0.15.1 - We are hope, despite the times
In my memory, the night is clear, not too cold even thought it's December. There's no-one around me on the sloping hillside, and I'm far enough from the road that the streetlight glow is just a dull yellow haze in the distance. If I look up, I can see the stars wheeling over my head, and as I make it to the crest of the hill, still a good fifteen minutes walk from home, I take a breather, and look down at the landscape I just climbed, all alone, in the dark. In the distance, I see the lights of the houses down below doing a poor imitation of the night sky. Everything feels incredibly calm, and in that moment I feel strangely at peace with the world. I sit down on the cold grass, and looking out at the streets below, I flip over the cassette in my walkman, wind forward past Shiny Happy People and Belong, then stop. And for a few minutes, alone on a hill in the dying moments of a year, I listen to Half A World Away and sing every word as loudly as I can. It feels like the most significant thing I've done that year.
There's a pleasing symmetry in hindsight that I discovered R.E.M when I did. Falling headlong in love with Out Of Time, their seventh studio album, meant that at the same rate I was discovering old records, new ones were on the horizon. I got a cassette copy of Green for my birthday; for Christmas I turned 16, I got cassette copies of Document and Automatic For The People (and my parents got their own CD copy for the fancy new CD Hifi system in our dining room). Every year or two, the pattern would repeat; each new album accompanied by a deeper dive into the back catalogue that preceded it; Monster in my Christmas Stocking, Life's Rich Pageant bought with some of the first real disposable income I ever produced from working a real, grown up job*. Right now, on a shelf behind me remains all my CDs collected in the last 30 years, or at least, until collecting CDs seemed pointless in the face of the Big Streaming Music platforms - with a couple of exceptions. If R.E.M. put out a new album tomorrow, consisting of 60 minutes of Michael Stipe doing musical variations on the song Baby Shark, I'd still buy it on CD and put it in my collection. At some point, in my mind, a pact was made between us, and I will not fall short on my side of the bargain.
Ironically, this dedication, my refusal to not physically own every single R.E.M. studio album stood me in good stead as I finished listening to their discography this afternoon in preparation for writing this post.
Half way through Up, suddenly At My Most Beautiful just stopped playing. I had a deadline, but I had an album and a half still to play before I'd finished the whole discography. Suddenly, and without warning, my capacity to listen to the music I wanted had been curtailed at the whims of a monstrous corporate conglomerate. Or so they thought.
So I did it; between the three albums I covered in my very first real post on this blog this year, and covering Green in my colour-themed article, and this post I've listened to all fifteen R.E.M. studio albums. If you want musical critique or deep dives into musicianship and instrumentation, plenty of the rest of the internet has you covered. No matter the quality of their music, which for the record is extremely high, my relationship with R.E.M.'s music, and all the music I cover on here, is best described by how I associate it, andwhat it means to me. If I talk about how an album sounds, that's probably because I don't have much else to say about it.
I bought Murmur and Reckoning together in a HMV sale for £5 each; I know that because both of my jewel cases still for some reason bear the sale sticker I was too lazy to peel off. I like these albums, but don't love them the way other R.E.M. fans do; to me, they always feel distant - the last of their early discography that I acquired, and as such, just two of ten or eleven albums I owned by the band I loved. Human nature is what it is, and while I listened to them when I bought them, they never hooked into me the way they did for older, in-at-the-beginning R.E.M fans, as I sought comfort in the more familiar albums released later in their discography.
The time I bought Fables of the Reconstruction coincided with my father's ill-fated attempt to get me to learn guitar (ill fated for both of us, he was an impatient teacher with a natural talent, I was a lazy bum who wanted to be instantly good without practicing); I made him learn Driver 8 so he could teach me how to play it; I can probably still just about play the opening few bars if I concentrate hard (though my experiences picking up my guitar in the last couple of years tell me that my drumming brain has erased what little progress I made). I asked him to learn Can't Get There From Here and he told me before I thought about that, I should concentrate on things like "learning basic chord progressions" first.
Life's Rich Pageant was the pre Out Of Time album I liked the most of all the stuff I listened to in retrospect; there's some tonal similarities between the two that makes that make sense to me now, but at the time I just liked the way it made me feel slightly sad, but in a good way. Fall On Me from this album is one of my favourite R.E.M. songs from their whole canon**, and I can't tell you the joy I felt when, on seeing them live in really the only opportunity I had at the Up tour, half way through the set, Fall On Me from an album then nearly 20 years old appeared in the set list. It was transcendent.
Document made me smarter. Michael Stipe has a scattershot approach to lyricism which either drives you crazy or leaves you entranced, but this album is full of cultural references that I, I kid from the middle of England had no frame of reference for. I went to our school library to read about who Joe McCarthy was because of Exhuming McCarthy. It's The End Of The World As We Know It is a list of names and events that had totally passed me by, and I made a point of looking up. What if another R.E.M. fan*** made reference to them and I was exposed as a fraud? That would not stand. I still don't know what Oddfellows Local 151 is about, and I am fine with that.
