreeing with him too. So he sat me down for a listening session. This "I'm Sorry" song did the trick, leaping right off the album, one of the earliest and still best examples of Stipe letting loose with that semi-professional lunge thing he does, hitting and holding and soaring on a quavery big note, purely for its emotional high, with the band churning on well beneath him on the surface of the planet. I wouldn't be surprised if real fans considered this a little suspect, lurking in realms of the dread sellout, or at least unseemly emotional openness. For a bunch of mumbling introverts so determinedly guarded and even gnomic about their intentions, as only befits alt-indie heroics naturally, when they get after a song such as this it's pretty clear what a bunch of wallowing sentimentalists with dollar signs on their eyeballs they could be. I count that as a good thing myself. This song is about one thing and one thing only: the impossibly beautiful hook swelling out of the chorus on the plaintive "I'm sorry," which necessitated the parenthetical in the title (later dropped, evidently) as this was also the first single from the album, and even managed, way back in 1984, to crack the Billboard 100, peaking at #85. I don't believe I ever heard it on the radio even once. But I heard it a lot on my copy of the album, which I picked up soon after the scene detailed above. I've come around on Murmur finally too—consider it definitely superior to Reckoning now. But it's been a crooked road. I'm sorry.

"Losing My Religion" (1991)

93. R.E.M., "Losing My Religion" (April 20, 1991, #4)

Anyone tracking along with the career of R.E.M., 10 years, seven albums, three top 40 singles, an indie success story and major label signing sellout down the line, had by this time probably pretty well made up their minds about how they felt. Late as usual to the party, this is where I finally decided I liked them, and quite a bit, hardly suspecting that, with the possible exception of "Drive," this is the last decent thing they would push into the top 40—and even knowing already that the album that spawned it, Out of Time, came with its share of flat patches and embarrassments (the follow-up, for example, "Shiny Happy People"). Oh well, you can't be right about everything. But I don't think there's much question I'm right about this: from the mandolin leading the charge to Michael Stipes's newfound clarion enunciation to the soaring melody, it's poignant, touching, inspiring, unforgettable. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the enunciation is in the service of lyrics that have to be characterized as unclear, if not impenetrable, if not outright opaque. "Oh no, I've said too much / I haven't said enough" indeed. But this is what R.E.M. does and has always done best. The words don't say it—the sound of the music and the texture of Stipes's voice itself does that work. Even without the telltale word "losing" in the title (and that other one, "religion," and don't forget "my") it's not too hard to tell that this is a song about loss and faith and enduring and love in spite of everything. This was a big moment for alternative rock and its many sincere and hard-working followers. The whole world was poised to open for them. They were about to achieve everything they wanted.