I've talked about Green before; I will say that if I had to keep just 3 R.E.M. albums, but they had to be in release sequence (because of this very specific genies curse I guess?), I'd happily listen to Green > Out of Time > Automatic For The People at the expense of all the other albums****.
I've talked about Out Of Time enough already, but I thought it was worth mentioning that this is the album I have purchased the most times in my life. I wore out my original cassette, replaced it, my car got broken into and my stereo with the tape in was taken, I replaced it on cassette again, then bought a CD copy a couple of years later (that last tape I think was in a bag in the boot of a different car that was last seen being towed to a scrapyard after breaking down); that original CD copy was scratched to hell when I accidentally tripped over a speaker wire and dragged my Hifi system off the dresser it sat on while it was playing. Fifth time was the charm though, that one is still intact and on the rack, waiting for whatever disaster will befall it.
Imagine that the follow up to your favourite album is one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums of all time. Automatic For The People was everywhere; my parents owned their own copy; I remember the small cadre of young women we were sort of acquainted with through my friends going to school with them (they went to the nice school; I did not) explaining how much they loved Everybody Hurts. I looked at them in silent judgement and thought "Do you own the other seven R.E.M. albums? You do not." ignorant, of course, that I had been them only two years before.
Monster where where my R.E.M. collection moved to digital format; we'd been strictly tape before then. It was a Christmas gift, and I remember that once the gift exchanging and eating were done, I retreated up to my attic bedroom, and listened to Monster while reading....something. The novel I do not remember; the vision of me laying across my single bed with my speakers cranked up blaring What's The Frequency Kenneth? I remember vividly.
New Adventures In Hifi represented a new and challenging experience for me; what if the band you love makes an album you're unsure about? With age and experience, and having gone through it several times with several bands, I appreciate that nothing is static about R.E.M. albums; each one has a character and a theme and a direction which is unique, and some times that takes a while to develop. There are still bits of this album I rub up against wrong, but I wonder if that's just some long-dormant hindbrain resentment for this not being like albums which had come before it.
Fortunately, Up came along and put my doubts to rest. By this time, I was long into my "buy R.E.M. albums sight unseen" one-person pact which coincided with my "irresponsibly spending money I didn't have on buying CDs every week" phase. I'd moved out at this point, was in the house I shared with my friend Dave, where we would stay up till 2am and listen to music most nights. I'm not sure I ever converted him to a full R.E.M. fan, but one night we listened to You're In The Air and Walk Unafraid back to back at least four times at his request. For the record, when I want to feel something sentimental and hopeful, the sequence of songs which starts with At My Most Beautiful and ends with Walk Unafraid is more effective that any three pharmaceuticals you could name.
Which lead us finally to Reveal; As I said in my article about the latter three albums, there's a point where the modern offerings never quite hooked me. If Around The Sun held this spot in the discography, I'd call it a hard break, but Reveal has such a weirdly low key energy for an R.E.M. album I really don't know what to do with it. Imitation of Life is a great single, but I'm not wild about the rest of it. Someone once asked me what my favourite band was, and I said I couldn't tell them. I said, 'it changes from day to day. There's too much good music to pick just one." and I stand by that. But if you asked me every day for a year what my favourite band was, I'd answer "R.E.M." a whole lot.
These days, I worry. I think about experience of being a young person discovering a band who are out there, have been out there for a decade already, making music that doesn't quite fit in an easy, commercially accessible pigeonhole, but slides effortlessly into the star-shaped space in your mind like it was always meant to be there. Falling down a rabbit hole, realising the album you loved, your first love is just one link in a chain, the ongoing product of a musical evolution that will find new and different shapes for a decade more to come. With discovery controlled and constricted by algorithms, and listening habits which are shaped by 90 second clips of songs on Tiktok, am I the last generation (or close to it) that gets to experience the uniquely fulfilling sensation of accidentally discovering a band who's ongoing musical journey will be woven inextricably into your own life experiences? I hope not; like many things, I'm not sure I know where the path back is, but I talk to my eldest niece and she has a record player in her room, where she plays vinyl records from bands ranging from the 1970's to the present day, and listens to them front to back, in order, as intended; and maybe one day she'll have the same experience, or something like it, that I had, and end up signing her heart out in the dead of night to no-one because she has found something special.
She is hope, despite the times.
* With my first real paycheque I bought 3 CDs, (Life's Rich Pageant, Pearl Jam's No Code and Tidal by Fiona Apple), and a Playstation. Man, not having to pay rent or have any real responsibilities was fun.
** It's Fall On Me; Find The River (I want that played at my funeral presuming when I die funerals will be something that society still does); World Leader Pretend; Half A World Away; Walk Unfraid.
*** In my entire life, I know two real R.E.M. fans, my friend D and Sheffield netrunner player and music list maker Alan. Neither have ever asked me to explain any R.E.M. lyric to them.
**** Having gone back to get the link to the other article, I say in that one that Document>Green>Out Of Time is the better sequence. I go back and forth on this, obviously.
